Page 21 of Most Unusual Duke

Osborn balked on the threshold of the largest receiving room, and when she did not exhort him to follow or inquire as to why he hesitated, he took a breath and ventured forward. It cost him, and Beatrice honored his fortitude by being as brisk and snappish as she could manage. He, in turn, was obstreperous and sarcastic. She tested the bell pull, and it came straight down from the ceiling with the requisite cloud of dust. She stumbled back into his chest; he turned her around and stroked the dust off her face, which produced an odd stirring beneath her petticoats, to a disturbing enough degree she dropped the velvet rope and left the room.

So, perhaps not the worst husband she may have found herself forced to marry. Whatever her lack of control that led to being bullied and blackmailed into this situation, she need not act as if she had no say going forward. Good may be wrought from the situation at the end of the day.

There was good to be wrought from her accommodation on the ground floor: it meant a proper bath could be brought in and filled without Glynis or Ciara having to exert themselves too terribly. Morag had promised a bucket line of sorts, and even though the water would not arrive at its hottest, she anticipated the pleasure of fully immersing herself after the busy, begrimed day. The door opened without so much as a knock, and she assumed it was the housekeeper.

“Morag, a closed door requires a warning before—” Beatrice came around the screen in her dressing gown and gasped.

Osborn strolled in carrying two enormous containers akin to rain barrels. One was clutched in his fist with as much ease as if it was a handkerchief, and the other he held balanced on his shoulder. He poured the contents of the latter—lovely, steaming-hot water—into the copper tub.

“Why did Mr. Todd not see to this?” This was not a task to be laid at ducal feet, no matter how she teased him about his lily-white hands.

Osborn gave her a brooding look she could not decipher but that inspired the rustle in her petticoats again. “This is a job that requires fewer brains,” he replied as he emptied the second, “and greater brawn.”

He threw back his shoulders, and the muscles of his upper arms…twitched? Parts of his chest also lifted and lowered, and she could not look away.

Nor did his departure encourage her to avert her gaze. It was not ladylike to gawk at a man’s bottom, not even one belonging to one’s husband, even should he be in name only. However, it was indisputable that there was no comparison to be made between the backside of Castleton and that of Osborn.

Glynis and Ciara scampered in after him with a bucket of water each and an inability to contain their giggles. Out their water poured, with Ciara adding a few drops of oil from a bottle, and they toddled away. Twin shrieks of laughter erupted as Morag came in with soap and an armful of cloths, a duty that, contrary to her usual style, was executed without comment.

Beatrice stood like a statue in between the bed and the tub and could not bring herself to fuss with the linens. He’d know she’d need them after she had been in the water without her clothes and oh no! Would he be required to fetch the tub after she was done? She would empty the bathwater out the window, one teacup at a time, rather than have him return when she was clean and sleepy and smelling sweet.

The oil was jasmine, and its feminine, heady scent filled the room; she sniffed at the cake of minty freshness sitting in a dish on the lip of the tub. Both were fragrant and delicate, in sharp contrast to her old soap, which like the spare bottles of oil had not accompanied the removal to Arcadia. It was time, likely past time to set aside the use of both. She would ask Todd where they had got to but would make no great effort to replicate them.

Osborn returned without his coat and waistcoat and with two more barrels. The heat rose off the water, fingers of steam wrapping around his arm as he poured out one, then the other, the fine lawn of his shirt clinging to his shoulders. He flipped away that thick lock of hair, the one forever falling across his brow. Though he seemed no worse for his exertion, his skin gleamed in the combination of hearth and candlelight, his shadow casting long and large against the glass cases.

“Madam. Your bath awaits.” The resonance of his voice sent chills over her skin, and she suddenly felt rather faint. She expected it was a consequence of the physical work of the day and the resultant fatigue. And the heat of the water. And the fire.

“Should you choose to give up dukery, you make a fit chambermaid.” Good Lord, what was she saying?

“I am not, as you may have discerned, adept at dukery.” He seemed amused. Lifting the barrels with much rippling of muscle, he gave her a sarcastic leg to match her defiant style of curtsying. “The water will be seen to in the morning. I bid you goodnight.”

***

Arthur replaced the barrels and heard the maids giggling, Odin love them. At their age! Morag sat at the kitchen table and regarded him with censure, while Conlon jibber-jabbered to himself about staff and bathwater and the expectations of duchesses. He walked out in the middle of a thinly veiled scolding concerned with leaving Her Grace alone again and went into the woods to Change.

He remained clothed even as he reached the first cover of the trees to avoid the mistake of wandering back to the house in the nip as he had this morning. What if Madam had seen him? She would have fled for the hills, her shrieks heard for miles around, possibly as far as Lowell Hall.

Arthur picked up his pace as he imagined her naked in the tub, submerged in the water that smelled of jasmine, bathing herself with the minty soap. Her golden hair had been loosened from the severe style that confined it during the day, and the moisture in the air resulted in unexpected waves blossoming around her face, beckoning him to run his thumb over a silky pink cheek. For one as frosty as she, her blush rode very close to the surface, as it would on an innocent. Had she known how the fire shone through the flimsy robe she had donned, she would have hurried back behind the screen. The flames highlighted delicious curves that begged to be stroked and squeezed. His cock stirred in his trousers, and he did his best to ignore it. His wife she may be, but he was only a man.

Well, mostly.

As little time as they had spent in each other’s company, he found he liked the salty aspects of her character as much as he enjoyed gazing upon her confectionary qualities. There was none to say they could not rub along nicely as he let her do what she wanted with the house and she left him out of it, none to say that a bit of teasing and firelight-through-the-nightgown gazing could not transpire. There was none to say they could not forge…a polite association. An amicable alliance. A cordial affiliation!

He ignored his bear’s incredulous reception of that conclusion, but once he slung his clothes over a handy tree branch, he gave himself over to his essential self.

Well, this was new. His Change had always come upon him easily due to his status of Alpha, sleuth or no. The greater one’s place in the hierarchy, the more fluid the surrender from man to beast and vice versa. He knew firsthand how seamless Georgie’s Shift became as he grew to manhood, had known his own was a mere step behind. Tonight, however, the segue was unlike any he had undergone in the past.

As a rule, the Change was not easy and was indeed something to undergo: a complete transformation in shape and stance, in skin and bone. The body restructured itself from one being to another, and it was a process not without pain; while not as grotesque as portrayed in those ridiculous werewolf Gothic novels, the pressure of it often displaced itself as air and sound.

This night, Arthur Changed as effortlessly as if he was shrugging out of one coat in preference for another.

It was almost too much for his sensibilities to handle, if he was being honest. One moment he was standing and reaching within for his bear and the next—he was the bear, enrobed in his luxurious coat, his senses sharpened. He fell so fast onto his fours, the bear was equally discombobulated and tumbled over. He righted himself, and for the first time in a long time, since he’d been very small and could not manage his creature’s strength, the bear took over.

***

He shook from head to toe and reveled in the Shift. He wanted to roar and roar—

We shall not alarm Madam, the man said.

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