Free More Than a Duke (Heart of a Duke Book 2) by Christi Caldwell Page A

question.
     
    She flinched at his deliberately placed barb. “Must you be so odious?” She blinked back foolish tears of hurt and glared at him.
     
    Instead of properly chastised, Harry quirked another golden eyebrow. He leaned close so his brandy-scented breath fanned her lips. “Isn’t that what you want, sweet?” he said, almost tauntingly. “Title of duchess and by Crawford’s interest in that,” he jerked his chin at her satin ribbon, “golden ringlet—”
     
    “Which is not silly,” she cut in.
     
    “Which is silly. Well, then I’d wager all my coffers in the book at White’s that you’ll be carrying the duke’s heir by next Christmastide season,” he said, a biting edge to his prediction.
     
    She gasped. Her fingers twitched with the urge to slap his smug, rude, arrogant, condescending face. Katherine looked over with a question in her eyes. Anne shook her head and her sister returned her attention to the performance.
     
    A spark glinted in Harry’s hazel eyes.
     
    With his roguish cynicism, Harry judged her interest in the duke and sought to taunt her for those efforts. She’d not allow him that satisfaction.
     
    Anne relaxed her fingers. “Then your lessons on seduction should come in quite handy, my lord.” She sat back in her seat and promptly dismissed him.
     
    ~*~
     
    At Anne’s rebuttal, fury thrummed through Harry’s veins, hot and volatile. By God, that he should school her in the ways in which to use her body and charms to catch another gentleman while he himself remained ignorant as to the color of the nipples atop those generous swells, or the pleasure of her touch, or the sound of her damned laughter, infuriated him.
     
    He steeled his jaw. This sudden, inexplicable interest in Lady Anne was merely about sex. He’d never before noticed her lush form and now, well hell, now he did, and he wanted to know all of her. In the physical sense. Margaret’s deception had shown him there was nothing else to know of a woman outside of the pleasure to be had in her arms.
     
    He might mock Anne’s efforts to land Crawford, but the reality was Harry had well-learned the way of their calculated world eight years ago. He’d given in to the emotion of love, given his fool’s heart to the sweetly innocent, beautiful Miss Margaret Dunn. He’d risked his very life, his reputation in a duel against Lord Rutland for the honor of the lady’s love. In the end, she’d chosen neither of them. She’d chosen wealth and status. And Harry? He had pledged to neither love nor feel again.
     
    He didn’t care about the damned Lady Anne, tempting vixen with her sharp tongue. He pulled out his watchfob and consulted the time. He should leave. Hell, he should have left when Anne herself had made the suggestion a short while ago. A steady staccato pierced his thoughts. He dropped his gaze to the floor.
     
    The tip of Anne’s slippers peeked out the front of the gown and beat a rhythm in time to the current song selection. All the hardened anger he’d carried since Crawford had come over and interrupted whatever this was between him and Anne, lifted. An odd shift occurred. There was something so whimsical, so endearing in Anne’s innocent gesture.
     
    The lady enjoyed music.
     
    Other than the fact that silver-flecks danced in her eyes when she was annoyed and that a little muscle ticked at the left corner of her lip when she frowned, Harry knew next to nothing about Lady Anne Adamson. But with her talk of contraltos and lyric sopranos, and her fixed interest in even the horrid performance of the Westmoreland girls, he found she cared about music.
     
    He who made it a habit of not learning anything about a lady’s interests, outside of the bedchambers, that is, knew this of her. When one knew a lady’s likes and dislikes and what made her smile or laugh, and even frown, then one could no longer see merely a supple body to bed.
     
    Christ. What was next? He’d begin sprouting sonnets about