“Watercolors?”

“For the girls.”

“French?”

Anthony shook his head, bewildered as to where this line of conversation was heading.

“Ah ha!” she said triumphantly. “No French. I thought as much.” She offered him a dazzling smile. “I’ll have to adjust their schedule to make room for it. I will begin work on that immediately.” She turned and crossed to the door, talking as she went. “It should only take me a week or so to finish it, but I’ll put forth the best effort to get it done in a proper fashion.”

A week? To finish a schedule? “Thraxton, I don’t think you understand the importance of keeping the children on task. They have suffered from a lack of constraint and it is important to provide them with structure.”

She stopped at the door. “Greyley, there’s no need to be so oppressive.”

He blinked, unable to believe he’d just heard aright. “Oppressive?”

“Inflexible. Stodgy. Stiff. Stuffy.” She said the last word as if it tasted bad.

That hurt. “I’m sorry you find my company so objectionable,” he bit out. “But that does not change your duties. I will have that schedule on my desk by tomorrow, if you please.”

“A week.”

“Three days.”

“Done.” She regarded him with a pleased smile. “Was there anything else you needed to say? I really must change.”

Anthony didn’t like the way she eyed him, as if he were a bull and she a red flag. “Miss Thraxton, you may think this a facetious matter, but—”

“It is obviously important to you,” she said, still with that firm smile on her lips. “You’ll get your schedule, Greyley. In the meantime, you can work on governing your temper and your language.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but with a swish of that damnably seductive habit, she was gone.

It took Anthony a full moment to realize that he’d been dismissed. Dismissed, discounted, and disrespected. He closed his eyes and slowly, slowly counted to twenty, but still he was a jangled mass of frustration and something else. Something heady and hot. Something that increased his frustration to the boiling point. Something that felt suspiciously like disappointed desire.

He opened his eyes to discover that his hands were balled into fists. It was true—he desired Thraxton, wanted to feel her beneath him, wanted to taste her skin, wanted to dive beneath the trim line of her skirts and feel her moistness. His manhood quivered and stiffened as his vision filled with tight red curls and long, long white legs, of full rounded calves and delicately arched feet.

He shook his head, but the vision refused to leave. Instead it taunted him more. The legs curved, then parted—he moaned and dropped his head into his hands. God help him, but he hadn’t lusted this strongly over a woman since…well, since the untouchable Matilda, if truth be known.

Women had always been available to Anthony. Coming into his title at an early age, his fortune beyond respectable, he’d been pursued by hordes of matchmaking mothers and their avaricious daughters, all of whom managed to bore Anthony to tears.