Page 68 of Misadventures with a Duke

“Feel.” That part, I can let out. Not too far astray from where our subject is already. “Please, Bastien. Stop fighting it. Can you try…for me? For her?”

No more of his skewed glower. He rivets the look straight into me now. “You want me to think about another woman? Here? Now?”

“What if I do?” It’s shockingly effortless to be serious about it. But still scary. Oh, still plenty of that. “You were all-in on obsessing over her a couple of nights ago.”

“That was different! This is—”

“Still no different, if you time-jump your mind back. If we both do.”

His nostrils flare. I glimpse the grit of his teeth, with those front four a little more prominent than the others, emphasizing his bossy side by delicious degrees. “Why are you doing this? She is gone, and I am struggling to accept—”

“But what if you don’t have to?”

What if we get you back to the wardrobe, and you can fix it all? What if you can save her?

More astral concepts that I keep inside. I’ve already hit the poor man with all he can handle for now. All that he still hasn’t embraced—and that I might have to convince him of with the dirtiest tactics. With my naughtiest side.

“Raegan.”

“No.” I stroke a hand down the center of his chest. When getting to the ridged path below that, I keep going. “My name is Magique now. Come on. Try it. I think you’ll like it.”

With a terse sweep, he halts my caress. “What are you about? And why? Is this some strange new sorcery?”

“No.” I purse my lips. “Okay, maybe. I don’t know myself. But you believed Kavia’s spell enough to go for all of it.”

“Because there was an enraged mob after my balls!” he protests. “And a lot of everything else.”

“Well, I don’t blame them. I like being after your balls too.” I take advantage of the moments in which his surprise loosens his grip, and I can slip free to continue my downward stroke. “And now, I want to know what it’s like to have them craving me. To know what it’s like to be the woman you desire the most in the world.”

The lucky woman who’s captured your whole heart.

And there’s the part I should have left out of my heart. Because its absence from the air doesn’t stop his dukeness of discernment from spotting it on every inch of my face.

At once, there’s a defined change across his. Not one I’m fond of. The man can keep his tender pity, damn it. I don’t want it. I’ve actually told him what I do want, so why isn’t he listening?

“One day, one unbelievably blessed man is going to claim yours too. And he shall know the true gift he has in his possession. And he will cherish that prize with every ounce of his heart, soul, and body.”

Okay, so he did pocket the pity—only to replace it with everything worse. Words like that.

“So let’s pretend, just for a few minutes, that you’re that blessed guy.” My offer is joined by my smile when he doesn’t try to stop my caress anymore. “You get to role play him, and then I get to be Magique.”

But he hitches again. Damnably hesitant again. Even an extra undulation of my pelvis doesn’t affect him. “I am not one for playing, little one.”

His expression is true to his tone. Not a single bantering quirk around his lips. Not a wink from his unblinking eyes. The small glitterings in his irises have been buffed and blended to a take-no-shit sheen. A glaze that now seems to bleed into the air around us, tinting everything in an old movie sepia.

What…the hell?

The golden glow spreads, transforming everything else in the room. Holy shit. I’m no longer in a cheap boardinghouse chair but reclining on an old-world chaise covered in tufted velvet. The craft services tables are gone, replaced by a giant canopied bed that belongs in a musketeer movie.

In Bastien’s world.

Which is now…my world?

No. I mean, no. What is all this?

But as the words careen in my mind, they never take form on my lips. The only thing that emerges there is a phrase as stunning to me as it is to him.

“Tu préfère te battre?”