She was a cobbler’s daughter and she always looked down. His boots—Hoby, if she had to guess—were black mirrors.
Mrs. Hardy saw her, and her face lit in welcome. “Your Grace—”
Your Grace? Holy Mother of—!
“—we should like to introduce Miss Mariana Wylde. Miss Wylde, His Grace, the Duke of Valkirk.”
Thusly the first legend she’d ever met in the flesh turned to face her directly.
She didn’t know whether she would call him handsome. Only that his presence worked on her senses like the clash of a gong.
His nose seemed to have been broken at least once, but the result suited the terrain of his face, and intriguingly suggested he’d come up against violence and walked away the victor. His mouth was long and rather fine. Beneath thick, straight brows, his gaze was deep-set and uncomfortably penetrating, as though he was forever searching for enemies on the far horizon. He could probably frisk a soul for sins and, once discovered, keep the knowledge of them to himself, for strategic use at a later date.
The stark colors he wore implied he thought he needed no embellishment. She was inclined to agree. But she knew one would need to pay a tailor dizzying fortunes for that fit and that fabric, not to mention the staff to keep it jet black and snow white.
She was instinctively certain there wasn’t a soft place on the man.
When she wrote to her mother about this later, she would leave out the part where she stared up at him, mutely, like a looby, for a full three seconds, and go right into the part where she curtsied.
Because her curtsy was a thing of beauty. She knew, because it had gotten rave notices when she’d played a perfidious courtier in The Glass Rose, before she’d been promoted to queen for a night, which was more or less immediately before two men decided to shoot at each other over her. She had not been born genteel, but damned if she couldn’t convince anybody that she was.
“Your Grace . . .” Nerves had made her voice go a little too seductively breathy. “Meeting you is an honor I never dreamed I’d have in this lifetime.”
When she was upright, she thought it best to appear simultaneously devastating and virtuous. This meant lowering her gaze shyly at least a second or two. This was a brutal sacrifice, because her entire being wanted to continue studying his face to decide how she felt about it.
She raised her head what seemed like a vast distance to meet his eyes.
Only to discover that a screen of faint but unmistakable bored cynicism had moved across his features.
This was so disorienting, she nearly brought a hand up to touch her face to make sure it was still there.
“How do you do, Miss Wylde.” His voice was a wonder. All bass she could feel right in her chest. She noticed his dark hair was a bit longer than fashionable, and unlike the rest of him, hinted at a disinclination to remain in formation. A shock of it dropped over one brow, and in this a few silver threads glinted.
They regarded each other in silence. Hers purely dumbstruck.
His unmoved.
No pupil flare, no twinkle, no slow lowering of eyelids to appreciative slits. Nothing remotely akin to the things she was accustomed to seeing in the faces of men the moment they got a look at her. Instead: hard, speculative, and cynical.
The backs of her arms went cold.
She had a terrible feeling that the Duke of Valkirk read the entire paper. Even the gossip columns.
“Miss Wylde,” he said politely, in that voice. “I apologize if this is a presumption, but you’ve the same name as someone who has lately made an appearance in the London Times with reference to a duel.”
Her heart slowly, slowly contracted into an icy fist.
He wasn’t one bit sorry for that “presumption.”
And did he ever blink?
He seemed to be, in an entirely dispassionate way, merely curious about how she’d respond. As though he couldn’t care one way or the other, but he might as well prod with a stick at a small, flat animal to see whether it was sleeping or dead.
He already knew that her only options were to lie or to admit to being at the center of a sordid scandal.
Or: to turn tail and run out of the room.
She understood instantly that he was a terrifying man.
Dear Mama—I regret to inform you that the Duke of Valkirk is a right bastard.
Then again, he was still a man. Wasn’t he? Even if he was orders of magnitude more potent in real life than other men? She had not yet met one she couldn’t ultimately decipher. They’d all thus far regrettably proved the same beneath the skin, even if this one’s skin was made of battered steel plate, granite, and meanness.
She would need to be very careful. Most of her instincts had been clubbed senseless, but pride and flirtation, both possibly stronger than they ought to be, formed a hopeful team.
“Everything I know about you I’ve learned from the newspaper as well, Your Grace,” she said lightly. “There’s something we have in common.”
“That, and having the misfortune to be present when young men were shot. Of course I considered it my duty to prevent it, if I could.” He said this mildly.
She went still, as winded as though she’d slammed into an invisible wall.
The subtle implication being that she’d all but stood there and cheered on two men aiming pistols at each other as though it were a horse race. After, no doubt, untangling her naked limbs from the pile they’d all formed during their sexual debauch.
“Since you’ve evidently found shelter here, Miss Wylde, you may yet be ignorant of the fact that Lord Kilhone continues to cling to life,” he added.
How could anyone say such brutally direct things and make them sound like casual conversation?
“I’m happy to hear it. It wasn’t for lack of trying to get himself killed,” she said, mimicking his lightness. Because she owed her survival to the fact that she was a quick learner.
Contempt would have been better than whatever it was he directed at her from beneath those thick brows now. It wasn’t even indifference, precisely. His seen-everything eyes—she could imagine they’d gazed upon shattered bodies on the battlefield, down the barrels of rifles and cannons, at kings and lords and enlisted men and doubtless every imaginable type of female, naked and clothed—burned through her as though she were scarcely worth the effort of keeping them open.
She’d once seen a flaming scrap of newspaper cartwheeling through the air on a breeze. That’s precisely how she felt.
And now he was just toying with her. As though this, not spillikins, was his idea of a game.
A stray thought meandered through her focus: no wonder we won the war. For God’s sake.
“I believe they’re out dragging the Thames for you,” he told her. “The current theory as to your disappearance is that you cast yourself in out of a fit of remorse.”
Who was she if he’d burned her down to nothing? Pride struggled through again. Of a certainty there were more beautiful women in the world. But she doubted there were any more bloody-minded.
“I suppose I’m touched that I’ve been missed at all,” she said lightly, self-deprecatingly. “I understand some of the rooms here even have a view of the Thames.”
“My rooms do.”
Rooms. Plural. Because of course a single room could never possibly contain his big, fat duke head.