No man had ever before come to her defense.
“Grazie,” she said. A little ironically. Almost shyly.
“Prego,” he said shortly.
James found he could not quite produce a smile for her yet.
His fingers were still curled; they buzzed as though they’d been deprived of the feel of that man’s throat. Emotion entirely out of proportion to the situation simmered in his veins.
“Anger” was the safest word to call it.
She was so pale that the little gold spots on her face stood in stark relief, but two hot, pink, embarrassed spots sat on her cheeks.
“But he’s a brilliant composer,” she said finally, ironically, as though they’d been exchanged in a long, silent litany of Giancarlo’s grave flaws.
He managed a short, humorless laugh.
She cleared her throat.
“I’m terribly sorry you were forced to witness that, let alone intervene.” Her hands went to her cheeks. “I’m just so embar—”
“No. Please don’t apologize. There is no need. I am only glad that I was here and could be of some assistance.”
There were questions he wanted to ask. Of her, but mostly of himself, when he was alone. Because he could not catch hold of the ragged ends of his outsized rage to trace it back to its source.
She cleared her throat. “Signor Giannini is a composer, and our relationship is professional. He brought about a third of the money he owes me. He’s dissatisfied with the current casting choices for his opera, and since he cannot hire me at the moment, for obvious reasons”—she grimaced wryly here and she flashed a quick little smile—“and he claims he missed me. One can hardly blame him for that, yes?” Her voice faltered. “Though he tends to express such sentiments . . . with his hands.”
Her words began in a brittle, cheerful rush. They ended nearly inaudibly.
Mariana, he wanted to say softly.
She looked so alone, standing in the middle of the room. He realized he’d never fully understood her actual aloneness so acutely until now. The absolute singularity of her position.
“I hope,” the duke said carefully, “I have not introduced a complication into your milieu by interrupting your . . . shall we call it a conversation?”
She quirked the corner of her mouth. “Oh, what’s one more complication? It seems I’ve an infinite capacity for them. Rather like Mr. Delacorte has for gravy.”
James smiled a little, only because she seemed to need it.
“Will you be all right now, Miss Wylde?” he said finally, a little stiffly.
“Oh, of course,” she said quickly. A flush rose swiftly again. “I’ll just sit here a moment and drink my tea. Please do carry on with your day, Your Grace. Thank you.”
“It was no trouble at all.”
He turned at once to leave. And as he moved across the foyer, he did not slow his pace. But he could not keep his head from turning, just slightly, to look back.
She was still. The light that always seemed to animate her, so that she perpetually glowed like a little lantern, seemed dimmed. She looked weary, stunned, and ashamed.
He was shocked by how this cleaved him.
He turned away abruptly, as if to protect her from his gaze.
Once back in the anteroom, James lowered himself slowly and stiffly into the chair, as if he were gingerly carrying something volatile.
He did not recognize his mood.
He did not recognize himself.
He took up his quill and aimed his gaze out the window, but he didn’t see the river, the milky-blue sky, the man urinating against the building, the black cat making a slinky left turn into the alley.
A knot like a spiked, mailed fist sat between his ribs. His mood eluded naming, and its persistence remained all out of proportion to the circumstances, which had been common enough: he’d come upon a man behaving like a cad, and he’d put a stop to it. Young men, especially charming, good-looking young men, had seized upon such opportunities since the world began, and it was the job of honorable men to stop it when they could.
That was it. Something about that word.
Common.
He closed his eyes as he again saw Giancarlo’s hands at Mariana’s waist, her elbow, her hip again as she twisted and dodged and backed away. If a duke had not issued a threat to his life in the doorway, the man would no doubt have kept at it until she’d had no choice but to knee him in the baubles. Or capitulate. It had been a diversion to that man. It was clear he’d done it lightly.
The wrongness of this. It had felt like watching someone use the grail for a spittoon. Or an emerald for a shuttlecock. “Sacrilege” seemed like hyperbole, considering, but James couldn’t think of a better one.
All he knew was that she was not common.
The more accurate—and troubling—word was “rare.”
He knew, in a way that made his breathing go peculiarly shallow, that she was rare.
The flustered, shamed spots of pink in her cheeks, her chin resolutely hiked as she visibly gathered the tinselly shreds of her usual composure about her—he understood viscerally now something he suspected she did not yet fully realize, and he saw it because he was a man. There would be no ultimate winning against the Giancarlos of the world. Flirtation and charm and firmly issued Italian or English requests to behave might forestall them. But she could not ever fully stop them.
And it would surely wear her out in the end.
Unless and until she acquired the armor of a diva.
That mailed fist between his ribs clenched more tightly.
He drew in a long, long breath to prove he could, and released it. He had frightened her, which he regretted, and awed her, which he did not. Her gratitude felt like a warmth against his skin, felt like a medal pinned to his chest.
And then, as he’d stood there unable to speak, a slow-dawning radiance supplanted uncertainty as her eyes searched his. She’d found something there.
He wondered what she’d seen.
She drank her lukewarm tea, and sat in the reception room. She wanted to be alone for a while in a room where, for the first time in her life, a man had come to her defense.
And looked at her the way the Duke of Valkirk had just looked at her before he’d left the room.
She was chagrined she hadn’t finished her assignment, but she fetched the foolscap from her room anyway, before she took herself off to her Italian lesson. There was no sense in wasting it.
She paused for a moment in the doorway, as usual.
“Good day, again, Miss Wylde.”
“Good day again, Your Grace, Duke of Valkirk.”
He flicked a wry glance up at her. A sheet of foolscap lay before him, and a glance—she saw a salutation, what appeared to be a column of numbers—made her think he was writing a letter to his Man of Affairs.
The pages of his manuscript were stacked and pushed to the far side of the table, as if he couldn’t bear to look at them.
She settled herself into her chair.
“How is your work on your life’s story proceeding?” she asked. Rather wickedly.
“Apace,” he said shortly. He flicked his eyes up to her again, went still, and a faint furrow appeared between his brows. He was distracted.
“‘Apace.’ What a usefully vague word that is. I suspect it means ‘not at all.’”