Free Beauty and the Duke by Melody Thomas Page A

ridiculous to her as well. “If anything, whatever that tooth came from ishuge. Bigger than anything ever found. In my world, it is more important being first at discovering a thing than in being right in explaining how it came about.”
    “Is it not pure hyperbole to make such a deduction from a single tooth?”
    “My father believed in something that he could never prove.” Moving nearer, she willed him to feel her passion. Her raison d’être. “He died a laughingstock to his peers. Disgraced for what he tried to teach. Have you any idea what it is like not to have anyone believe in you?”
    Folding his arms, he looked away.
    “You owe me this chance, your grace!” She blurted the words, then stepped back, horrified by what had come over her.
    “I owe you?” he asked in a clipped voice. “How did you manage to come up with that conclusion?”
    He did owe her, a part of her shouted at her to say the words again.
    He owed her for breaking her heart, for marrying her cousin, for daring to think he could come back to London, taunt her with that fossil, and then tell her he wanted Darlington. He owed her for making her come here tonight and plead her case like a vassal bowing before her lord…
    “Your grace.” The butler suddenly stood in the corridor.
    Erik straightened. “What is it, Boris?”
    “Dessert is being served—”
    Without taking his eyes from Christine, he said, “Tell them I have been called away. Bring my cloak. Have my carriage sent around,” he said. “I will be escorting Miss Sommers home.”
    Boris stole a glance at Christine’s pale face. “Yes, your grace.”
    After Boris retreated, Christine sidestepped Erik. “I can take myself home.”
    He caught her arm. “It is a moot point. Your hackney driver has been paid and already sent away. I’ll not be missed here.”
    She doubted that. His absence would be like a large black chasm. She did not want him accompanying her. “You needn’t go to the trouble.”
    “I do not trouble myself over anything I do not wish to do, Christine.” He smiled his humorless smile. “I thought you would remember that about me.”
    Christine pulled her arm from his hand. She had no choice but to accept. Where would she find another hack in Mayfair this time of night?
    Then they were outside scurrying through the drizzle and he was handing her up into the cab of a luxurious brougham, horsed by two magnificent blacks. Once inside, she attempted to relax against the velvet squabs, watching as Erik gave orders to his driver. The coach lamps hanging from the driver’s seat cast a warm glow over his stark features, made all the brighter by the surrounding night. And as a gust of wind buffeted the coach, she felt the strange stir of something powerful.
    For all of her fearlessness when it came to exploring dark, cold, and confining places where most people, especially women, would never go, all in the pursuit of her passions, her discomfiture around storms had always been something of a joke among those who knew her. But tonight she felt no fear.
    Instead, she found the storm’s energy seductive. It intensified her senses, as if something inside her had awakened. Something deep and dormant within her she was not sure that she welcomed.
    A moment later, Erik climbed into the carriage and sat opposite her, filling the air around her withhis heat and scent. He dimmed the single light in the carriage, causing the upper portion of his face to be darkened by shadow. The coach jerked forward and for lack of a place to set her gaze, she watched his house fade in the gaslight mists. The horse’s clip-clop on wet cobbles pulled at the edge of her mind and she folded her hands in her lap, too conscious of him as a man.
    She stole a glance at him and found herself looking directly at him. Tonight was a perfect example of how he treated people, she thought, the way he had abandoned his guests at his own dinner table.
    “Do not worry about Lord and Lady Willows,” he