She reached for the foolscap to pull it back.
But he’d already silently read:
Il duca ha gli occhi marroni.
“The duke has brown eyes,” he said.
The unadorned nature of the sentence was striking amidst all her others.
In the English version she’d written, a longer word had been hatched out; “brown” was its replacement. The word she’d originally chosen also appeared to start with a “b.” He was also certain he could detect an insufficiently scratched-out “l” at the end of it.
“I was wondering if I’d make an appearance in your sentences. Why have you not dressed me, perhaps, in a green coat and yellow trousers?”
Startlingly, she did not reply. She seemed to have gone mute.
He looked up. “What did it used to say?”
She appeared to give it some thought.
“Seventeen,” she replied.
“It used to say, ‘The duke has seventeen eyes.’”
She inspected his face. “Yes.”
He smiled slightly. “What did it used to say?” he repeated pleasantly and evenly, as if he hadn’t asked the question the first time at all.
She met his eyes, but she was distinctly, curiously uncomfortable. Her cheeks had gone a hot pink.
“Refuse,” she said.
His eyebrows began to dip as he prepared a frown. Immediately, he schooled his features to careful stillness and regarded her in silence.
He was fairly certain he knew what the original word was.
He hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it.
He knew a twinge of irritation, mainly because he’d been taken by surprise, which had happened perhaps twice before in the last decade.
All at once, with a disconcerting epiphany, it occurred to him that she was not so much hesitating in the doorway of the anteroom before she entered . . . as taking that moment to look at him.
Precisely the way he took that moment to look at her.
He was utterly still.
And then, in order to look at anything else at the moment, he glanced at the clock and noted three minutes were remaining.
It was, surprisingly, a second or two before he could think clearly.
But then he had it.
He wrote something on the foolscap.
“Tu non mi ami. È solo il lume di candela,” he said evenly.
She looked up at him curiously.
“You do not love me. It is merely the candlelight.”
She gave a laugh.
He pushed the sheet of foolscap over to her so she could see what he’d written. She dipped her quill and bent her head, and diligently began to copy the words, so that she would make them her own.
He picked up his own quill, to return to the work of writing to his solicitor.
He noticed a strand of hair clung to Miss Wylde’s cheek, and the sunlight through the rain-washed windows picked out little rainbows in it. He obviously had no choice but to look at that instead.
As she left, Mariana passed Dot in the hall bearing a tea tray laden with scones on a plate, a pot of tea, and a cup for the duke.
“Vicissitudes, Dot,” she whispered. “Viss-iss-i-tudes. It means whims.”
“Viss-iss-i-tudes,” Dot repeated slowly. “So fun to say! Like a snake. Ssssssss. I have a word for you, too. I learned it in the kitchen this morning. It’s ‘beleaguered.’ ‘Beelee,’ then ‘grrr’ like a dog growling, then a ‘d.’”
“Beleaguered,” Mariana repeated. “I like it! It’s a very strong word. What does it mean?”
“It means bothered or annoyed. I overheard Mrs. Durand say that Lord Bolt told her that the duke is beleaguered by all the invitations he receives to dine with lords who want to marry their daughters off to him. She says he’s bound to marry one of them.”
Mariana was silent, frozen in place, for a long moment. Shocked by the fact that this, briefly, had taken the breath out of her.
“Well, that would beleaguer anyone,” she said, finally.
The duke made short work of the tea and delicious scones Dot brought in (the food here was divine), made use of the snowy napkin provided, then pulled his stack of work back toward him and dipped his quill.
He went still and frowned. Staring at the curve he’d drawn yet again.
Another epiphany struck.
He tentatively, almost angrily drew atop it two shorter, rounded peaks.
He now was looking at Miss Wylde’s lips.
He laid his quill gingerly down, as if the feather had grown talons. Might then spring to life and attack him.
He’d been spending the last two bloody days tracing the swooping curve of her bottom lip.
The duke has beautiful eyes.
That’s what she’d written.
He hadn’t sensed this approaching.
The legend of General Blackmore had it that he could hear the movements of an enemy army from a hundred miles away, like some sort of primordial forest creature sniffing the wind for wolves. It was an exaggeration. He had vision: he could cast his eye over a circumstance—limited munitions, cruel geography, depleted troops—and then apply inspiration and cunning to eke out a triumph. He had, time and again.
Perhaps he hadn’t sensed this thing with Miss Wylde because it wasn’t an advancing army, and battle was all he knew.
But if he’d been a deer at a watering hole, the wolf would have gotten him.
With brutal and funny astuteness, she’d suggested that a duke chess piece would only be able to move in a straight line. But it was always the swiftest, most powerful way to move. Life ought to be conducted within defined contours. And honor dictated that he could take note of the charms of this opera singer and not feel compelled to veer outside those lines.
Because that’s where a woman like Mariana existed: quite beyond the bounds of his world.
But he understood now that her earlier implication that he was cold had landed painfully raw because of his suspicion that it was a quality of character he could do nothing about. As if “cold” was merely his personal climate, like Siberia.
He began to suspect that it was a condition he’d merely been needlessly suffering.
And that the cold was not a climate, but a season.
Somewhat darkly amused, he dipped his quill, and drew a long, careful, vertical, curving line. Then next to it, an inch or so away, a matching one. As deliberately as though he were drawing a battle map of enemy territory. The shape of her beautiful body, the way he saw it as she approached each day.
Chapter Nine
Dot surprised everyone that evening with a show of initiative: earlier that day, when she’d been out to buy the newspaper, she’d purchased for three pennies of the household money twenty silk handkerchiefs from “a nice gentleman on the street! It must have been providence, like you said, Mrs. Durand!”
She beamed at them proudly and brandished them in the sitting room at the top of the stairs.
Delilah and Angelique eyed them warily.
It was, of course, entirely possible that a man had been taken by Dot’s big blue eyes and general air of don’t-mind-me-I’m-up-in-the-clouds and offered her a bargain out of the goodness of his heart. But given that a good plain linen handkerchief usually cost four shillings at least, and that pickpockets usually did a brisk business reselling stolen handkerchiefs after they’d picked out the owner’s embroidered initials, the conclusion was that she’d brought contraband goods into the house. Providence, in this case, was likely a pickpocket.