“I shouldn’t like to be a general,” she mused. She gestured to the sheet of foolscap with her chin. “Men being how they are.”
“The loss is the military’s, Miss Wylde,” he said dryly. “I think that will be a useful phrase for you to know should you encounter that expression in conversation again. Would you like to repeat it to me?”
She took a breath, and squared her shoulders, and lowered her voice an octave. “Non parlarmi in quel modo.”
It was a creditably menacing imitation of him, repeated with phonetic flawlessness.
Amazement and something like pure hilarity momentarily flared in his face.
“Well,” he said finally. “You certainly gave me second thoughts about speaking to you disrespectfully.”
“I think you’re humoring me, which seems unlike you.”
He snorted. “Why don’t you write that phrase now, Miss Wylde, so you won’t forget it.”
She dipped her quill and in her careful, neat hand began to copy what he’d written. And then she paused. “Should I be more polite about it when I use it? Perhaps add a ‘please’?”
“Do you think you ought to be polite about it, Miss Wylde?”
“If I thought I could get away with it, I would tell them in no uncertain terms where they could put their rude suggestion. And the day I’m able to do that freely will be the day they won’t dare to say it. So I suppose the issue is moot.”
He cast his eyes up to the ceiling in thought. “In that case, Ti chiedo di parlarmi con rispetto. I ask that you speak to me with respect.”
He retrieved the foolscap from her, wrote the phrase swiftly, then pushed it back to her.
“I believe ‘rispetto’—respect—will be a useful word for you to know and use. And a useful thing to demand in such circumstances . . . assuming, of course, ‘rispetto’ is what you want when someone says those words to you.”
She went rigid.
A surge of temper sent heat rushing into her cheeks. She knew, and he knew, what had been written about her in the newspapers. He had a fixed notion of who she was, and the injustice of it scalded.
She clamped her teeth together as she wrote. She could sense his eyes on her, and the fierce tick of his mind. He was as consequential as a bloody planet, sitting there.
She finished and looked up, to find him watching her.
“I’d like to make something clear, Miss Wylde. I—and the other gentlemen in residence here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and gentlemen in general—do not ever and would not ever speak about or to women that way, either in the smoking room or in any other social context.”
Which was lovely to hear, of course. Perhaps he meant it to be reassuring. But the underlying implication was that the contexts in which she moved were at fault. That if these words were being said in her presence, then the men in question were surely not gentlemen.
And then what did that make her? Spirited, she supposed.
She already knew what he thought that made her.
“It’s very gratifying to hear that you don’t seem to have any difficulty respecting women, Your Grace,” she said pleasantly. “Or perhaps your respect is reserved to a type of woman?”
There was a pause.
“Women are people, Miss Wylde. All people deserve and are accorded respect until they prove they do not deserve it. It’s a simple rule, really.” He issued these words with a sort of patient, maddening certainty. As though they ought to have been self-evident but he was unsurprised she didn’t know it.
“How might someone lose your respect?”
His mouth curved slightly.
He knew precisely what she was asking. Because the splinter, as it were, had not yet been pulled entirely out of their association. Something remained unsaid.
Her heart began to jab at her breastbone. She realized she was afraid of the answer. But suddenly she could not endure another day without it.
“If one has ever needed to tell a soldier’s mother that he was killed in battle, Miss Wylde, they would perhaps lose all respect for frivolous, careless people who engage in thoughtless, reckless activities that endanger their lives and the lives of others.”
The words were elegantly drawled at first, but they gradually grew more taut until the last few fair glittered with ice.
His composure did not so much as shift a hair. But she heard it. It was a sort of futile fury at fate itself, at deaths not even he could have prevented, even with all of his brilliant rules and strategies. It was pain as much as it was anger. She could feel it echoing in the pit of her stomach.
It only surprised her in that she would not have guessed at it. She sat with this realization a moment.
And there they had it.
She breathed in. Breathed out. Mustering her nerve.
“I would like to ask a question, Your Grace.”
“Very well,” he said easily.
“What is your understanding of the . . . events . . . that led to my being here at The Grand Palace on the Thames?”
“That your two jealous lovers fought over you while you were present, a duel challenge was issued, the duel was fought on the spot, and a promising young man was nearly killed.”
He delivered this with brutal, unvarnished calm.
She was still, but her cheeks were hot. “‘Lovers.’ Plural. That word certainly tripped off your tongue, Your Grace.” She said it somewhat bitterly.
“May I refer you to an earlier conversation wherein I shared with you that it’s nigh on impossible to shock or offend me.”
“Irritate you, on the other hand . . .”
She reviewed his expression and decided it was wiser not to finish that sentence.
“I should like to say that I don’t owe you an explanation of what truly transpired that night. Would you agree?”
“I cannot disagree.”
“But I swear to you that neither one of those men was my lover.”
He tapped his quill slowly. Tap. Tap. Tap. Apart from a single arched brow, his expression did not change. He waited.
“. . . at . . . the time,” she expounded, a little more quietly.
Two cynical dents appeared at the corners of his mouth. This, clearly, did not come as a shock to him.
It was both unbearable to have to explain this to him, and unavoidable.
She took another fortifying breath. “Two years ago, Lord Revell pursued me rather determinedly. I liked him. And I’ll admit I was flattered because . . . well, have you seen the man?” She flicked her eyes up at him, a bravura attempt to be minxy, instantly quelled by the pure flint in the duke’s eyes.
“And . . . and one must . . . well, when I hadn’t a book full of warnings to refer to, one must learn things the hard way, yes? In the absence of books on how to behave or the advice of moralizing dukes, that is.”
It was a bit like jousting with a fortress. She was going to come away with, at best, a snapped lance and a scrap or two of pride. As a duke, she supposed there were dozens of ways he could crush her, if the notion took him. But she was certain of one thing: he might be a bastard, but she knew in her gut he would be a fair one, if she could get him to listen to the truth.
“Learning things the hard way is a tried and true method for getting them to stick, yes,” he agreed with exaggerated patience.
“And so. My mother had gone to live in Scotland with a cousin until such time I could make enough money to keep both of us comfortably alive. I was . . . lonely. Lord Revell made . . . I shall use the word ‘overtures,’ given that this is a story that involves the opera. And we became involved.”