Page 65 of Misadventures with a Duke

“It’s been a while since I hit a jag like this,” she confesses quietly. “After a while, when you start telling yourself you’re irrelevant so many times, you just start believing it. It gets easier to ignore the inspiration because you doubt that too. You just doubt…all of yourself.”

She slides the stack back to the table but does not yet surrender her reverent touch. Looking there, at her slender fingers with their functional oval nails decorated in green and gold swirls, I am awash in a wave of new awareness. An unignorable need to lean for her. To wrap those fingers with my own.

“And now, you have stopped doubting.”

Raegan lifts her head. The motion is like the moisture in her eyes. Misty but meaningful.

“Yeah. I really have.”

I draw in a breath. It hurts. I have never savored such perfect pain in my life. “What made it stop?”

Her grip tightens in mine. “You.”

RAEGAN

And here I go again.

Letting the truth tumble out of me before contemplating what it’ll actually mean. About the effect it’s going to have on everyone around me.

This case, in which everyone equates to just this one, is no different.

Because he’s the only one who shouldn’t be hearing confessions like this from me. Not when there are other things I had prepared to tell him. More vital things.

Well, one thing in particular.

Using my hands to sketch always frees my mind for strategic thoughts. To show for it this time, I have a theory about getting him back to Magique—a living, breathing version of her—but also ensuring the two of them will escape the Jacobins’ crosshairs. It all hit me sometime between my second and third sketches, but now it’s like my creativity damn got busted open.

My flair is definitely back. My confidence.

Best of all, I don’t worry about Bastien seeing it all too. He actually seems to enjoy the wild and crazy view. The swirling, bouncing me. The imagination parade that used to drive Justin, and so many like him, so nuts. But like a moth to a hundred flames, I kept craving creative geniuses. Kept thinking they’d be the ones who got me the best.

But they all ran. And they all were fine that I blamed myself for it. They were scared of my light. Intimidated by it.

I do not intimidate Bastien De Leon.

I know it with thorough brilliance. With such awesome completion, I don’t even have to ask him. But the man leans in as if I’ve done just that, already knowing how to halt all my misgivings.

He kisses me.

At the same time, he sweeps over me with his broad warrior’s body. Before I can discern whether to gasp or groan, he drops on his knees in front of my chair. I decide on both. Good plan, since his hands plummet onto my knees—right before he pushes hard and spreads them wide.

Not. Intimidated.

And now, with the new plunge of his tongue, not taking any prisoners either.

He’s just as voracious when continuing his kisses down the front of my throat, scraping my skin with his teeth until the neckline of his big T-shirt won’t stretch any lower. By now, my moan is a frustrated growl. Half an inch more, and the man’s magical lips could be in contact with my aching nipples. It’s beyond time to make that happen…

But the moment I stretch back my hands to go for an over-the-head T-shirt strip, Bastien captures both my wrists between one of his. With another sweep, he pins them over my head, caught atop the chair cushion.

“No,” he orders at last, the growl low and lethal in his throat. “No, Rayonnement. Sometimes it is better…without so much skin.”

He debates his side with incredible effectiveness. The warmth of his mouth over my left nipple, aided in its spread by the abrasion of the cotton fabric, has me already crying out. The next second, I’m bucking against him. And God, it feels good. The wetness. The friction. The pulses that careen through me, not stopping until they curl my toes.

Yes. Oh yesss.

“Oh, my freaking hell.”

“Or heaven?” he teases, still tracing maddening circles around my thimble-hard nub.