The Tattooed Duke by Maya Rodale Page B

another sip, hoping the burn of the brandy would keep her from blurting out that she was more than a mere housemaid. She was a writer—a published writer. She was a good friend to her fellow Writing Girls, she kept secrets and dealt with problems and had her own wishes and dreams.
    She was more than a woman with a broom and an apron. But because the duke thought that was all she was capable of, it lessened any regret she might feel for what she wrote about him.
    But still, it begged the question of why she cared what he thought of her. That was something to be considered another time. Unless it was fodder for her articles, it wasn’t worth her attention.
    Get the story. Get the story.
    “You wish to avoid your fate,” she summarized.
    “I suppose that is one remarkably accurate and succinct way to put it,” the duke answered. Again, she wished to point out that she was a writer, that she had a way with words.
    “But I want . . . what I’m not supposed to want,” he said, and sipped from the bottle. “Tonight, at the ball, Lady Althea slapped me clear across the face in front of everyone.”
    “The audacity,” Eliza murmured, when instead she wished to ask what he’d done to deserve it.
    Julianna probably witnessed it with unabashed glee and had already written an entire installment of “Fashionable Intelligence” relating the scene for those who had missed it—the Elizas of the world, the housemaids and the working class and the ones who were never on the invitation list. Being friends with a duchess and a countess who never missed a party and who always had new dresses was hard sometimes.
    But then again, they could never do this: go off in disguise and spend the evening looking at the stars and drinking brandy with the most intriguing, handsome, scandalous duke in town. She found herself leaning closer and breathing him in.
    “I deserved the slap, of course. But that incident, coupled with that scathing newspaper column . . .” If he saw her shrink back, he did not show it. “ . . . has made it impossible for me to stay, and impossible for me to escape. I feel as if I do not belong here, yet England and the dukedom own me and I cannot leave.”
    “Why did you even return?” Eliza asked.
    “Honestly? I was bored of Tahiti and another option presented itself.”
    “I am tempted to slap you myself,” Eliza remarked.
    “Burke had stranded Harlan and myself there a year earlier with some noble idea of teaching us a lesson about being careful what we wish for. I knew that the time was coming for me to own up. I just didn’t expect it so soon, so suddenly. I still remember laying on the beach and seeing Burke’s ship on the horizon . . . and then him delivering the news that my father had died and I was now Wycliff. I thought I ought to return.”
    “You are redeemed. Slightly.”
    “How kind of you to say so. I do have a sense of duty,” he said. There was a slight smile on his lips, and it reached his eyes, too. He reached out to push a wayward strand of hair back from her face. His fingertips brushed across her cheek then, and she couldn’t help but close her eyes and savor it.
    “We should go before I ravish you on the rooftop,” the duke stated.
    Eliza’s eyes widened and she could feel a coy smile forming on her lips. When had she ever been coy? Or a flirt? That one week in Brighton, perhaps . . .
    “Go,” he commanded, sounding very ducal. She had been dismissed. “And do not open your door if I knock.”

Chapter 11
     
    In Which the Writing Girls Visit the British Museum
     
    Sunday
     
    I t was Sunday afternoon, Eliza’s half day off, and she was spending it at the British Museum with her fellow Writing Girls and Sophie’s younger, troublesome sister-in-law, Lady Charlotte. They all paused before a particularly chiseled stature of a man—a god, surely—who was utterly unclothed save for one strategically placed leaf. A very large leaf, one might add.
    “Oh my