Virginia Heath - Lilian And The Irresistible Duke

She poked her head out into the hallway to call back her maid, but the girl was gone. She knew Alexandra—her maid would still be there even if her mistress was already soaking in her bath and Lilian selfishly wanted her soap. Rather than retying her dress, she wrapped her shawl tightly around the loose and gaping bodice and decided to make a dash for it before the water got cold. With one hand on the shawl and the other holding the full skirts and petticoats of her uncharacteristically fashionable new dress, she scurried down the hall, staying close to the wall. As she pivoted around the sharp corner, she hit him, her face connecting with the broad expanse of his chest.

‘I am so sorry…’ She had to crane her neck to look at his face and the apology died on her lips a split second before her face heated crimson.

Pietro had been having a bad day. Or rather it was not so much that the day was any worse than any other, but that he had awoken feeling restless and that restlessness refused to go away no matter how much he tried to divert it with purpose.

The restlessness, as he called the odd mood which crept up on him without warning, had always plagued him since he was a young man. A sense of something not quite right, something missing, a peculiar feeling of dissatisfaction with his life. It predated his marriage and had bothered him throughout its short and turbulent duration. In his youth, he put it down to ambition and over-exuberance and had always assumed it would disappear with age. Except with each passing year, and despite his success and his significantly increased fortune, it seemed to plague him more now than it ever had. His usual method of distracting it with work, and if that failed to assuage it with a brief fling with a willing woman, no longer seemed to alleviate it for quite as long as it used to and he often found his mood soured because he was so very bored with it all. Although he could never quite pinpoint exactly what it was he was dissatisfied with because he had no earthly idea exactly what it was he wanted.

To make matters worse, despite actively looking, suitable distractions outside his punishing work schedule had been thin on the ground lately. The stalwarts he could always rely on held little appeal and he hadn’t met a new woman in months who had seemed worth the effort.

Apart from one…

One whom he would have enjoyed thoroughly seducing just before Christmas. The troubled, proper, pretty one who had strangely intrigued him at Lady Fentree’s festive gathering in England. The one who had just apparently walked straight into him.

‘Hello…’

Her dark hair was loose about her shoulders, silky and wavy against her pale English skin as one of those creamy shoulders was exposed bare above the shawl she clutched tightly. Feline green eyes blinked up at him, the mouth he had thoroughly enjoyed kissing all those months before a startled O. And she was blushing. At her age. How…interesting.

All in all, the woman who had strangely intrigued him during that chilly English winter, because she wasn’t his usual type at all, suddenly looked very much his type in his home town now. A petite, gloriously curvaceous, tousled and thoroughly intriguing armful of woman who looked wonderfully scandalised to have collided with him again. Her eyes were on his mouth and he realised in that second she was remembering their heated kiss in the carriage just as he was. It was a memory which he had often revisited since, which was not like him either as he was not one to reminisce. What was the point? The past usually only served to depress him and he enjoyed the here and now.

But she had surprised him that night. He still couldn’t think of a reason why he had been initially drawn to her at the interminable house party he had been dragged to. But once they were alone in that dark carriage, thick fresh snowflakes falling outside under the moonlit sky and crunching beneath the wheels on that much-too-short journey, he had remembered clearly why he had kissed her.

Because in that moment, he had wanted to. It was that simple. And she had surprised him by kissing him back with barely contained passion and, for a few short minutes, the carriage, the snow and the entire world had disappeared the second his lips had touched hers.

Pietro could not remember the last time such a thing had happened because his head was always full of other things. His business, his wealthy clients. Brokering discreet deals with the many financially challenged aristocrats who needed to liquidate some of their assets, then creating enough excitement and intrigue about those paintings and sculptures so they not only found a welcoming new home, but he was paid a fortune for rehoming them. At least one of these things was always at the back of his mind at all times and usually more to the forefront than the recesses, yet in that carriage, on that short road between one house and another, it had only been him and her.

It had been a truly unforgettable kiss. One which, if he were honest with himself, had caught him off guard and left him decidedly off kilter. Enough to leave the area quickly in case he was tempted to do it again. Such an unexpected and unforeseen reaction was far too complicated to indulge further and Pietro avoided complications like the plague.

‘What are you doing here!’

‘I live here.’

‘You do?’ Her voice came out in a delightfully outraged squeak as she simultaneously realised her shawl wasn’t entirely covering her modesty and wrestled with it ineffectually.

He nodded, his mouth curving into a smile for the first time that day. ‘Which begs the obvious question, cara …what are you doing here?’

‘I am here with my late husband’s cousin…with Lady Alexandra…we’ve come to stay with Carlotta…’

‘Ah…’ Instinct told him this was no accident. It had the stamp of his sister all over it. She despaired of his quarter-century of bachelorhood, declaring it unnatural—especially as he had been widowed so young. ‘And she put you in this room?’ Conveniently located right next to his in the family wing. Much too coincidental to be coincidence.

‘Do you know Carlotta? Silly question…of course you know Carlotta if you live in her house…’

‘Actually, this is my house.’

‘It is?’ She didn’t look very happy about this news, her dark eyebrows drawing together to create a charming wrinkle between them. ‘Lady Alexandra led me to believe this is her friend’s house. Carlotta’s house.’

‘Carlotta moved in here after her husband died three years ago. To bother me. Something she does very well. My little sister has always liked to meddle.’ And matchmake. Although she was usually more subtle about it.

‘Your sister?’

‘They never told you?’

‘No…neither she nor my dear cousin thought to tell me that my host was her brother… Or that we had met.’ Her eyes flicked to his lips again before she caught herself and forced them to hold his gaze. He bothered her. The knowledge warmed him until he reminded himself he should probably be more wary than warmed. Mrs Fairclough was a widow. He was a widower. Carlotta and Alexandra had conspired to put her in the room next door to him, thrust directly in the path of temptation, when there were another twenty serviceable bedchambers in the palazzo well away from his.

‘Clearly they both like to meddle, as I suspect you have been brought here on purpose, Mrs Fairclough.’ It didn’t take a genius to work out what was going on. Alexandra must have reported back straight after Christmas, eager to tell his sister he had shown an interest in a woman and Carlotta being Carlotta, she had assumed it meant more than it did and had thought to encourage it. ‘To matchmake, perhaps?’ Unless the woman before him was in league with them. She wouldn’t be the first to assume he was in need of a wife and, as he had instigated their kiss, she might well assume she could be the one to tempt him to abandon his bachelor ways…