3

The duke was breaking his rules, and he did not like it.

Going after Arabella Denton at all—that broke a rule. Nick should have sent a servant. Hell, all the servants.

Why had he gone? To keep it quiet, of course. To find her before word spread that his betrothed had fled in horror of his face.

Regardless. He'd sworn he'd never chase a woman.

And bringing her here. To his sanctuary. A cottage no one was to know existed.

But what was the alternative? Allow her to die of the cold?

Nick knew one thing: he was furious.

She was barely conscious when he carried her into the cottage. He stripped off her cloak to find her clothes soaked through. He'd see to that in a moment—first, a fire, before the cold rendered his hands as useless as hers.

Damn this idiotic girl. Damn her hysterics.

He lit an oil lamp near the fireplace. Thankfully, he'd been here just four days before, to read and write in solitude, and had left a pile of good dry wood. He had a fire going within minutes, and the space began to slowly fill with warmth.

Now, he lit an oil lamp, found towels, then went to the chest of drawers and retrieved a linen shirt.

She was shivering alarmingly on the bed. "Miss Denton." Her eyes did not open. She gave a soft, distant moan when he touched her shoulder. Ice. "Arabella," he said, curtly. "We need to get you dry now."

She mumbled something he couldn't make out—something about trees? "I must remove your clothing," he warned her.

He got to it, as efficiently as possible: unlaced and eased off her muddy boots, then her dripping stockings. Yanked the waterlogged gloves from her white fingers.

Then he got to work on unbuttoning her dress, cursing the tiny buttons under his breath. Finally, he peeled the wet garment away from her shaking body. He found a small bag hanging from her neck—enough money to leave the country, he noted—and set it aside. He felt his anger rise, push past his chest, up into his head.

Later. Once you've gotten her dry. No sense being enraged at her idiocy while she dies on the bed.

Her stays were even more stubborn—the wet had fused the ties into knots. Cursing, he pulled a small knife from his boot and cut through the lacings.

And then he saw that her eyes were fluttering open. She weakly tried to blink away her torpor. She saw his hand holding the knife, and whimpered.

"Bloody hell. You'll catch your death. That's all," he said. "If you don't like my undressing you, do it yourself."

She tried, he'd give her that. She sat up, shivering hard. Her cut stays fell away, leaving only her chemise. Wet, stuck to her skin. He could clearly see the shape of her body. He looked away.

She gripped the material in shaking hands. But she seemed at a loss to lift her arms.

"Just let me help you," he snapped. "I don't know what's in your silly head, but I assure you, I have no plan to ravish anyone this evening." Before she could protest, he grasped the fabric and pulled it over her head.

She was luminously pale, her skin everywhere smooth, slender limbs, small high breasts.

He tore his gaze away as soon as he realized he was staring. "Hell and the devil," he growled at himself and turned abruptly.

What was he, a schoolboy? This was the woman who meant to humiliate him. He forced himself to keep moving fast, to grab the towel, vigorously dry her with his eyes mostly on the wall, pull her arms through the sleeves of his shirt and button it as quickly as his fingers would allow, then wrap her in a blanket.

But he'd seen. He knew now: she was a gorgeous creature, head to toe.

Not a surprise, that. She'd been lovely when he'd seen her under that tree, a quiet, large-eyed girl absorbed in sketching. She'd been lovely in her modest blue day dress the morning he proposed; he'd been almost painfully aware that every part of her would be soft.

He'd proposed despite that. The last thing he wanted was an overly compelling wife.

And so he'd been concerned, in fact, earlier this evening at dinner, when the reality that he wanted to lean closer to her kept interfering with his plan to ignore her.

That's not what she's for, he reminded himself.

And yet he'd still fought the urge to turn to her, to stare. He refused. She'd play her part, he'd play his, and the less they interacted, the better. Of course she was afraid of him. He'd yet to find a woman of good breeding who wasn't comically wide-eyed with terror at the sight of him. The eye. The scar. The allegedly murdered wife.

Nick's plan was simple. Had been simple. Find a suitable wife with whom he had nothing in common. Someone healthy, ready to bear him an heir. Someone quiet, polite, and preferably incurious by nature.

The fact that, due to her blackguard of a father, Arabella Denton was also very good for business was a not-inconsequential factor in choosing her above the score of near-identical candidates. But in the main, he sought someone who didn't cause trouble. Someone who didn't occupy his mind. Affect his mood, his choices. Capture, God forbid, his imagination.

He would do his duty, then ship her off with the children to his country estate, to ... embroider, or whatever it was ladies did. While he did what he did—travel, generally drown himself in work. If he needed passion, a woman in awe, her fear bending deliciously to arousal, he'd get it the usual way, by paying for it.

That Arabella was tempting—that her skin was creamy, her lashes long on lowered lids when she pilfered a glance—was mildly dangerous. He'd known he would need to tread carefully. The dose, as they say, makes the poison. His body responded readily to hers, a warning that it wouldn't take much to intoxicate, and potentially addict him.

He would never put himself in a situation where that might happen.

Because he was decided: he would form no attachment to any woman. And especially not to his wife. He would bed her in the dark and leave. He'd do his best not to even touch those sweet little breasts.

And then she'd run. From their bloody betrothal dinner.

The feeling in his chest, the moment he realized she'd been gone too long—he knew . He'd miscalculated, gravely. She was not going to make this nearly simple enough.

Now, curled into herself on the bed, Arabella was still shivering hard, paler than ever. He hadn't seen someone so dangerously affected by cold since the day they'd pulled a half-frozen servant boy out of a winter lake, and that child had nearly died. He needed to get her warm, now.

He scooped her up in his arms; she didn't protest. She'd spent her strength. Her limp limbs were shockingly cold to the touch.

He brought her to the fire, laid her on the plush woolen rug where he kept a pile of cushions and books. She did not open her eyes, but she turned her body slightly toward the warmth.

He rose and efficiently stripped, dried off, fetched a shirt and breeches for himself, and came to join her. Her tremors seemed smaller, more internal now.

She didn't protest when he pulled her into him, her back against his chest, and covered them both in another blanket. She really was chilled to the bone.

He held her as her body shivered. Giving her his warmth. He took one slender white hand in his own, steadily rubbing warmth into each stiff finger, then the palm, then up her wrist. Then repeated the procedure with the second.

He didn't notice exactly when it happened, when she relaxed. He only knew that her body against him had stopped being a hard, angular thing and began to melt into his, her muscles unwinding, breath deepening. Limbs becoming soft.

He felt a relief so sharp it took his breath away. For the first time, he realized how afraid he'd been, from the moment he'd found her, staggering in the storm, half-frozen, eyes vacant.

He felt an ironic laugh bubble in his chest. Wasn't this exactly what he'd been trying to avoid? Worrying about a woman? Fearing for her?

But alas. Despite the fearsome visage, he was only human. And he did feel for Arabella Denton; she was simply a young woman, about to enter into a marriage with a man about whom she knew only gleefully dark rumor. She'd spooked like a fawn approached by a wolf. She'd run—for her life, she must have imagined.

"You poor, foolish thing," he whispered into her hair. She smelled of rain, and very faintly of jasmine.

She didn't answer. By her breathing, she was asleep.

She snuggled closer with a dreamy sigh, the curves of her rubbing into him. He felt his body respond. Truly, he only wanted to warm her. He had no intention of feeling her .

He didn't know how long he could endure this.

He touched her arm, testing the temperature. Her skin was warm now, pinkening. Good.

She shifted in his arms, rolling onto her back, and the movement caused his hand to fall onto her linen-covered breast.

He moved the hand quickly. But not quickly enough to miss the weight, the tautness.

Enough.

He was trying to keep her alive, that's all. She was safe now. The last thing he wanted to do was put his hand anywhere on a woman who hadn't expressly invited it.

He eased his arm out from beneath her. And rolled away. She made a protesting sound, but did not move.

Relief, and the cooler air of the room, hit him as he rose to his feet. He walked away.

Nick opened her bag, which he'd found on the ground not far from where she staggered in the storm, and assessed its contents, hoping he'd find something a bit more appropriate for her to wear than a man's shirt.

She'd packed a woolen dress and a nightrail, but everything was damp. At the bottom of the bag, he found a few items, wrapped in a shawl that had, for the most part, kept them dry.

A small book. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Inside, pressed dried flowers. A handful of paintbrushes, tied together with a frayed ribbon, and a muslin sack holding drawing pencils and watercolor paints.

And, wrapped with care, two sketchbooks.

He looked to Arabella. She was asleep by the fire, body uncurled and relaxed now.

He flipped open the first book. Landscapes. Ducks and a lapdog. The sky on a clear day. Everything one might expect a lady to draw. She had a good eye for shade and texture, and rendered her subjects with care and a certain wit. It hadn't occurred to him that she'd have real talent. But evidently, she did.

The second sketchbook didn't surprise him at first. Copies of statues and paintings from museum visits. Studies of a finely sculpted Greek thigh, the veins running over a marble forearm.

But then, a few pages in, he realized he wasn't looking at sculpture studies anymore, but sketches drawn from life. A voluptuous nude model posed with a basket of grapes, her hair braided loosely over one shoulder. The tender divots at the base of her back, the dimples of her arse rendered precisely.

Another, of the same woman from the bust up. Her mouth flirtatious, a finger lazily playing over a tendril of hair.

How had this well-behaved young lady found herself in a life-modeling class? Art schools and the like were generally off limits for women of quality. The nudity, of course, but also the counter-cultural, unapologetically debauched atmosphere.

He couldn't imagine her father knew. Did anyone?

A secret. Arabella was not exactly the woman he'd imagined. And he found, with no small measure of surprise, that he enjoyed discovering her other life.

But then he turned the page. And what he saw there changed his entire opinion of her.

I've been a fool.