This ought to have won her a reasonably good-humored scowl at least. But he seemed lost in thought. Between his fingers the quill pen was poised, the feather trembling, as though impatient to return to the work of writing.
Then he leaned back and regarded her, his brows knit.
“I think I ought to learn the word for ‘sword,’ Your Grace. Because I suspect that was the difference in your success and mine, when it came to Giancarlo.”
He snorted. “Spada.”
“I wondered if—”
“Miss Wylde,” he said so abruptly she froze.
He didn’t speak immediately. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully.
“I should like you to know,” he began, as though he was picking his way through unknown terrain, “that I am not in the habit of threatening anyone with sword violence as a first line of defense, especially an unarmed man. I will assess a situation and, if it seems necessary, step in and at once break a man in half like a bundle of twigs. I will do that without announcing my intention or issuing threats. I don’t believe in wasting words or actions.”
She went breathless.
“A bundle of twigs?” she repeated softly.
“Yes. That is to say . . .” He took a breath. “I regret the means by which I accomplished my ends today. I do not regret the ends.”
She sat quietly a moment.
“Perhaps it is just you were out of practice in threatening composers. One often overshoots the mark when attempting something new.”
“Nevertheless.”
She wanted a smile from him, but given his mood, it seemed clear she wasn’t going to get a complete one, just one of those little taut affairs.
“Perhaps you were simply overcome with emotion at witnessing a friend in distress, Your Grace.”
There was a little silence.
“Ah, yes. ‘Overcome with emotion.’ That sounds like me.”
She smiled at him slowly. He was regarding her with a little furrow between his brows. He didn’t take up the word “friend.”
She was as absurdly glad as if she’d gotten away with an epithet in the drawing room.
Finally he returned his attention to his foolscap and said nothing more, which she took to be her cue to write her sentences.
After tapping her quill to her chin, she thought of a sentence, and began to scratch it out.
Then she paused.
“It might reassure you to know, Your Grace, that Giancarlo has only a basic command of English, and it was likely a charity to him that you were direct in a way that could not be misconstrued. I suppose it’s an impulse of his age. It seems a reflex with men to have a go if they think they can get away with it. That is, why haven’t you tried to kiss me?”
Those last words emerged like a bullet she hadn’t known was in the chamber.
She’d shocked herself breathless. She felt as though they’d entered the room like a cymbal crash.
The duke didn’t seem to hear them.
His head remained fixed on his foolscap; his quill continued scratching in leaps and darts, making those consonants like the masts on ships and the swoops below like their decks. “Because if I were to kiss you, Miss Wylde . . .” He jabbed a period at the end of a sentence and looked up at her. “It would ruin you for all other men.”
There ensued an instant of absolute silence and stillness.
Such that when the gold sliver of the second hand on the clock shifted, it echoed like a gunshot.
She sat, airless, as the words all but detonated in her, sending a shocking onslaught of heat through her, tensing her muscles, waking something raw and new and so needful that her eyes burned, and she could not say whether it was longing or fury.
She knew, with a certain despair, that he only spoke truth.
He did not lift a brow. He didn’t duck his head to fix her with a smolder. Such embellishments were wholly unnecessary. After all, everyone understood what went on inside volcanos. It was why one did not recklessly tiptoe about their rims.
Now was the time for a light, insouciant laugh, or a joke.
She parted her lips to do it.
There emerged a sound like the wheeze of a gently squeezed concertina.
He gestured to her foolscap. “Shall I have a look?” he said mildly.
He seemed to have complete command of his voice. His expression hadn’t changed.
But she had no doubt that he’d read her as clearly as he read Italian or the map of a battlefield.
Mutely, her palms damp, she pushed it over to him.
She didn’t take her eyes from him when he lowered his head. She studied the severe lines of him: the narrow part in his hair, the vast horizontal shelf of his shoulders. The gold-brown hands with the copper hair at his wrists. She realized only then that while she was learning Italian, she’d also been learning him with an unseemly hunger.
She’d written only one sentence.
But his head stayed lowered a second or two longer than this warranted.
She wondered—it occurred to her—that perhaps his own composure wasn’t entirely shatterproof. That perhaps he had shocked himself.
And at this notion, her heartbeat became nearly painful in its slamming.
He read aloud finally.
“‘I use my sword to cut the roast of beef.’”
He slowly raised his head. His eyes had gathered that light she had come to so appreciate, to count on, when he looked at her. His expression was difficult to interpret. He, too, was schooling his features. She was certain of it.
However, she suspected part of this was because he was tempted to laugh.
“I thought they ought to be put to some use during peacetime,” she said, subdued. “Swords.”
He nodded once, gravely. “Swords might indeed languish in peacetime if there were no women to defend from composers.”
Damn.
He was funny.
And if she was being truthful with herself, she’d thought he was funny from the very first.
His wit was as subtly dangerous as the rest of him. It sneaked up on you like a sunrise and took you over until you were lit all through with a sort of quiet and total delight.
She couldn’t speak. They regarded each other across the table. Her eyes still burned strangely with some suppressed emotion. As did her heart. Like joy or fury, only too bound in thorns and brambles to get a good look at it.
And that’s precisely how it would stay: bound. It could strain all it wanted at those bonds.
She had more sense than that.
He pushed the foolscap back to her.
“Write it using all of the pronouns and verb tenses,” he suggested. Then he dipped his quill, and he resumed writing, and in seconds it was as though she was forgotten.
Chapter Eleven
Twilight was his cue to change into a fresh shirt. He would not be dining with the boardinghouse citizens tonight; instead, he would be dining with the Earl of Langley and his family, and he saw no reason to beg off. The Earl of Langley, who, of course, had a pretty daughter.
He slowly wound his cravat while he studied his reflection in the mirror. He was no Byron. He was no Giancarlo Giannini, for that matter. But he saw nothing to lament, unless it was the passage of time. He looked the way a man ought to when he’d lived a life like his. He’d seen himself reflected in the eyes of women and men; he was satisfied with what they reflected back to him.