Read Not Quite A Duke (Dukes' Club Book 6) for Free Online

isn’t for you. I understand. Then what should we discuss? If not ourselves and not my layers, then what?”
    “The weather is a very fine subject.”
    “Weather be damned,” he declared, absolutely serious now. “You’re more interesting than that.”
    She gave him what she could only call her most spinsterish look, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, spine straight as a ramrod. It was an often practiced look. “Am I?”
    “You know it.”
    “Ah sir,” she said with as much humility as she could muster, “I am naught more than a reclusive lady who scribbles away. I’ve no aspirations to greatness or singularity. I am merely an unassuming and rather boring creature.” 
    He snorted. “There is nothing mere about you.”
    Drat and double drat. Why wouldn’t he accept that she was just a bored recluse who wrote romantic prose for her own entertainment?
    “Why are you so determined to unearth something that isn’t there?” she demanded, her temper flaring.
    “Because I believe it is there and truth be told. . . I am bored.”
    “Bored?” It was all she could do not to roar at him. He was causing her all this trouble because he was bored ?
    “Bored,” he repeated with exaggerated articulation.
    “How can someone of your birth and your good fortune be bored?” she asked incredulously, though she’d seen it before. The sight of men and women born to every chance, every privilege and who went about sighing with ennui would have been tragic if it wasn’t so infuriating. In her opinion, bored people needed a good slap.
    “Ah.” He folded his arms across his broad chest. “To echo you, Lady Patience, you know nothing about me.”
    Of that she was beginning to truly agree. She had made basic and quick assumptions about him. But there was more to this man than just the rake. He was claiming boredom, but as she surveyed his face, he didn’t seem bored. He seemed like a placid sea hiding great currents underneath. He was running from something, hiding from something deeply unpleasant within himself and that was why he sought distraction.
    Oh, yes. There was a darkness. A cleverness. And a willingness to push her and discover her secret no matter the consequences.
    Which she had to nip in the bud.
    “My lord, if you will be so perverse, then I will have done.” She curtsied and started for the door, manuscript still clasped to her chest. As tempting it was to plumb his depths, such a thing would be far too dangerous. “I bid you goodnight.”
    “What, my lady retreats?” he challenged.
    She stopped and said, “My lady is a pacifist and doesn’t engage in fights.”
    “What a pity.” He gave her a slow, wicked smile. “For fights do often meet pleasurable ends. All that tussling, you see.”
    That smile of his burned. It burned her straight to her core with the most pleasurable heat and it was enough to cause her to swallow and draw a deep breath. “I beg your pardon?”
    “I should dearly like to tussle with you.”
    “You’re outrageous.”
    His smile only deepened as he delivered what seemed to be his coup de grâce. “And I think you like it.”
    She wanted to pop him one. Right in the mouth. Something proper Lady Patience would never, ever do. But even she, as her most honest self, couldn’t. Because he was correct. She couldn’t let him know that, though.
    Squaring her shoulders, she sneered, “What you think and what is are so very far apart it is not even worth giving credit to.”
    “The lady doth protest too much.”
    She let out a cry of protest. “Using Shakespeare to prove your point is too low.”
    “Using Shakespeare is never too low.”
    Clutching her papers tighter to her chest, turning her book into armor, she decided that the only thing to do was, indeed, retreat so that she might regroup. This afternoon, she had undoubtedly won their sortie. Now? She wasn’t sure about the outcome of their forming war.
    “Goodnight, Lord Charles.”
    She started to resume her exit but to her