“Impossible. I am far too handsome to be predictable.” Frederick reached for his coat, shrugging into it with careless grace. “Besides, she is more fun than I expected.”
Rowan gave him a dry look. “A ringing endorsement.”
“It is, from me.” Frederick’s smile flickered, then softened. “Go home, Rowan.”
“I intend to.”
“And when you arrive, try not to punish your wife for being able to see what the rest of us pretend not to.”
Rowan’s eyes narrowed, but Frederick was already turning toward the door, whistling as though he had not just stepped too near a wound.
“You cannot mean to keep us cooped up in here forever.”
Rowan looked up from his letter. The room was thick with the scent of ink and leather, but beneath it was the dark, clean warmth of him, a scent that settled in her lungs and made the simple act of standing before his desk feel like a transgression.
“Good morning to you as well, Duchess,” he said.
Emmeline clasped her hands before her and held his gaze. “It was good when it began. It has since suffered from confinement.”
His brow shifted. “Confinement?”
“Yes.”
“You live in a house with forty rooms, three gardens, an orchard, a stable, and a library.”
“And yet all of them belong to the same cage.”
Rowan’s face stilled.
His gray eyes held hers across the desk, unreadable and far too searching, and Emmeline felt her pulse begin its foolish climb. She had come here with a practical purpose. A simple one. She would ask to visit the village, insist if required, and leave before the room could become charged.
But he was looking at her now, and her body reacted.
She remembered his nearness. The heat of his breath against her mouth. The low scrape of his voice when he had told her to be careful. She hated that the memory moved through her, warming her skin beneath her gown until even the lace at her wrists felt too tight.
Rowan set the letter aside, aligning its edge with the others on his desk before lifting his eyes to her. “You wish to go somewhere?”
Emmeline held her hands still at her waist, though her fingers wanted to twist together. “I wish to go into the village.”
“No.”
The refusal came so quickly that her lips parted. “No?”
Rowan leaned back slightly in his chair, one broad hand still resting near the abandoned letter. “No.”
A small, incredulous breath escaped her before she could stop it. She stepped closer to the desk, and lifted her chin. “Do you decide against all requests before hearing them fully, or only mine?”
His mouth remained stern, but a faint line appeared beside it. “Usually only yours.”
Her breath caught on something dangerously close to laughter. She lowered her gaze for half a second to steady herself and found that it was worse, because his strong hands rested on the desk, one thumb darkened faintly with ink.
She remembered how those fingers had closed around her elbow, how heat had traveled from that point of contact through her entire body, and suddenly she had to look back at his face before her thoughts betrayed her completely.
“I am suffocating,” she said. “And before you list the number of rooms again, I am not speaking of space.”
“I understood you.”
“Then you understand why I wish to see the village.”
