“I am familiar with how such associations come about, Miss Wylde. But thank you for the history.”
He was a sardonic bastard. She might have enjoyed it more if he wasn’t wielding it against her.
“I cannot fairly claim that it was an unpleasant or unwelcome association. Or that I was an unwilling participant. But I soon realized the whole notion did not sit right with me, and . . . it did not solve my loneliness.”
Her face felt warm with the revelation.
She bravely looked into his eyes.
He blinked.
And his expression—well, she didn’t suppose it ever softened—had gone decidedly more thoughtful.
She took it as encouragement to go on.
“Six months into our . . .” She cleared her throat. She could not bring herself to say “friendship,” as it was far too coy. She would have to use the more embarrassing and accurate “. . . affair, I explained as kindly as I could that I no longer wanted to go on as we were. We parted as friends, I thought. Or at least civilly. As much as any man enjoys being told he is . . . ah . . . no longer wanted in that way. I never had reason to believe his heart was either broken or even involved. And he certainly is spoiled for choice, when it comes to women. So at the time of the . . .”
“Duel?” the duke supplied evenly.
She nodded. “. . . he had not been my lover for more than a year.”
The word “lover,” like “duel” and “affair,” would forever be a part of her history. How had she been caught up in such a thing? It seemed she could not have escaped the momentum of it, no matter how she’d tried. She might as well get used to saying it bravely and frankly. It could not be undone.
“All of this I swear upon everything I have ever held or will ever hold dear. I do not have many things to hold dear, but they are my mother, my father’s memory, my pink ribbon, and my fur-lined pelisse. I would die for them.”
She’d tried a joke. Because she couldn’t help herself.
He took this in. His expression was difficult to interpret. Like a metronome, the quill between his fingers measured the methodical tick of his mind.
But his eyes never left her face.
“Then I shall be compelled to believe you, won’t I?” he said finally. Quietly. Almost gently.
She subtly released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“So . . . the night of the duel . . . well, it all began backstage, in our dressing rooms, after my first performance in the lead role. So many encores . . . my room was filled with roses. Roses, Your Grace. Actual flowers from a hothouse! I could not believe such loveliness was for me. It smelled like heaven. All the young bloods like to crowd backstage after a show . . . perhaps you know this?”
“So I have heard,” he said ironically.
“Lord Kilhone was one of them. He praised my performance and made so bold as to tell me I was beautiful. And . . . well, when someone tells you you’re beautiful, it’s only polite to graciously receive such a compliment, and perhaps return it somewhat in kind?”
“I cannot say, as I’ve never been accused of such a thing,” he said dryly.
“Well, then everyone’s been remiss, Your Grace.”
His slow smile was so unexpectedly, wickedly sensual, it shocked the breath from her.
She began to suspect, with a certain thrill and uneasiness that accompanies walking the ledge of a tall building, that he was, in fact, capable of devastating charm. He just hadn’t seen fit to expend any of it on her thus far.
It occurred to her that this was likely a mercy.
She did not think this was a man who did anything by halves.
“Do you see the difference?” she said. “That was flirting, Your Grace. And now we’ve both learned something today.”
“It’s a mystery why duels spontaneously happen around you, Miss Wylde.”
“I think so, too,” she said earnestly. “But mind you, it was just the one. Sometimes flirting seems the polite thing to do. Isn’t it rude not to say or do a thing about it when men flirt? That is, they will flirt, won’t they?”
“Do I really strike you as the sort?”
“Oh, I suspect you’re capable of anything, if you really put your back into it, Your Grace.”
She wanted another one of those smiles the way she’d wanted another sip of champagne that fateful night. And what did that say about her? Both were potent. Neither was wise.
He gave her another one. Fleeting and patient.
She was reminded he was a castle. All but impossible to breach with her meager weapons.
And as far as he was concerned, she was still on trial.
“Lord Revell heard this exchange, and he was outraged that Lord Kilhone would dare to compliment me in his presence, which is frankly ridiculous, as he had no claim on me at all, though they were both . . . ah, foxed.”
“You don’t say,” the duke said cynically.
And even as she said the words, the story seemed unspeakably frivolous and sordid even in her own ears; how must it sound to him? But oddly she felt stronger as she unburdened herself, which spoke to how heavy it had weighed upon her.
“I wasn’t,” she hastened to add, primly. This was true, but mainly because they had run out of champagne. “They used me as an excuse to go outside with pistols and shoot at each other,” she said bitterly. “While their friends looked on. While their friends looked on! The papers were wrong. I didn’t watch. I couldn’t bear it. But neither of them gave a da . . . fig about . . . me.” She took a breath to steady her voice; she heard the rise in pitch, the stifled anguish in it. “It was about two spoiled men and their pride and reckless tempers that they felt free to indulge like children throwing tantrums. Something I would never dream of doing, and never, ever get away with doing.”
His eyes were cool and remote, as if he was watching the entire sordid scene inside his mind, the way he might an enemy army amassing on a faraway hillside.
“If they cared at all for me, wouldn’t they have minded or noticed that I was terribly frightened?”
Damnation. She kept her chin up, but her voice broke on the last word, anyway.
“You were frightened?” he said sharply, after a moment.
She nodded wearily.
His face was pensive now. Lips pressed together.
She took a breath, and dared to ask the question she’d yearned to ask all along.
“So that is the story, and I swear it on my life. I am sorry it happened, but I cannot see how I caused it. But what I’d like to know is this, Your Grace. You ought to know. Is it honorable, what they did?”
She asked it as if she were indeed on the dock and he were the magistrate.
Her heart was pounding.
There was a beat of silence.
“No,” he said.
It should not have felt like absolution. She was not Catholic. This was not confession. He was not St. Peter at the Gates. But he was the national arbiter of honor, and it was the best she was going to do, and it was enough.
She exhaled.
“And I don’t feel as though my honor was harmed—im . . .”
“Impugned.”
“Even so, one can be angry and not lose one’s head. Is that not so?”
“Yes. Being angry without losing my head is, in fact, my specialty.”