The Tattooed Duke Read Free Page A

turquoise water lapping around her hips. She was breathtaking, and it was some vile mistake that his idiot cousin Basil should be able to look at such raw beauty.
    Out of the corner of his eye Wycliff saw the little maid’s cheeks turn pink. He’d forgotten how adorably prudish and modest English women could be.
    Wycliff took the sheet away from Basil, and the other sketches, “For all your talk of civilized behavior in England, it seems quite uncivilized to sort through a man’s personal papers.”
    “Indeed, indeed. I say, my apologies. One just has such a curiosity for all things exotic. You’ll have to join me at my club, cousin, and tell my friends of your travels,” Basil offered. Wycliff muttered something like agreement, even though he had no desire to sit around a stuffy old club with stuffy old men.
    Finally, after much ado, Basil was gone and he was alone with the maid. She curtsied awkwardly before him, murmured “Your Grace” and asked if there was anything she could provide him with. All with that little pink mouth of hers. Wicked thoughts crossed his mind, but he would not give voice to those, even though it would be such a typical Wicked Wycliff thing to do.
    “If you can, I’d like that hour of my life back,” he said frankly.
    “If I had the ability to turn back time, I’d have no need of your wages,” she replied tartly as she gathered up the tea things. It ought to have been a simple affair, but china cups clattered against sauces and silver spoons clinked across the tray and she spilled the milk. She also swore under her breath, which delighted him. She must have met Harlan already, he thought, or had some unsavory past of her own.
    Thus far this little maid with the sea blue eyes and salty language was the only thing of interest in England.
    “What is your name?” he asked.
    She hesitated before answering. “Eliza.”
    With her arms laden with the tea tray, she managed a short, awkward curtsey on her way out, treating him to a splendid view of her backside, again.
    Once she was gone, he pulled the key from the leather cord he wore around his neck and used it to unlock and open the door leading from the library to a room otherwise cut off from the rest of the house. It was here that he kept those things he wished no one to see. Not yet.

Chapter 3
     
    In Which the Nudity Is His Grace’s
     
    Later that day, dusk
     
    E liza stood outside the door to His Grace’s bedchamber, summoning the gumption to walk in unannounced while His Grace was in a bath. Naked. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen a naked man before. She wasn’t some sheltered missish thing.
    The protocol for a situation like this eluded her: a naked duke, in the bath, without a drying cloth. She probably shouldn’t go in. Or should she? Having never grown up with servants, nor having been one herself, Eliza was learning everything about her new job the hard way.
    She had filled that damned bathtub—hauling heavy buckets of boiling water up three floors—with the help of another housemaid, Jenny. The task required moving fast enough to keep the water warm, but not so fast that they’d spill it. It had been excruciating. The duke had better enjoy his damned bath.
    In Eliza’s haste and inexperience, she had forgotten to leave a drying cloth. She did not yet know if he was the type to roar and holler in anger, and she did not care to find out, because he was an imposing, intimidating hulk of a man and because she was the type to roar and holler back. That spelled trouble. That spelled fired, and she could not lose this position or her story for The London Weekly.
    Get the story . Get the story.
    Thus, she debated. Leave him without a drying cloth? Or interrupt?
    He hadn’t arrived with a valet, or hired one yet, which meant there was no one else to attend to him . . .
    Such was the life of a writer, undercover and in disguise. The things she did for Mr. Knightly, and for The Weekly ! If she had to go to such lengths