Victoria handed Lord Westley her diaphanous lace kerchief with which he mopped her sneeze from his visage. When the task was completed he did not appear pleased. Amber eyes flashed beneath stern brows and she winced, wishing that there was some way that she could manoeuvre back under the desk, sight unseen, although that hardly seemed likely given that she had already sneezed all over his face.

"Umm... Je suis desolee," Victoria uttered hopefully.

"What?" Lord Westley roared.

"I said I'm sorry," Victoria balked as he squeezed her shoulders in a vice grip. "Now, please release me."

Anthony stepped away instantly and scowled. "What are you doing here Miss Hastings? Shouldn't you be in the ballroom with all your friends?"

Victoria extricated herself from the furniture and wound her way around to place the desk solidly between them. "There are two problems with that assertion. One is that you assume I am wanted in the ballroom and secondly you imagine that I have friends."

The dukes eyes widened. "I beg your pardon."

Victoria shrugged. "You heard me, your grace."

Anthony rubbed the back of his neck, unsure of how to respond. The last thing that he expected to see in his adopted father's study was Miss Victoria Hastings. Three years ago she was most horridly abused by a friend of her family and had never truly recovered. For at least a year she was the sole provider of grist for the gossip mill and then she was shunned for the two after that. He only saw her on the brief occasions that he returned from the Orient, and even then she was not often to be seen in the ballrooms. Now he knew why, the little stowaway was frequenting libraries all across London.

Victoria could see the duke struggle for the right words to complement the situation and quickly deflected any oncoming pity. "Do not trouble yourself on my account, your Grace. I was just about to leave. Sorry to have encroached upon your time."

She headed swiftly for the door, hoping to brush off some of the dust in the hallway before she was seen. After so many years of whispered accusations and hushed gossipmongers as she walked by, Victoria knew how to hold her head high despite the swirling void of mortification she harboured internally. She tried not to let the scent of his heated flesh and musky cologne distract her but as her hand seized the brass doorknob she slanted her eyes over her left shoulder for one last peep.

He had leaned back against the edge of his desk with palms laid out flat on either side. His shirt was still open to the waist, revealing a hard, muscled chest that glistened under the lamplight like ripples of water in the sun. Russet suspenders dangled loose about his thighs encased in tan breeches that clung to his legs in a mockery of the purpose of pants. Victoria didn't exactly swoon but she did release a sound from her throat that was part way between a moan and a sigh. The duke's eyes glinted like emerald shards and she shut her disloyal mouth.

"Un momento, por favour," Lord Westley murmured in the dark.

"Pardon," Victoria frowned.

The duke stood up with slow deliberation and strode towards her. "It's Spanish. Have you not yet expanded your linguistics thus far? Surely you understand me."

"Si," she answered as her eyes narrowed to slits. What was he playing at?

"Can I call upon you tomorrow morning?" he asked with brandy smoothing the rough thread of his voice.

"Whatever for?" Victoria squawked and gripped the edge of the doorframe.

The duke's lips tilted ever so slightly at one corner. "Because it would amuse me."

Victoria choked on her own gasp. "Are you mad?"

Anthony raised a brow. "As mad as a woman who hides underneath desks at a ballroom."

For the first time in many years Victoria saw the old familiar glint of mischief in his eyes. However, she was not the girl that she used to be and mischief no longer sat well with her. If she had learnt that lesson long ago she would not have been in the predicament that she currently found herself in. Mischief was not a friend of the fairer sex.

Victoria closed the door firmly against the beat of the music and the blistering light and turned back to the duke at hand. "I would kindly ask you not to visit me on the morrow, Lord Westley."

"Why ever not?" he queried politely.

She strode towards him purposefully. "Because, my lord, it would give certain members of the ton... ideas."

Anthony leaned back on his desk and wondered why he hadn't done this years ago. Victoria had always been an interesting debutant and she was turning out to be an even more interesting spinster. She may have dressed in more demure shades of late but at her heart she still burned with the same fire as her youth. Consumed by his own affairs, he had forgotten the pleasant company that Victoria had provided amidst the sprawling ineptitude of the ton. She had a quick wit and an engaging disposition, and time had done nothing to damper its spark. He watched as the firelight pricked at her skin like facets of a diamond and he was reminded of yet another reason to return to the use of her old nickname.

"Pray tell me, what kind of ideas, Diamond?"

"Ugh, don't play that game with me!" She jabbed him in the chest with a long finger, and immediately recoiled as flesh touched flesh.

He almost grabbed her hand as it contacted his body but resisted the foolish urge. It turned out to be the correct move, since she turned brusquely back to the door with a growl.

"Leaving so soon?" he could hardly hide the smile from his voice.

She grabbed for the bronze door handle and let loose a smothered curse. "If you don't mind, your grace, the last time I was found in such intimate quarters with a man it destroyed my reputation. So I will be on my way."

Victoria pulled at the door but it refused to budge. She stared pointedly at the handle and twisted- no problem there. She pulled again and the door sat firmly with its frame. Hmm. She inspected the outer portion of the lock then cast her eyes upwards and found a masculine palm leaning heavily against the solid oak above her head. With a start she became shockingly aware of the heat of his body at her back. She had neither heard nor felt his presence over the anger boiling over in her heart and spilling into her veins.

"Let me pass," she ordered. The similarity of her present situation to her past was not lost on her, but instead of fear something like excitement crashed at her pulses.

"Of course, you are free to go but I was hoping I could detain you just long enough to have you answer but one question, Diamond?"

Victoria felt the heat of his chest pour through the lace at the back of her dress and the warmth of his voice misted at her neck with the scent of his musky cologne. She leaned her forehead against the grain of the door succumbing to the barrage on her senses. "What do you want, Anthony?"

"A kiss."

"What?!" She turned sharply smacking her head against the solid wood.

"Would you give me a kiss?"

She rubbed furiously at her forehead and stared at him in the dim light. He looked serious, and he certainly sounded serious, but never in all the years that she knew Lord Anthony Westley did he show even a smidgen of interest in her. She squinted against the dull pain throbbing from her left temple and scrutinised his profile. There was the same strong jaw, the Grecian straight nose and wide brow. However, this time there was a hint of passion hidden by innocuous hooded lids. "What are you playing at?" she whispered.

Lord Westley placed his other hand against the door to capture her in the centre with his body. He had spent years learning how women responded to him in bed and in the ballroom, and used those artful lessons on his spinster. He leaned into her with one salient purpose. It wasn't a hug. No. Hugs involved arms and hands; this was a whole body moving towards another slowly, meaningfully with measured pace. When the hard planes of his chest brushed against her bodice he paused and met her eyes with a jaguars determined crawl. "Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like?"

Before she could become affronted he continued, silencing her opposition once more.

"It has just dawned on me that I have known you for the better part of my life and it has taken until this day, this moment for me to consider that I have not kissed you. And now I am wondering why we have let all that time pass without contemplating the possibilities."

She stared into the Duke of Westley's honeysuckle eyes and tried to blame the hitch in her breath on the binding laces of her corset. There was no way she was going to admit that she had spent countless hours imagining what it would be like to kiss him, touch him or have him look at her the way he was currently looking. So, instead of opening her mouth and letting the aching truth of her loneliness escape, she did what young women were supposed to in such situations and hissed with effrontery. "How can you say such things to a woman, Lord Westley! That is most unchivalrous."

The duke leaned in closer, dipping his head into the curve of her neck and drank in the floral scent of her skin. "Now who is the one playing games, Diamond? You were never the kind of woman to play coy, do not start now."

Victoria took a shaky breath and locked her knees in place lest they thought of giving way. She was not a green girl of sixteen to be blown over by a randy male. She was a woman... a woman in a darkened study with handsome duke pressed to her breast and the dusty smell of old books lingering in the air that was an aphrodisiac to only those who truly loved to read.

Victoria parried with anger as her only defence. She was tired of the ton treating her as used goods, and now the only man that ever intrigued her was pushing his advantage. It would not do. She would not be handled as a despoiled virgin. "Step back Your Grace and kindly refrain from the familiarity of touching."

The duke was many things, but a cad was not one of them. He heard the steel in her reprimand and lifted himself away from her with ease. He stepped back silently and waited for her to divulge whatever was on her mind. Then he would kiss her, or more importantly she would kiss him... if he played his cards correctly.

The cool air rushed between them and Victoria pretended not to notice. "I don't know what you have heard about me, but I can assure you that I do not comport myself by running around and kissing men in shadowed corridors. Despite what Andrew may have-."

"Andrew was a fool," he cut her off sharply and the ferocity in his intonation gave her pause.

"Nevertheless," she continued at length, "I would not have you under the impression that I am easy prey."

Anthony felt irritation quicken at his fingertips like the scraping touch of an archers bow ready to fire. He took a steadying breath before responding with a scoff. "I am surprised that you think so little of me. Don't you know me at all?"

Victoria's eyebrows drew together in consternation. "I do not know you, not anymore. It has been years since you have truly lived in London, and more still since you and I have conversed."

The duke drew his shirt closed and secured the lowest button with deft fingers. Victoria tried not to mourn the steady progressive loss of bronzed flesh but it was a difficult task.

"Perhaps, you are correct Miss Hastings," the duke mused with tilted head as he watched her hover at the doorway. "However, I think there is a lot of the 'old' you that I still see lurking under your newly found prim propriety. I always admired that fire in your eyes that you have spent the last three years trying to stamp out. From memory, you were never one to run from a challenge when a gauntlet was thrown, and yet now...," he trailed off poignantly.

"You are trying to bait me, your Grace, and it won't work. You assume that I am remotely interested in kissing you."

Anthony raised both brows and ceased his redressing, leaving a glimpse of suntanned skin between lapels of white. "If I have misread your motives then I am sincerely sorry, perhaps they were clouded by my own."

Victoria's heart skipped a beat. Where was that apothecary's book she had found last summer on medicines for the arrhythmic heart? Was it Foxglove she needed or the Hawthorn plant?

"Forgetting the current sensual heat between us," he continued, "forgetting that tremor of anticipation that I felt shudder through you when you were pressed so intimately betwixt me and that door, what about several years ago?"

"What about it?" Victoria throat hitched with memories.

"The woman you have grown into now may no longer find a man she barely knows appealing. But, a long time ago when we were both very different people, untouched by sadness or scandal, you looked at me like a girl who perhaps fancied herself a little in love."

Victoria clenched her jaw at the love sick look she had so often caught in her reflection. There was no denying that her youth had been spent pining for the most handsome duke in London. "So what if I did? That is all in the past." She spat the words forcefully hoping to make them true.

"True," he acknowledged with a nod. "But wouldn't that girl somewhere in you like the chance to be heard? In my opinion girlish dreams should always be given a chance to be realised. Come now, Diamond, there is no one here but you and me." The Duke of Westley lifted his arms open wide and it was an image to make women weep. The still night had picked up a breeze with notes of jasmine blossoms that coiled through the open window. It blew at the tails of his shirt, curling through his ebony hair like the grasping hands of a lover. The light once again caught his eyes and this time they glinted with flecks of amber and passion.

He lowered his arms and shook his head in reminiscence. "... but maybe I was mistaken. Maybe you were never the woman I thought you to be, n'est pas?"

Victoria knew what he was doing and despite herself, his words crawled beneath her skin like a disease. The passing of years had not changed the effect he had on her and fight it as she did, he had the power to poison all pragmatic thought. From amber eyes to hessian boots he had thrown her heart into the fire and left her there to burn. She told herself to be strong, to stop yearning but her fingers still twitched whenever he entered the room, her feet inched traitorously towards him and she hated herself for it. But he was wrong, she was not the same young debutante who had waited for his hand and craved for his heart only to receive neither. She was no longer that girl, she was a woman, a spinster and she would not wait a moment more.

Victoria crossed the room with a swiftness that belied her soul. Stepping between his splayed legs, she threw herself at his body and pressed the lush curves of her silhouette into his. What she lacked in experience, she made up for in fervour. What were girlish dreams compared to a woman's fantasy?

Victoria wound her arms around his neck, revelling in the slide of flesh against flesh and lowered her lips to his. They were warm and firm and inviting. She licked at the corners of his mouth tasting the smoky remnants of aged whiskey like an adolescent's first taste of wine. She had wanted to kiss him since she first caught a glimpse of him across a stuffy ballroom when she was sixteen. For longer than she cared to remember, Lord Anthony Westley had consumed her heart's desire and try as she might, whether the toast of the ton or a sad spinster, he had not wanted her. But now, for no fathomable reason he was requesting a kiss, and she was resolved to give him such a meeting of lips that he would feel the heat of it burn him in the depths of winter. She pressed the plump curves of her mouth to his over and over, like a flint to stone until their connections sparked and ignited a flame of passionate yearning.

Victoria's hands quested beneath the open folds of his lapels, her nails finding the round muscled shoulders that bunched under her touch. Anger made her brazen as pinpricks turned to frenzied scrapes of skin across his broadened shoulders. The tang of blood was in the air and catching the scent like a shark she hungered for more. Her teeth sunk into his flesh and the metallic taste seeped across the bed of her tongue. No one was more surprised than she to discover that the once named Diamond of the ton was instead a rough and uncut gem, still earthy and wild.

Anthony accepted her embrace like a gift. Part of him did not dare to think she would surrender to his ploy; she had never been one to follow the marked path. But, she came to him as if he had drawn out the guiding line and proceeded to tear away every expectation with a single kiss. He half expected to feel nothing for her, but instead the softest sweep of lips made him ache. It was a novel feeling to be touched by a woman whom one also considered an old friend.

So he did not caress her. He did not touch her. He let her explore the planes of his face as one would a new land and he held her in place as she bit at his lower lip with wanton frustration. Her crescent nails scraped along his scalp and he decided that had finished playing the gentleman. He would bide his time no longer and opened his mouth, to draw in her tongue and drink deeply of the woman she had become.

A moan escaped her throat as he massaged her mouth with his own. It was a guttural sound, so abstract from the cool veneer that she liked to put forth and it called to something primal in him. She fought with him in the embrace as he always knew she would, reprimanding and taking pleasure as she deemed satisfactory. Anthony wondered why it had taken so long for him to proposition Miss Victoria Hastings, particularly when both her banter and her bottom were so delightfully appealing. He ran his hands down the slope of her back, lingering at the valley at its base, only to grip her derriere and pull it firmly into the crevice between his thighs.

No, he thought, uncurling his fingers in an attempt to release her.

This is madness. She may not be a maiden anymore but this is ridiculous. She deserves to wait.

Victoria rubbed the length of her body against his with the slow supine movements of a cat at rest in a shaft of sunlight.

Anthony tried not to think about his shaft.

Oh, bugger it, he thought throwing caution to the wind and reached for her once more. But, Victoria stepped out of his grasp as swiftly as she had stepped in and smoothly retreated to the exit for a final time. Before she shut the door she whispered between stained and swollen lips a parting that he was not likely to obey. "You have your answer, Your Grace. There will be no further need to wonder. Do not seek to visit me in the morning."

"Not a chance, Diamond. Not a chance," he warned the empty room.

A/N:

My eyes are burning from lack of sleep but I really wanted to get this chapter out to you. I have to go back to work in 4 hours so please ease my pain and give this chapter a vote and a comment. Hope you liked it (flaws and all).

Till next time ;)

.....what is Anthony going to do in the morning?