Free How To Vex A Viscount by Mia Marlowe

shocked.”
    “No, I’m sure you’re not,” he agreed with a raised brow. “In fact, as I recall, you possess a healthy curiosity about such things. To that end, I wonder if you’d clean this object first.”
    He picked up a little statuette from the bench and placed it in her open palm. It was a representation of the goat-god doing a cloven-hoofed jig, his engorged penis all out of proportion to the rest of him, despite having a bit of the tip missing.
    “I plan to take that to Mlle La Tour this evening,” he said. “I think she’ll enjoy it, don’t you?”
    Daisy’s heart tripped a beat or two. She was cleaning up this lascivious little bit of antiquity so he could present it to . . . her, in exchange for kissing lessons.
    “Blanche will be charmed,” she said.
    “Good.” His smile was so blindingly white against his tanned face,
    it made Daisy’s eyes water to look at him. She sighed in relief when he turned back toward the pit.
    “Oh, and Miss Clavenhook, just so you know,” he called over his shoulder, using her assumed name for the benefit of the boy who labored below in the dirt. “That’s not life-size either.”

    Daisy worked through the rest of the morning, sorting, stacking, and rearranging the odds and ends. She grouped the shards of pottery according to colour, in the hope that later she’d be able to reassemble the bowl or vase or amphora the pieces had once been.
    She discovered the portable writing desk beneath a section of a mosaic depicting nymphs and satyrs. Most of the mosaic was damaged beyond repair, but she was able to discern a few body parts represented in the intact sections: there a set of bared breasts, here detailed genitalia of both sexes first in congress and then separate. She found a confusing scene with only male figures and decided not to scrutinize the mosaic further.
    She tingled in strange places when she looked at it.
    She turned her head surreptitiously to gaze from the shed to where Lucian labored. The day was unseasonably warm, so he and the boy who helped him had removed their shirts. The muscles in his chest and broad back bunched and flattened. His sun-darkened skin glistened with a sheen of male sweat. The sight of Lucian bare-chested sent a flutter through Daisy’s belly. Even stronger tingles settled between her legs. She jerked her gaze back to her lap desk.
    She noted each item in her small curlicue handwriting on the fresh paper and found that reducing the pulse-jumping images to mere words helped ease their effect.
    Item: one bacchanalian scene with three figures, two male, one female, on black glazed pottery.
    Item: one frieze of woman with swan. Limestone.
    Reading about Leda dallying with Zeus in the guise of a swan was romantic. Seeing the act depicted so . . . realistically was another thing altogether.
    Item: one . . .
    Daisy’s quill hovered over the page, dropping a blob or two of ink in her hesitation. There was something different about the next pottery fragment. The detailed ornamentation was just as explicit as the others. A nude young man was reclining on his elbow while a young woman hovered over him, guiding his erect member between her widespread legs. Their gazes were locked on each other.
    The man was reaching up one hand to touch the woman’s face. The gesture was so tender; it reverberated with power through the centuries and made Daisy’s breath catch in her throat. She wondered if she’d been laced too tightly that morning.
    No, it’s just that these Romans were real people, she thought. Doing the loving things real people do.
    “Only they apparently did so much of it, one wonders when they found time to conquer the world,” she murmured.
    “Perhaps this was why they conquered the world.” She startled at the sound of Lucian’s voice behind her. “In order to have peace to enjoy the gentler pursuits. Art, music, the delights of love.”
    She slanted her gaze up at him. “I wasn’t speaking to you.”
    “Oh.” He