She peered and noted that the top sheet of his book began with the words “Chapter 4.” It appeared to be comprised of about five sentences, all of which had been violently scratched out, alongside which were a little drawing of a sailing ship and another of a tiny horse. She was gratified to see that this one had a fluffier tail.
Beneath this he’d drawn three gentle upward arcs. Perhaps he’d been testing a new ink?
“It was kind of you to donate two hundred pounds to the Society for the Protection of the Sussex Poor, Your Grace,” she said.
“I suppose it was,” he said, politely. “It was kind of Madame LeCroix to reminisce about her relationship to you.” He paused. “And yours to champagne.”
She regarded him coolly.
Kind, but also a bit of a bastard. How she wished someone would reminisce thusly to the newspaper about the Duke of Valkirk.
“I suppose it was,” she said, carefully.
A smile flickered over his lips. “Shall we review what you’ve learned since yesterday, to ascertain her assessment of your . . . how did Madame LeCroix describe it? Sense of responsibility?”
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.
He pulled the foolscap he’d given to her yesterday toward him, and swiftly, crisply, tested her on the words by first reading the English and demanding the Italian. Then reading Italian in a different order and demanding the English versions.
She didn’t miss a one.
“Well done, Miss Wylde.”
The faint surprise he’d inflected that with set her teeth on edge. But she could not deny that hearing these words from the most irritatingly exacting man in the world was gratifying.
“Grazie, Your Grace.”
“Do you think you can handle more vocabulary words this time? I’ll send you away with a much longer list and an assignment of, oh, say, fifteen to twenty sentences. How did Madame LeCroix put it? If a girl has plenty of work, she won’t have time to get into mischief.”
Normally she enjoyed a good piss-taking but was disinclined to let him know. She found herself instead coolly staring again, as if in so doing she had a hope of putting him in his place. The silence unfortunately allowed her to note, once more, that the contours of his face were fascinating. So distinctive and implacably fierce in repose. Those heavy brows. The mouth that bordered on sensual above that hard chin.
“Well done on memorizing the article, Your Grace. May I commend you on your parroting skills.”
A swift little smile flashed again. “Before we discuss which categories of words you ought to take away for your next lesson, was there an Italian phrase you’ve overheard that you’d like translated, or would you like to know how to say a specific phrase in Italian?”
“Ah, yes. I’d like to know what this means, Your Grace. It sounds like this: ‘voglio scoparti.’”
His eyes flew wide.
His entire body went as rigid as the mast of a ship.
Then his face went slowly—and what seemed like irrevocably—hard.
Oh God. Terrifying!
“Miss Wylde,” he said icily. “I cannot tell if you are . . . is this flirting? . . . in some—well, I can only call it astounding—way, or if you’re trying to disconcert me. Both are inadvisable, and arguably, impossible.”
“Oh, no. Oh, dear. I’m not! You should see your face . . . your expression . . . oh, it’s a bad one, isn’t it?”
She brought her hands to her face, then deliberately forced them down and folded them tightly together in her lap and regarded him anxiously.
His expression hovered somewhere between scalding indignation, exasperation, and rank astonishment.
Still, her need to know what it meant far outweighed the mortification. He was never going to like her; she would need to get used to not caring. And now she really needed to know what that phrase meant.
He sighed heavily. “Since virtue demands I cannot say the English version aloud . . .”
He dunked his quill, scrawled something on the foolscap, and pushed it across to her.
She read it and she could feel herself going pink.
Her voice seemed to have been entirely burned away. She would never speak again from mortification.
She could not believe she had actually said this aloud to a duke.
She could not believe a duke had scrawled it on a piece of foolscap and passed it to her.
A silence ensued, during which she could feel his eyes boring into her lowered head.
She finally mustered the nerve to lift her face again.
To find his expression ever-so-slightly less censoriousness, but no less exasperated. The cold outrage had shifted to something more curious. Though it was hardly sympathetic.
“Miss Wylde . . . do men actually speak to you that way?”
She cleared her throat. “Not all of them. I should say most of the Italian performers I meet are perfect gentlemen. But I’m afraid more than a few have. I’ve heard it several times. A stagehand, once. Another time, a man in the chorus. A tenor with whom I once sang. They slip it in.”
His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
“Into conversation!” she added hurriedly, aghast. “I’ve heard it more than once, and something about the inflection has always made me suspicious. They slip it in between other phrases, doubtless to . . . amuse themselves at my expense.”
His eyebrows remained in scowl position, and he assessed her with what she was beginning to think of as the subaltern glare. It would have withered a weaker person, and she supposed he’d cultivated it for that purpose.
Though gradually, before her eyes, she watched his expression become more thoughtful.
“Where is your father?”
She stared at him. It was the last question she’d been expecting.
“My father died when I was fourteen years old.”
“Your . . . husband?”
“I haven’t a husband.”
And then she took his point. Men were the solution to women’s problems as often as they were women’s problems.
He tapped his quill thoughtfully, pressed his lips together. She supposed he thought women were bound to learn filthy words if they hadn’t men in their lives to protect them.
“Astute of you to notice what those . . . men . . . were doing with that phrase.”
Her temper stirred. “Are you aware that when you see fit to appreciate a quality of mine, you inflect it with surprise? It’s not as flattering as you might think, Your Grace.”
His eyes widened in fleeting outrage.
A tense tick or two of silence ensued. And then his expression eased.
He gave a short nod. “Point taken, Miss Wylde.”
“Thank you,” she said graciously. Relieved.
After another moment of studying her, he gestured to the filthy little phrase he’d written. “Non parlarmi in quel modo,” he said slowly and flatly. Almost menacingly.
She thought about it. “Don’t speak to me that way,” she hazarded.
There was a little pause. “Yes.”
She was almost amused, and rather touched that he’d clearly taken pains not to sound surprised. Her confidence began to recover, along with a little of her cheer.
“It’s certainly convincing the way you say it, Your Grace. My hackles fair stood up.”
“I was a general. Everything I said was meant to be convincing. Hackle-raising was my forte.”