Not that his waking hours were any less painful when the minx now utterly consumed him. If he wasn’t mulling over her, he was frantically trying to find any diversion that might stop him mulling, so far with minimal success. Not even his dogged quest to find the evidence to get her first conviction quashed, as he had solemnly promised her, diverted his attention that far from Portia, because ultimately it was her he was doing all that digging for. Her he was seeking justice and retribution for. Like a man possessed. Or obsessed. Or just pathetic.
Or likely all three.
Frankly, for the sake of his sanity, something tangible had to shift his dilemma one way or another, or he was going to go bloody stark staring mad. Because he needed a valid reason to either forgive her or forget her. To want her or want her gone. To love her or loathe her. Where his tumultuous feelings for Portia were concerned, there really couldn’t be an in-between.
Which all rather suggested that just a quick, cursory glance into this battered and well-loved box was the answer. And was invading her privacy a little a crime when she had told him such a pack of lies that he didn’t know which, if any, of her words he could actually trust?
Because Barkington and Snifferson were currently staring at him with the same intensity as he was staring at her box, he deferred to them. “What do I do, boys?” He tapped the offending wood with his toe. “Should I open it or not?”
Snifferson sniffed it, then resumed staring at Leo, perplexed, but when Barkington barked that felt like a permission. Before remorse set in as it inevitably would, he lifted the chest onto his desk, winced at the enormous rush of guilt that flooded him, but still flipped the lid.
He only gave the contents a cursory glance, simply to ascertain that they were indeed hers and that they were still in there. That wasn’t a violation of her privacy, was it? It was diligence.
Surely?
He leaned over, ensuring his hands were firmly clamped behind his back in case looking became touching, when touching crossed the line.
Inside was, unsurprisingly, stuffed with papers all written in Portia’s bold and flamboyant hand. Essays that smelled unsettlingly of her perfume; each folded into a neat rectangle so none of her precious arguments became separated but making them impossible to surreptitiously read.
Apart from one that he noticed had been stuffed down the side. The only one that wasn’t folded closed.
He twisted his head to attempt to read it and that was when he saw the underlined question at the top:Is it just the dimples or is it more?
Bloody hell!She’d written an essay about him! Leo knew that without a shadow of a doubt as he was now a bit of an expert on her distinctive writing style after he had spent hours and hours since their nuptials poring through every back issue of that damned newspaper that he could get his hands on. Whether she was the incognito K Pendle the editor or the P Kendall who had been a bold and brazen regular contributor over the last few years, she still wrote with a clever combination of pith and wit. Always starting with a question and then answering it with Portia-esque aplomb. Her arguments well researched, reasoned, and flawlessly convincing—just as they were when she vocalized them.
But what conclusions had his clever wife come to about him?
Rightly or wrongly—most definitely wrongly—he had to know and snatched the essay up.
Two weeks ago, if you would have asked me if there could possibly be anything redeeming about a duke, even a particularly handsome one, I would have emphatically said no. For dukes, as a breed, are an entitled and privileged lot who are so out of touch with those beneath them that it would bepractically impossible for someone with such strong reforming ideals as mine to even find anything to like, let alone admire. That, of course, was before I collided with the Duke of Dimples. A charming, liberal-minded man with such an easy manner, twinkling blue eyes, and the most disarming smile that I have ever seen. But is it just his dimples that have turned my usually sensible head, or is there more to him that calls to me than his obvious attractiveness?
To answer that properly, I must first and most reluctantly discuss those distracting dimples…
The light knock on the door had him guiltily jumping out of his skin.
“Leo?” The sound of Portia’s voice made him stuff her essay back into the box and shut the lid. “Sorry to disturb you but you have a visitor.”
He flung himself into his chair, pushed the box to the furthest edge of his desk and yanked open a ledger in a pathetic attempt to look consumed with something other than her. “What visitor?”
She swung the door open to reveal M’Lady Whiskers hanging from the doorknob and smiled. “Her worshipfulness couldn’t get in.”
He smiled too, widely, so that his distracting dimples showed, as the imperious Persian dropped to the floor and sauntered in as if she owned the place. She gave Barkington her customary hiss, leaped up onto his desk, then promptly curled into a ball right on the ledger he had pretended to be reading.
“Don’t mind me, M’Lady. I was only working. Your sleep is so much more important.”
“Good luck moving her now.” In the spirit of the awkward truce they had fallen into, Portia did not cross the threshold of his study and instead leaned against the doorframe. “She’s pretty much taken over my bed and if I try to reclaim any more than the sliver of the mattress she has deigned to leave me, she can be quite rude about it.”
“To be fair to M’Lady, she had declared that room hers long before you moved into it and if she’s granted you a sliver then she has clearly agreed to tolerate you—which is a rare honor indeed. Trust me, Emilia isn’t allowed anywhere on the sofa if the cat is on it, and she despises Abigail so much since the incident with the bird that she’s taken to hissing at her whenever they collide. But M’Lady adores me.” To prove that, he scratched the spot under the Persian’s ears and she immediately vibrated loudly as she purred. “I think it’s because she cannot resist a man with dimples.” Like the pathetic fool he was, he then grinned some more in the vain hope that they still worked their magic on his reluctant wife.
“Or maybe it’s just because you are a man and your cat dislikes all women? Perhaps she sees us all as rivals for your affection? Or perhaps she’s just nasty to everyone, irrespective of their sex, and it is only you that she tolerates?” She pushed herself from the frame. “I shall leave you to…” That was when she noticed the box on his desk and blinked, first in disbelief and then in wariness. “Is that my…”
“It is.”
She rushed forward, went to touch it, and then stopped herself. “Can I…?”
“Of course. It is yours, after all.”
The beaming smile she offered him then took his breath away. “Did you get it back for me?”
