How he had studied making love from books and relished mapping what he’d learned onto the woman who met him in the woods. It had not taken long to abandon the theories in favor of instinct, pleasure. He had loved the primal feeling of being the one to guide her, to leave her shaking and well cared for. It had meant something fierce to him.
This morning, seeing Georgie had been all the reminder he needed that he didn’t want to feel anything that fiercely ever again.
He did not want it.
It was the house. It made him behave like the fool he’d been when he had still lived within these walls.
Like he did not know that pleasure was but half of a continuum on which the other end was pain.
Like he did not know what it was to lose what was most precious.
He returned the key to its place around his neck.
He dressed and crept down the hall to his study.
He’d received a fat sheaf of documents from the counting-house in London, full of reports to read and decisions to be made. With any luck it would occupy him until he fell asleep.
A light burned beneath the door.
Poppy was in hiding.
It was absurd, but necessary.
The alternative was entrapment by a diminutive girl and her maniacal obsession with amusement.
Poppy had lost nearly an entire day dodging the demands of Constance’s house party, limping from room to room with her sketchbook, evading increasingly pointed invitations to join the group in whist and singing and theatricals.
Out of desperation she had begged off supper, pleading soreness in her ankle, and tiptoed down the hall to the duke’s deserted study, hoping he would not mind her using his spare table in the service of finishing her work in the only part of the house to which the guests and the servants seemed too afraid to venture.
It was peaceful in this room—darkly paneled and orderly and redolent of woodsmoke and the faint spice of dried tobacco. The walls were lined with books. She spread her scrolls and chalks out on the table and set to work on her diagrams, growing calmer with each hour that passed free from interruption. She looked up only when she noticed it had grown too dim to see, and ducked into the hall to find a candle with which to light the lamps.
Once the room was adequately lit, she lingered by the bookshelves, stretching out her back. She ran her fingers over the titles, most in Latin. The leather-bound books were free from dust and well cared for but had the distinct, musty smell of volumes long unread. Classics no doubt left over from Westmead’s days at university. She spotted a few books of poetry in English and tomes on geometry and physics. She stopped upon an old edition of Systema Naturae—Mr. Linnaeus’s book, which she had read at least half a dozen times. Could the duke be harboring a secret interest in botany? An interest in classification would suit him, judging by the intricate piles he was wont to leave so carefully sorted on his desk. She reached to pull the book from the shelf, and a slim, clothbound volume tucked beside it slid out instead. The embossing on the cover was in French. Curious, she opened it and saw an inscription on the blank first page.
Archer—
I hope you will enjoy this as much as I have. I cannot look at plates X and XXII without imagining your return. I hope when you turn these pages, you think of me, as I lie awake and think of you.
Always,
B
She flushed at the intimacy of the words.
They had to have been written by a lover.
She really should not read any further. It was rude enough to invade Westmead’s private study without his permission, ruder still to touch his books, to read what had clearly been meant only for his eyes.
She darted a glance over her shoulder to ensure she was alone before reading the inscription again.
She ran her finger along the script. There was no date. The ink was fading.
God forgive her, but she simply had to know what was on plates X and XXII.
Slowly she turned the brittle, yellowed pages. It was a book of illustrations.
The first page sent a rush through her whole body. A woman lay on a blanket in a field, half-undressed, as a man stood, fully clothed, observing her. The woman’s breasts were freed from her gown and her fingers clutched one nipple as her other hand disappeared beneath the hemline of her skirts, which were rucked up around her thighs. She was gazing at the man who watched her, her expression one of pleasure.
Oh.
She was not wholly unfamiliar with the activity the woman undertook, nor the pleasures of exploring one’s own anatomy. But she had never heard of such activities acknowledged in the open, no less pictured in a book. Certainly she had not imagined the act might be performed for a gentleman’s enjoyment. For, if her understanding of anatomy was correct, the pronounced bulge in the gentleman’s breeches indicated he was as excited by the lady’s explorations as she was.
She flushed deeper at the thought of it.
At the thought of it, and at the thought of Westmead being aware of such a thing.
Could it be that the stern duke, the man who had kissed her with such a guilty mix of longing and reluctance, had once been a younger man who enjoyed this licentious, private gift from a lover? She found it difficult to imagine him that way.
Lovely, rather. But so unlikely.
She quickly turned the pages to find the plates in the inscription. The images grew stranger as she went, depicting positions and assemblages she had not read about in novels and never thought to contemplate when pondering the mysteries of copulation. Plate X showed a woman with her wrists bound behind her as a man pressed his lips to her exposed breasts and his knee between her open legs. Plate XXII showed a woman kneeling before her lover, her lips locked around his very large, excitable male appendage as his hands tugged at her hair.
Oh my.
She quickly paged through to the end of the book, not wanting to be discovered spying on this so very personal relic that she definitely should not be reading and certainly should not be reading while imagining him reading it, yet not able to deprive herself of any additional revelations it might offer. She thought back to the first plate, the dreamy woman with her hand between her legs, and felt a pang of longing so sharp it startled her.
What is becoming of you? Thoughts such as these might be entertained discreetly in a lady’s bedchamber late at night when no one was the wiser, but not in the study of said lady’s host, on whom she was blatantly, unforgivably spying. She must really put this book away.
She flipped to the end, but the last page stopped her. Two plates, side by side, showed the man from the earlier pages without his haughty posture.
In the first he was on his hands and knees, his back to the lady, completely nude. Behind him the woman held her hand aloft, as though she meant to strike him. His buttocks were marked with the imprints of her hand, and his arousal made clear the assault was one he welcomed.
The second showed him with his wrists bound to the posts of a bed, his eyes masked by a blindfold. The woman, wearing stays and hose, was riding him, her powerful plump thighs holding him in place, her head thrown back in relish.
Poppy shut the book, more violently than she ought as it was fraying at the seam, then carefully returned it to its hiding place. She walked stiff-legged back to the table and the hard-backed wooden chair and her innocent sketches of flowers and stared directly into space.
What were those final images?
Was that done, truly?
The tableau was so different from any clue gleaned in her meager and unpleasant experience with courtship. Her years of evading unwanted leers in the market, ducking away from Tom’s advances, fearing men who were capable of violence, had left her predisposed to think that men held all the power when it came to amorous matters. She’d never thought to contemplate that the roles might be reversed. That a lady might be the one to make demands. That a man might want it so.