Page 111 of The Boxing Baroness

She narrowed her eyes at him and then deliberately pulled her shirt over her head.

A gentleman would look away.

Sin wasn’t so sure of that.

Besides, he didn’t care what some theoretical man who wasn’t there would do.

She smirked at him as she toed off her boots.

Sin’s greedy eyes marauded over her lean, muscular body as lecherously as the men he’d just warned her about.

“Are you going to join me?” she taunted.

He opened his mouth to tell her he’d washed earlier and then shut it. What sort of idiot was he? A woman was asking him to bathe with her. And not just any woman—but a prickly, combative, gorgeous woman like Marianne.

Marianne herself, in point of fact.

Sin unbuttoned his coat.

* * *

Marianne’s heart threatened to pound out of her chest as she pushed down her buckskins.

The duke’s jaw tightened—the only sign that he was looking at a naked woman.

She should probably be offended by the lack of expression on his face, but the bulge in his breeches assured her he was not unmoved.

She’d undressed in front of countless people during her time in the circus, and not only females. Far too often male employees wandered in and out of the dressing rooms in the course of their work. And she’d stood in front of howling, screaming hordes of men once a week, her thin muslin dresses plastered to her body with sweat. Normally, being naked in front of somebody did not bother her in the least.

But then this wasn’t somebody. This was the Duke of Staunton.

As badly as she wanted to cover herself back up, she forced herself to move casually, snatching a quick glimpse at the duke as she sauntered boldly toward the water.

She dipped a toe in the pool and winced; it felt far colder than it had that afternoon.

Marianne swallowed and then began to submerge one foot, hoping a gradual immersion would be less shocking.

It wasn’t.

“Coward,” he taunted. “You’ll be all night at that rate.”

She turned just as he pulled off his shirt, the rest of him gloriously naked.

And hard.

Marianne’s eyes settled on his erection. No, her memory had not exaggerated; he was as beautiful and big as she remembered.

He freed his head and tossed the shirt onto the pile of clothes.

And then he came toward her. He should have looked ridiculous with that prodigious pole bouncing up and down in front of him, but Marianne had never seen anything even half so erotic in her life.

His eyelids were at half-mast and his lips were compressed in a forbidding line.

He stopped walking only when the hot, satiny head of his cock pushed against her stomach. And then his arms slid around her, and he captured her mouth.

What happened next probably wouldn’t be called kissing. It was a savage joining, a clash of wills, a battle for supremacy. Marianne couldn’t seem to get close enough to him, even though she was halfway up his body, a squirrel to his tree.

He came up for air but kept her crushed to his chest.