He held up his hands in defense. “I fear I am no actor. There must certainly be a better option here among these lovely ladies.” He finished off with a flash of his most charming smile. The determined gleam in Alaina’s sapphire eyes was unnerving in its intensity.
“Please, Your Grace,” said the raven-haired woman. “You couldn’t possibly be a more miserable Petruchio than I.”
“Truly,” piped in the stunning red-haired woman beside her. As the only woman in attendance with such a shocking shade of hair, Sterling assumed she must be Sommerfeld’s wife. “Nothing can be worse than Lady Juliette.”
“I beg your pardon?” the woman Sterling now knew to be his wife’s other close friend exclaimed with mock indignation.
“Are you familiar withThe Taming of the Shrew?” Alaina asked, cutting off the banter between the other women. More than a dozen pairs of expectant eyes awaited his answer.
“I have seen it performed once,” Sterling admitted as he accepted the manuscript from his wife.
“Good.” She flashed him a smile that made his knees feel slightly weak. How long had he waited to have her look at him like that again? Faced with it, his brain went slightly mushy, and he’d later blame that for his caving into her request. “We’re going to try the scene where Kate and Petruchio first meet.”
Despite his reservations, Sterling quickly found himself enthralled with his wife and her passionate rendition. He was in awe of the way her eyes flashed and how her color rose to wash out her delicate freckles. She practically danced around him, prowling like a lioness as she spoke. The rest of the room fell away, and he forgot all about their audience of interested guests. He struggled to reconcile this intoxicating woman with the prim and proper rose he’d wed, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She may have been acting—performing words written centuries prior—but there was no mistaking the spark was all hers…and it was arousing beyond measure.
At the scene’s conclusion, the room materialized around them once more as the ladies erupted into enthusiastic applause. Alaina broke character and turned away from him, back to their guests.
“Now,” she addressed her Reading Society; “let us compare that to Kate’s behavior in the final scene of the play.” She motioned for Sterling to flip through the pages of his manuscript and locate the other marked section. Meanwhile, she rapidly assigned a few roles to some of the other ladies. He skimmed the scene to refresh his memory, and a part of him wondered how well Alaina would play the part of obedient wife. He tried not to smile at the image. Perhaps he’d give her another kiss as a reward.
The scene began with other voices chiming in; their tones ranged from confident and loud, to peppered with nervous laughter and self-conscious glances in his direction. One girl who was so shy her voice could barely be heard from where he stood. Her cheeks flushed when Sterling gave her what he hoped was a non-threatening, reassuring smile. He noticed Alaina nodding her head encouragingly to the young woman as well.
Finally, “Kate” returned to the scene…and Sterling was taken aback by Alaina’s performance.
Her haughty look and defiant stance starkly belied her words. Her flashing blue eyes never left his.
Clue three: She’d learned her part well enough to set aside her manuscript entirely.
He all but stammered his way through the lines, so set back on his heels that he was unable to match his wife’s defiant fire.
Sterling felt the sudden snap of the trap as the scene concluded, and Petruchio—he—was summarily chastened. The quirk of one of her well-shaped brows underscored her point, and she turned back to her congregation.
“Do you see how Kate manipulated the situation, as well as Petruchio? And how Petruchio is foolish and gullible enough to believe he could quash Kate? He believes in his innate superiority as the surety of his success—not to mention that it excuses hischildishbehavior.”
All at once, Sterling realized just why she’d drawn him into this situation… Alaina wanted to teach him a lesson. She wanted to shame him. Publicly.
His fists clenched suddenly and violently, crumpling the manuscript in his grip as his wife continued to speak. She was so obviously pleased with herself, and making a spectacle of their marriage in front of her friends was her modicum of revenge upon him.
A grudging part of him admired her creativity—he’d clearly underestimated her torture tactics—and her keen understanding and analysis of the text.
The other part of him (the ducal part) didn’t appreciate the undermining behavior.
Not one bit.
“Leave us,” he barked to the room, interrupting Alaina’s oration.
She frowned and turned back to him. “I hardly think it is polite to demand our guests leave. Again. What about—”
“Manners be damned,” he snapped, cutting her off once more. Several of the women gave little jumps. He’d likely be on an apology tour the next day for this, but he cared less than the weight of a feather about it at that moment. He needed to get Alaina alone. “Out.” The last word was uttered in such a low, dangerous tone that there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation before the women gathered their things and all but fled. They rushed past Sterling without making eye contact and Alaina followed their progress until she met him near the drawing room door. Neither said a word until the last woman had gathered her pelisse and rushed from Morton House.
Alaina scowled and opened her mouth—no doubt to utter a scathing set down—but Sterling immediately pressed her bodily against the door frame, every inch of him meeting her unapologetically. His mouth found hers and kissed her deeply, possessively. His tongue forced its way past her lips, stroking her mouth and tangling with hers. He lapped up her squeak of indignant surprise and swallowed it whole like a draught, struggling not to smile when he felt her falter. At first, she stiffened against him and fisted her hands in the sleeves of his coat, but she did not shove him away this time. Whether shock or desire held her in place, it mattered not to Sterling. He could only think about this moment, tasting her, feeling her, devouring her fire, breathing her in to keep her with him forever.
He wanted to grind his pelvis into hers until she was as weak-kneed with raging desire as he. He longed to strip the layers from between them—the tangible and the imagined—until they both were laid bare. No secrets. No clothing. Just this clash of passion that made them both gasp and ache and, at long last, scream in relief.
She spun him to distraction, and he needed her with everything inside of him. Alaina drove him mad with her words, but even more so with the heat she drew from his loins. His every nerve roared to possess her wholly, body, soul, and even indomitable spirit. It would be a challenge to even attempt to harness this wild woman of his, but Sterling was up to the task.
He hadn’t fought tooth and nail for the last eight years to not finally, truthfully, be able to call her his.
He ripped his lips from hers, his chest heaving with a myriad of emotions. “Do you realize how maddening it is to not know whether I’d prefer to punish you or fuck you senseless? You infuriate me beyond measure; you enthrall me beyond reason. You are Kate incarnate, my little hellion, and I cannot stop thinking about you,” he growled as if the admission were painful. “You make me want to throttle you as much as you make me want to take you to my bed and make love to you until we’re both too spent to move.” He found the catch in her breathing to be unbelievably erotic. His eyes flew unbidden to the rise and fall of her swelling décolletage.
