Page 51 of The Duchess Games

“Is that all?” he asked, surprised.

“It might remind the other revenue men that you trust me.”

Not to mention Juro and the other lads. They’d know she had connections. And the signet ring she had yet to steal.

Best of all, Juro would know he hadn’t gotten to her.

“It’s a bit political of me,” she admitted.

“I’m in the House of Lords,” he returned. “This is downright quaint when it comes to politics.”

She wasn’t entirely sure she liked being called quaint.

But then he held his arm out to her, like a proper gentleman escorting a lady through Hyde Park. “If we’re going to do this,” he said. “We do it properly.”

She curled her hand at the crook of his elbow and tried not to read too much into the warmth and comfort that went through her at the contact. He made her feel both safe and desperately wicked. No one else had ever been able to do that.

They reached the village proper before she could make an utter cake of herself.

The villagers watched them as they passed, eyebrows raised, whispers passing back and forth. They’d be talking about this for weeks. Months. The day the duke walked through Little Crumpet with Cat on his arm.

“I suppose a kiss on the hand would be overdoing it?” Callum murmured.

“For Little Crumpet?” And from a duke? “Yes.”

“Pity.” She blinked at him. He didn’t look her way, but his voice dropped. “Just as well, as that’s not where I want to kiss you again.”

Her head emptied. Just… emptied. No thoughts, no worries, no plans. Just a rush of want, heat racing up her thighs.

She cleared her throat. Twice.

She couldn’t think of a thing to say that wasn’t please and now and again.

She was almost grateful when Percival shattered the moment by trying to squeeze his enormous body between them. His tail wagged fiercely, like a whip. He jostled them both and then trotted away to be chased by three of the children. They hollered with laughter.

One of the merchants hurried out of his house to greet the duke. The baker offered a basket of crumpets. When they reached the pub, Cat told Callum about the day Ambrose found Maggie asleep, fully naked, on the roof.

“I remember The Laughing Mermaid.”

“You do?”

“Does Ambrose’s brother still run it?”

She nodded. “He does, yes.”

“I’ve never been so drunk as the night Ambrose fed me ale,” Callum said, nearly smiling. He was different here, the line of his shoulders was less hard, his posture less exquisite. He looked human.

Granny Goodwin was the first to notice, sitting across the road on her stoop. Her shawl was the gray of a storm at twilight. “Well, aren’t you a slice of cake?”

Cat couldn’t help the startled laugh that burst from her. “Granny, did you just call a duke cake?”

“So I did,” Granny chortled. The smoke from her pipe wreathed her head like pale flowers. “What’s he going to do about it, eh?”

Callum turned and looked down his perfect nose for one silent moment.

Cat held her breath.

She needn’t have worried. She knew him to be sharp and cutting, to be impatient with pretense, but never cruel. He appreciated forthrightness. That much hadn’t changed. Would likely never change and she knew that now, having seen the people that flocked to him, full of demands and flattery and artifice. That Callum dismissed them with an icy flick of an eyebrow.