A practiced beauty seduced with that worrying.
This woman, neither a beauty nor skilled coquette, did so when deep in thought.
He stored away that second, newly acquired detail about his bizarre companion.
“I understand this is disconcerting, Greg—Your Grace.” She wisely corrected herself. “I made an egregious error.”
Argyll winged an eyebrow. “Just one?”
“Having seen our fate,Iknow our union is inevitable.” The haunting quality of her voice sent a wave of coldness through him. “But you do not have the vision, and so you are left in the dark.” She swept forward and linked their arms. “Our lives intersect, Gregory.” The searing intensity of her brown eyes speared him to his spot.
A shiver traveled his spine.
He let her go. “And this is where they diverge, Miss Kearsley.”
“You are in want of a wife.”
“A specific one.” One with a figure curved in the places he liked them.
“Miss Emmy Caldecott.”
He thinned his gaze on her. “How do you know that?” No one, not his partners, not his sisters, not even DuMond, whom he kept not a single secret from.
She parted her lips.
“Never tell me.” He scraped a derisive stare up and down her unremarkable form. “Yourvision.”
The oddity draped in black nodded.
Note, sarcasm sailed beyond Miss Kearsley. As did common sense. Logic. Beauty. The list really was unending.
“Nor, in honesty, have you been terribly careful about your interest. You’ve been tiptoeing about the wallflowers when, as you pointed out, your preference is for exquisite beauties like Emmy, which can only account for your being there.”
“I…” Flummoxed, he searched for which charge to answer. “I do nottiptoe.”
“No, you more stalk than anything.”
Was she serious? Or was this more again of her disconcerting humor?
“Emmy?” Argyll kept his tones neutral. “I take it you are friends with Miss Caldecott.”
She nodded at another question that wasn’t a question.
Argyll did a full, slow circle about the stiffly-erect chit. “Whatever will she say when she finds out you tried to steal the title duchess from her deserving hands?”
When she gave him nothing but more bothersome silence, he pushed her further. “Your commitment to being my duchess, that you’d betray a friend, is a level of ruthlessness I can appreciate. It is perhaps the most interesting thing about you, Miss Kearsley.”
“I don’t want to be a duchess.”
“Ah, a sacrifice you will make based on your vision.”
She nodded.
When would he remember to save his sarcasm with this one?
“You cannot marry her, Gregory.”
“Because I’m meant to marry you.”
