“I thought glaring was.”
A vanishingly swift smile here. “The glaring is usually a result of that.”
There was a pause.
“And so, Your Grace, that is my story. Knowing it, you may continue to hold me in contempt if you so choose, but I should be obliged if you would disguise it better.”
His eyes flared in fleeting astonishment. His jaw tensed against a reflexive jolt of temper, or perhaps arrogance.
But she’d been right. He was a fair man.
But what settled in was a certain wry speculation. For the space of a few seconds, he assessed her.
“I hold you in the utmost respect, Miss Wylde,” he said quietly.
She gave him a little smile.
He continued to study her, a tiny furrow forming between his eyes.
“Gentilmente non sparatevi l’un l’altro,” he said suddenly, firmly.
She gave a start.
“Kindly do not shoot each other,” he translated.
“Sono spaventata,” he continued. His voice softened. “I am frightened.”
He wrote them down for her to take away.
She departed in possession of a sheet of foolscap that said, “I want to fuck you” in Italian and English, below which were written the word “impugn” and two new sets of Italian nouns (buildings and food) and some more verbs. All in all, representative of a satisfying day’s work, if a confusing document for anyone who might happen to come across it out of context.
Chapter Eight
Mariana tapped the feathered end of her quill against her lips, mulling the last sentence she wanted to write in order to complete the assignment the duke had given her. The clock downstairs had bonged the quarter hour. She was due in the Annex in about fifteen minutes.
Now that they’d peeled away the last of their previous mutual resentment, she’d felt oddly a bit exposed and off balance during the last three days’ worth of lessons with the Duke of Valkirk. As if she’d been dressed for and braced against a stiff wind all her life and it had abruptly stopped blowing.
Because her experience of the world of men had thus far included three types: the men who wanted to employ her to sing; the men who wanted to shag her; and the men who needed her to sing and also wanted to shag her.
The duke was an entirely new type. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word, not in the Lord Kilhone or Lord Revell sense of the word. He was very brisk, frequently impatient, but always respectful and polite, and unless she counted the occasional devastatingly sensual smile that implied he knew precisely what she was up to, he did not take up the flirtation baton that she could not resist, every now and then, extending.
Every one of those smiles were like a swift peek through a crack into the earth at something molten.
Every one of them knocked the breath out of her, unsettled her in a very primal way, and all but guaranteed she would try for another one, whether or not that made sense or was wise. (It didn’t and it wasn’t.)
His barely restrained impatience implied he knew she could do well, he expected her to do well, and he wouldn’t tolerate if she didn’t do well. She set out to impress him.
And his brisk yet fervent “well done’s” were frankly as satisfying as the thunderous applause of a stuffed-to-the-brim theater when she sang Giancarlo Giannini’s aria from The Glass Rose.
This morning over breakfast, Mr. Delacorte, bless his heart, offered to take a message explaining her whereabouts to Giancarlo at the theater since he was meeting a friend at a pub across from it, and to fetch their handbills advertising the Night of the Nightingale from the printer.
“Tall, dark wavy hair, lots of blinding teeth,” she told him. “Signor Giancarlo Giannini. They should be in rehearsals. But please don’t give it to anyone else.”
The lurking possibility that someone might shout, “There’s the ’arlot! Get ’er!” and lunge at her with a pitchfork or a knife kept her very close to The Grand Palace on the Thames, which ironically was located in what was considered one of the more dangerous parts of London. She was uncertain whether she ought to gauge the emotional temperature of a city by the one small murderous mob that had appeared beneath her window. She’d worn an enormous wig for one of her Opera House performances, but only a tiara and rose-colored silk dress for the afternoon performance. It was conceivable she’d be recognized.
Somehow she’d failed to consider that singing to a crowd of thousands at the Opera House would ever be a disadvantage.
No more gossip items had appeared in the newspaper at least. Perhaps Madame LeCroix had confused everyone about her character, and they hadn’t the faintest idea what to say now.
So she was safe for now here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
And because Valkirk was a gentleman, for the first time she was offered a space in which to be entirely herself. But in some ways she missed the relative buffer of their previous mutual resentment.
Because this space began to fill with an awareness that felt anything but safe.
She supposed that was all her own doing. He sank into her imagination the way the sun from the window warmed her skin. She memorized the interesting cragginess of his face. She estimated that his shoulders were about twice the width of her own. And when she thought about it, the entirety of her skin seemed to hum with restlessness, imagining how it might feel . . . to be covered with the entirety of him.
She did not know how any of this could be helped, and she supposed that was her own weakness. It had been documented in the newspaper that she was not, er, made of stone.
He certainly never fixed his eyes on her cleavage, for instance, and it was right there.
And yet she was truly glad he didn’t.
But there occurred every afternoon a moment more potent than a cleavage gaze, and it lasted all of a few seconds.
When she arrived in the doorway of the room and first laid eyes on him, there was always a distinct stillness to him. As if his breath was held. It was rather like the stillness of an arrow after it was shot into the red heart of a target.
Each time, she could have sworn that those embers in his eyes flared hotly. But vanished swiftly.
And this took her breath away every time.
She was now ten minutes away from this moment. She’d one more sentence to write to complete her assignment.
She scrawled, “The duke has brown eyes,” reached for the sander, and then happened to glance down. She froze.
Shocked to discover that what she’d actually written was:
The duke has beautiful eyes.
Her heart jolted. How on earth . . . ? It had sprung from somewhere within her that apparently was outside the jurisdiction of her senses.
She stared at it. Her heart began to jab painfully at her as she mischievously entertained leaving the sentence just like that. Imagining him discovering it at the end of all those other sentences.
What if she did?
What then?
She swiftly realized her nerve did not extend to that. He was, indeed, a gentleman, and she was grateful. It seemed intrusive and unfair to spring such a thing upon him.
And dangerous and absurd to reveal such a vulnerability in herself.
She scratched out “beautiful” and replaced it emphatically with the infinitely safer “brown.”
And went off for her lesson.
Heaven forfend she should be late.