Page 37 of Duke of Wickedness
“Watch the show,” she demanded from out of the corner of her mouth.
This time, it was David’s turn to smirk.
Oh, so the little bird thought she could hand out her little jabs but not take any in return?
He followed her instructions. He watched the show.
And he commented.
“Do you think you will learn any more of that saucy language tonight?” he asked, leaning in close to her ear, trailing his nose down the delicate shell. She shivered again, this time a little harder.
“I’m not sure how I could avoid it,” she said. The words were right, but the breathiness of her voice revealed that she was affected.
Thank Christ. David simply couldn’t bear being the only one, not when he had spent the last half an hour worried that the tightness of his trousers would do permanent damage to some of his favorite parts.
“What a fine point,” he cooed. “Clever, clever little bird.” The hitch in her breath told him that she liked it. He filed that little piece of information away for later.
He pressed a kiss to the curve of her jawbone, right where it met her neck beneath her ear.
“You aren’t watching the performance,” she accused.
“I’m watching the best performance worth seeing,” he countered, darting out his tongue tojusttouch the soft skin beneath his lips. “In fact, I’mstudying.”
She turned to look at him, to say something, but he pressed his face in a little closer, blocking her from turning away from the stage.
“Watch, Ariadne,” he ordered. “Tell me what you see. And then let me tell you how I am going to do those things to you, too.”
Once, when Ariadne had been fifteen, she’d woken in the middle of the night from a nightmare and had been completely unable to get back to bed. On a whim, one driven primarily by adolescent impetuousness, she decided to steal some of her brother’s scotch to see if this helped her get back to sleep.
And ithad—eventually.
First, though, she had poured herself two fingers of scotch, just like she’d seen Xander do a hundred times before. Her brother always sipped his drink, but she had worried that she would lose her nerve, so she’d thrown the whole thing back and had promptly nearly choked herself to death on the smoky taste.
Then, she had spent an incalculable period of time sitting and just giggling at the fire that smoldered in the grate.
She had, of course, woken the next day with a headache that meant that she hadn’t dared touch so much as a sip of wine at dinner for another three years, but she hadn’t quite forgotten that feeling—the floating feeling, like she as only half in her body, and as if everything around her was somehow more entertaining, more delightful—justmore.
She hadn’t had a sip to drink tonight, but she still felt that feeling.
And she was reasonably certain that she wouldn’t even wake with a headache come morning.
“Tell me,” the duke crooned into her ear. “What do you see?”
She looked down on the stage, where the heroine was shaking her bosoms—which had long since been revealed by the unbuttoning of her extremely scanty bodice—at the play’s hero. This precise action had happened several times already during the performance, but this was the first time that the hapless love interest seemed to notice his lady love’s extremely outrageous behavior. He cupped her breasts greedily.
“Tell me,” the duke repeated.
She gulped. “The man…” It was already hard to think; the atmosphere of the theater was at least as intoxicating as that ill-fated gulp of spirits. “He’s touching her breasts,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
The duke’s low chuckle was a ghost across her neck.
“Oh,breastsnow, is it?” he teased. “What happened totits?”
Drat, he was on to her. He’d known she’d been trying to tease, and now he intended to return the favor.
“He’s touching her tits,” she echoed, because she was not one to back down from a challenge.
She would have been pleased with the way his breath caught in his throat, if not for the fact that he chose that moment to let the arm draped over her shoulders drop even lower, until the fingers rested right atop her own breast. Even through the heavy fabric of her gown, she could feel the heat of his touch.
