How to Catch a Duke by Grace Burrowes (most inspirational books .TXT) 📗

room. He set his cane against his desk and opened the middle compartment of the clock, where nothing but chains or weights should have been. The compartment concealed a combination lock on the face of a steel box.

“Where are the clock parts?” Abigail asked.

“The weights drop behind the safe. There’s exactly one-half-inch clearance.” He spun tumblers and turned the handle, and the safe opened with a soft click. “I put another safe behind that portrait over the fireplace, and I leave a little money in it, but nothing of any import. Everybody puts their safes in the chimney wall. Can’t blame a cracksman for looking there.”

“But you didn’t want to be predictable. Is there a third safe?”

He stashed the letters inside, shut the door, spun the tumblers, and closed the clock panel. “Abigail, you are a constant source of delight. The house has a total of five safes. Two are decoys, and one only Quinn and I have the combination to. I suspect a gunsmith’s daughter could open at least three of them, given enough time.”

He was smiling at her with approval and affection.

“I would rather not spend the next hour getting into your safes, my lord. I’d rather plunder treasure of a different sort.”

He blinked. “The shops. Right. I am your humble—Abigail?”

She had stepped closer, mindful that he wasn’t holding his cane. “You,” she said. “I want to plunder you.”

“Plunder…me.”

“Your person. I want to enjoy your intimate favors. This is not a real engagement, and when it ends, I will go back to being York’s most boringly dressed inquiry agent, while you…”

“While I?”

She passed him his cane. “While you resume the life of a duke’s genius heir, flirting with all the merry widows and straying wives, making fortunes in all the wrong industries, and hiding treasures where nobody will find them. A little trysting with me ought not to impose too much on your busy schedule until you can resume your usual diversions.”

He caught her hand when she would have stalked off across the room, for he appeared to regard her proposition with something less than enthusiasm.

Perhaps that was for the best.

“Abigail.” He kept hold of her hand. “Is this what you want? An illicit affair with a scapegrace lordling who can’t even manage to promenade around a ballroom with you?”

When did anybody, ever, ask Abigail what she wanted? “If you aren’t inclined, you need only say so, but your kisses have been convincing, and you tell me that honesty characterizes—”

He braced his cane across her bum, grasped an end in each hand, and pulled her closer. “I want you. I want you until I am insensate with longing, until you haunt my dreams and preoccupy my waking thoughts. I had to toss myself off in the damned coach on the way to fetch you. That came out wrong.”

“I know what you meant.” And the image of him, falls undone, cock rampant, all that velvet, leather, and lace luxury around him while he…“Shall we find a bed?”

Sexual congress did not require a bed, but Abigail would have few enough opportunities to be intimate with Stephen Wentworth. Some awkwardness was unavoidable. Nonetheless, she wanted their memories to be sweet, not of itchy carpet or a hard desk.

“We have a bed,” Stephen said, easing the pressure of the cane against her backside. “The sofa folds out, like the benches of a traveling coach, only more commodious.” He crossed to the sofa, bent down and released some sort of latch, then gave the bottom cushions a yank. The sofa flattened out into a sizable bed.

“Et voilà tout. Shall I undo your hooks, or will we go about this dressed?”

He probably knew eighteen different ways to copulate without removing a single stitch—the wretch.

“We have time. Why not dispense with some clothing?”

Stephen closed his eyes, hands braced on his cane. “Abigail, you are a woman after my own heart. Come here.”

She crossed her arms.

“Please, rather. Please come here that I might be your lady’s maid and finally, finally get my hands and lips and tongue on the luscious abundance of your breasts.”

He did more to arouse her with words than Champlain had done with his entire repertoire of loverly overtures. “Please suffices. You needn’t lapse into erotic flights.”

Stephen wiggled his fingers at her. “No second thoughts, Miss Abbott, and one doesn’t lapse into flights. One soars. More accurately, two will soar into flights and raptures.”

“Such humility about your amatory skills.” Abigail crossed the room and turned her back to him. She expected to feel deft fingers undoing her hooks, but nothing happened.

“My lord?”

“I am marshaling my self-control. If a stray bit of tinder were to land on my imagination right now, the Great Fire would be a mere glowing coal by comparison.”

Something was afoot with all this prolixity. Not shyness, exactly, but self-consciousness, perhaps?

“My hooks, Stephen, and my stays. Be about it, please, or we will have to go shopping when we could be cavorting instead.”

She barely felt his fingers brushing at her nape as he undid the back of her dress. Her stays loosened without any of the usual tugging.

“You have the hands of a safecracker,” she said, turning. “Allow me to reciprocate.” To stand around in loosened stays and an undone dress in the middle of the day was peculiar and naughty. Abigail liked the daring of it, and made a production out of removing Stephen’s cravat pin and sleeve buttons, then his watch and fob.

“Why do you wear silk cravats?” Most men preferred starched linen, though the silk was exquisite to the touch.

“Several frolicsome relationships ago, the other party had a taste for being bound when I used my mouth…” He tipped his chin up, as if consulting with the dragon on the ceiling. “She liked to have her hands tied during certain intimate acts. I could not countenance rope against a lady’s wrists, so I took to wearing silk cravats.”

Abigail drew the cravat from around his neck. “I see.”

“You don’t, but if the Deity is merciful to a man about