Free One Dance with a Duke by Tessa Dare Page A

extraordinary night. Even before you arrived at the Bunscombes’ ball.”
    Her remark put him back on that darkened terrace and had him mentally searching his pockets for her handkerchief. He shouldn’t like to lose it. She’d obviously invested great care in its design and creation. But unlike the young ladies who netted purses and lacquered tea trays as a means of displaying their dubious “accomplishments,” Lady Amelia had embroidered that square of linen for no one’s appreciation but her own.
    This intrigued him.
    As did the fact that, for all her harsh words declared him an enemy, her body seemed to have formed a fast friendship with his. She was still leaning against him.
    “You are not intimidated by me,” he observed.
    “No,” she said musingly. “Honestly, I am not. Oh, I would have been at this time yesterday. But as Lily said, this night has taught me that no one is immortal. It’s a dire realization in many respects, but oddly enough I find it somewhat freeing. Brash impertinence holds a sudden charm. I shall have to look out, or I may be in danger of becoming a real termagant.” She laughed softly to herself. “Yesterday at this time, I would have seen you as the unapproachable, imposing Duke of Morland. And you would not have seen me at all.”
    No doubt it would have been the politic thing to object. To say,
Oh, certainly I would have noticed you. I would pick you out from a crowd of ladies
. But that would have been a lie. In all likelihood, she was right. If they’d crossed paths in the street this time yestermorn, he would not have spared her a second glance. And that would have been an unfortunate thing, for she was a woman who greatly improved on second glance. At this moment, he was discovering that the warm, even light of dawn did her features better service than the harshshadows cast by candlelight and coal. She looked almost lovely, in the morning.
    She touched a finger to the window glass. “Today, I know we are merely humans. Two flawed, imperfect, mortal beings, whose bones will one day crumble to dust. Just a woman and a man.”
    At her words, space inside the carriage seemed to collapse around him. Not in a suffocating, oppressive manner, but in a way that evoked the pleasanter aspects of human closeness: physical pleasure and emotional intimacy. It had been some time—an imprudently long time, on reflection—since he’d enjoyed the former. He’d spent most of his adult life avoiding the latter. Surely the extraordinary nature of the night’s events was to blame, but Spencer found himself suddenly, intensely hungry for both.
    No sooner had he thought it, than she nestled closer still. Was she seeking comfort? Or offering it?
    Just a woman and a man
.
    Slowly, deliberately, he lifted one gloved hand from his lap and placed it on her leg, a few inches above her knee.
    Her thigh went rigid beneath his palm. He did not move, did not acknowledge her startled response. He simply sat there, cupping the plump curve of her thigh and enjoying the way it filled his hand.
    Though for practical reasons he favored pretty little nothings in a ballroom, when it came to bed sport, Spencer’s tastes ran to substance, in multiple senses of the term. He liked a woman with something to her, both physically and intellectually. Lady Amelia met both qualifications.
    True, she was no great beauty, but she had an undeniable appeal. Her mouth, in particular, he found alluring. Her lips were full and voluptuous, like the rest of her, and a lovely shade of coral pink. Then there wasthat lone, obstinate freckle still clinging to the inner curve of her left breast. The tiny mark only called attention to the otherwise creamy perfection of the bosom it adorned.
    And after the night they’d just passed wandering through Death’s shadow, it was only natural for a man to crave … well, to crave.
    In sum, he wanted her. Quite fiercely.
    He eased his hand up her thigh—one inch, perhaps two. Past the