Page 79 of The Duke Undone

“I’m awake now.” More parts of her, more awake than she could remember. She leaned forward and fit her mouth to his. He kissed her back, then lifted his hands and settled them, heavy and hot, on her shoulders. He held her still as he eased out of the kiss.

“Alas.” His smile was gentle. “Consciousness is necessary but not sufficient.”

She searched his face and understood. But surely she hadn’t had so much to drink as that! Did he think she didn’t know her own mind? She frowned in protest. “I know my arse from my elbow.”

He laughed and grabbed her wrists, lifting her arms so he could kiss her elbows, the awkward posture and the strange ticklish attention lavished on such an unprepossessing part of the body making her laugh too, laugh and squirm away.

“Prove it.” His tone was jesting, but his eyes had narrowed. Suddenly, his dimples flashed, and he dove forward, reaching over the side of her bed and coming up again with her sketchbook.

“Here.” He thrust it at her. “If you’re capable of higher-order thinking and decision making, you should be able to . . .” He paused and considered her. Dear God, did she look as startled as she felt? She turned the sketchbook over in her hands. Oh, but he was grinning, that wide, devastating grinning.

“Let’s see. You should be able to . . . draw a cow that strikes terror in my heart.”

“What?” She laughed her disbelief, and he lifted his brows, scooting back to lean against the wall.

“You said you’d imagined the scene.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Cows with terrifying aspect, meting out grisly death. I ask for a single cow, no more.”

That was his test of her sobriety?

“You are . . .” Words failed her.

“Asinine?” He suggested impishly. “I don’t consider it an insult. We’ve established that I respect donkeys. Your cow, my lady. Might I advocate for fangs?”

More laughter bubbled up. He was asinine, absurd, and, with that self-satisfied grin, overwhelmingly, irritatingly attractive.

She crawled over the bed, feeling along the crack between mattress and wall for one of her charcoal pencils. When she’d got one, she sat beside him, setting her back to the wall, propping her sketchbook on her thighs.

She pressed the pencil to the page, then lifted it. How to begin?

He spoke airily. “Put on the page some semblance of a cow.”

“Thank you for your advice,” she muttered, refusing to look at him, knowing his expression: dimpled and delighted and infuriating. She made a mark, the long line of a bovine spine. Good. Oh, but not good. The cow should be rearing. She started again, trying a new angle, and the whole while, she was aware of him, lounging in her bed, laughing to himself.

“Quiet,” she snapped, whenever she felt him take an overlarge breath.

In the end, her sketch resembled a bald, block-headed horse, tall on its hind legs, mouth open.

“Fangs,” she said tersely, pointing.

“Ah.” His side pressed hers as he took the sketchbook. They peered at the sketch together.

“I forgot cows don’t have flowing tails,” she said at last. “I haven’t seen many cows firsthand.”

“I could introduce you to a few.” He looked at her, face so near she could count those orpiment flecks in his irises, study the curvature of his lids. “Someday, we could go to Hampshire. You’d love it, I think. The fields and hedges, and—”

He broke off. He loved Hampshire, it was obvious. And he wanted to show it to her. Something squeezed inside her and began to ache. She rubbed at the sketch with her thumb, blending the charcoal lines.

He cleared his throat. She hoped, for both their sakes, that he wouldn’t continue in the same vein, intimating some future that wouldn’t be.

“It’s an abomination,” he said, and the smile was back in his voice. She removed her thumb. The blending hadn’t helped.

She sighed, relieved and disappointed. He was right. “Well then.” One question remained. She frowned at the monstrous cow-horse, which borrowed something, too, from the realm of dogs, the jaws, if not the teeth. The teeth belonged to a wild boar. “Does it strike terror in your heart?”

A pause, then:

“Yes.” The one syllable rasped in his throat.

Her eyes shot up.