Free Beauty and the Duke by Melody Thomas

attention to detail.” Nor did she normally blather about like a flitting butterfly. “Your sister said that you had more specimens where that tooth came from.”
    He didn’t reply, which doused her hope that he had brought the entire cumbersome collection to London. “If fossils have been washing up on one of your riverbanks, the source has to be from somewhere near where the tooth was discovered. I want to examine all your bones.”
    He suddenly pinched the bridge of his nose and quietly laughed. Her gaze of its accord moved to his lips. And a random memory besieged her.
    No one kissed like Erik. Not in her entire life hadany man touched all five of her senses with only a taste of his mouth. He could make her hot and buttery and certain of her desires. He could make her want more than she knew she should have. His eyes returned to hers, amusement in their depths.
    The long-ago memory vanished, but not the heat it left behind. “What is so humorous?” she asked.
    A strange, tender light came into his eyes. “All of this we could have discussed in the morning, Christine.”
    “No, we can’t.”
    Christine didn’t understand why this conversation couldn’t have waited until tomorrow but something inside was pushing her forward, an ember of passion she had not felt in so long. Passion that was suddenly flowing through her veins and pumping her heart faster.
    Her future was in Scotland. She knew it in her heart and her gut and she only had to convince him. “Have you ever believed in something that no one else did?” she quietly asked. “Ever wanted something so much, then suddenly find that by whatever fate it has dropped into your lap and your whole world changes?”
    His silence seemed to tell her he was listening.
    “I want to go to Scotland and find the beast,” she said. “I am asking you to hire me. You cannot find anyone better qualified than I am for the job.”
    She withdrew a packet of folded papers from the pocket lining her cloak, outlining all of her qualifications and years of experience. Laying out in detail the last ten years of her life. All she had done since…since she and her father had boarded a ship to South America. Since she had walked away from him…
    “I know what your qualifications are, Christine.”
    Christine felt a rush of heat to her face. But to her relief he held out his hand and took the slim packet. “I assume Darlington has yet to return?”
    She had the sense to recognize that his hesitation might have something to do with her obviously stepping over Joseph, and how unfeeling it might appear. But in her mind, her case for doing so was strong. Joseph had Perth.
    “Mr. Darlington is on his honeymoon. I can be ready to leave before he is,” she went on in a rush afraid he would say no, unsure what she would do if he did. “That tooth your sister found might very will be the link for which Papa spent years searching. You must have known it or you wouldn’t have come to me. At the very least you must have known what that find would mean to me.”
    “Go on,” he said.
    She took a hidden steadying breath. “Your beast of Sedgwick is going to help me prove that dragons may have once inhabited this world.”
    Silence followed.
    Christine fought a frightening urge to laugh. “Not in the way that fables and mythology have painted them. But as you must know since you read his book, my father believed there were creatures as big as a house that once roamed the earth, a place far different from what we know today, the same creatures that eventually evolved into what we see today as birds.”
    Erik’s brows lifted in a clear attempt to tell her he must have missed that chapter in the book. “You want to take Becca’s find and announce to the world that dragons or something that might have passed for such once existed and are still here today having evolved into what…? Chickens, or the red-breasted robin we see picking worms out of the earth?”
    The theory had once sounded