“I’ve he-ard of him. His name only.” Worry tipped he space between her high-arched eyebrows. “Madam Pomfret mentioned him.”
“Madam Pomfret?” he asked bluntly.
“My mother’s fortune-teller.”
“Your—” Argyll caught himself. “You know what?” The whacky family would have a fortune-teller. “Never mind.”
“Madam Pomfret helps me sharpen my skills.”
This time, he couldn’t call it back. “Your skills.”
“I see things. The…future.”
He drained the last of his champagne.
Done. He would not indulge this further. He set the empty glass on the stone stand beside the brass urn overflowing with roses.
The calm nothingness of her voice broke his patience.
Catching the peculiar chit’s delicate wrists in his larger, exacting ones, he pinned her skinny arms on either side of her. “You won’t quit.” A quiet, harsh laugh escaped him.
“I can’t.”
“Trying to trap me, are you?” He scoured her face for a hint of something…anything. The face-framing tendrils couldn’t even favor this one’s stark features with so much as a curl to soften her. That black fringe just above her black, prominently arched eyebrows added to her strangeness.
He tightened his grip upon her. “I’ve faced more women than can be counted of the same aspirations. Not a single one of them were as desperate as you to be my duchess.” He sneered. “But then they were exquisite works of art, bloody goddesses. The same will never be said of you.”
“Certainly not.”
How bloody matter-of-fact.
His apprehension soared. “Be warned, Miss Kearsley,” he layered ice within his warning. “You are playing with fire.”
A flash of unease flickered in her naturally saucer-round eyes. “You won’t hurt me.”
He chuckled. “Are you certain?”
The oddity searched him the way she might a map with an X drawn upon it. A tiny crease pulled between the lady’s jet-black eyebrows. “No—”
“You have at least some sense.”
“I do not believe you would hurt me.”
“I stand corrected,” he muttered.
Argyll traded tactics. “I do not play games, Miss Kearsley.” He placed his mouth near her sparse mouth. “That is, outsidethe bedchamber.” He curled his lips into a lascivious grin that would send any lady into a dead faint.
Any sane one, that was.
The Season’s strangest wallflower remained unshaken. By Argyll. His warnings. His touch. Not just unshaken, butbored.
This one didn’t give so much as an inch.
Her indifference stoked something primitive inside.
No one held dominion over him. He’d just humbled a duchess. A virginal wallflower without the sense God gave a turtle didn’t stand a chance. Certainly not the Lady in Black.
Argyll slackened his grip but kept her imprisoned in his arms.
