Page 17 of Duke of Wickedness
“My apologies, my lord,” she said. “I was woolgathering about flowers, inspired by your gift.”
The faintly worried furrow to his brow smoothed at once.
“No apology necessary,” he said affably. “I do know how ladies get about their flowers.”
It wasn’t a cruel comment. He wasn’t trying to put her down. But somehow, the fact that the viscount really thought that women frequently went into raptures about flowers so intense that they forgot themselves…
Well, Ariadne could not help but be irked.
Had the viscount always been so…bland? He was like the gentleman’s equivalent of nursery food, the sort that you got after a bout of stomach flu. Blancmange, beef tea, and crackers with no butter. All well and good in small doses, but could she live off such fare?
But she was being fanciful again, most likely.
Besides. The viscount had hidden depths. He had practically admitted as much.
So she pushed down her irritation and smiled again.
“I appreciate your understanding. Shall we sit?”
He was agreeable in this, as in apparently all things, so they sat, and she summarily poured tea, just as a young lady ought to do. They sipped appropriate, small sips, and talked about nothing—about the weather (God help her), about how his horse had thrown a shoe but was thankfully uninjured, about how the viscount’s cook had recently purchased a most very fine cut of beef, and hadn’t he enjoyed that very much?
It practically put Ariadne to sleep. Or maybe that was just because she hadn’t slept particularly well the night before, her mind buzzing over that kiss?—
Which was inappropriate to think about in any circumstances, let alone while she was meant to be entertaining another suitor.
Though this did bring her to the matter of something else she wished to learn about the viscount.
“My lord,” she interjected politely when he threatened to go into a third straight minute extolling the virtues of his cook’s purchases at the butcher shop, “might I ask you something?”
He looked at her with the approval that one might offer a particularly bright child.
“Of course!”
She chose her words carefully. “The other night, you mentioned…that there were certain things you might wish to conceal from a wife,” she said eventually. “I do not mean to imply that I would not offer you your privacy, were any such union come to pass between us, but… I should like to have some greater sense of what you meant by that.”
She had very intentionally kept her query vague. Though she did maintain that a wife ought to havesomeidea of what her husband’sneedsmight be, she didn’t wish to embarrass the viscount.
Besides, it wasn’t as though she felt she wanted to be privy to all his secrets—either before a marriage or after. Unless one had a great love match, one very likely kept certain parts of oneself tucked away, only to be examined in private.
But if he meant—as she very much suspected that he did—that he had certain desires when it came to matters between men and women…
Well, that she ought to know, certainly.
But the viscount’s open, friendly expression had folded, leaving a disapproving, disappointed look in its place.
“My lady,” he said in the firmest tone she had ever heard from him, “while I understand that my comments might have elicited curiosity, I must insist that you forget any such ruminations. This is not something I will discuss with you further.”
There really was no room for argument in this. Ariadne should have just accepted it.
But it wasn’t the viscount’s words that echoed most clearly in her ears in that moment.
It was the duke’s.
I saw your curiosity—and I do not blame you for it. Indeed, I think it likely that there are many young ladies in your position, women who wish to know more about what transpires between lovers.
Shedidwant to know more—both in the general sense that had been excited by what she’d seen at the duke’s house and in the specific sense of what she might be asked to see or do if she married this man in particular.
So, she pressed.
