A glacial glint iced his eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Yawning?”
At his blank stare, Daria glanced about. “Leaving?” In fact, she pushed her cloak open and consulted the timepiece fastened to the front of her gown. She really did need to be going. “If you’ll—”
“With my sister-in-law,” he gritted out.
Ah. Understanding dawned. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to answer, Your Grace.”
“You are not at liberty to answer?” he spoke each syllable in a slow, rhythmic staccato.
His lips curled. Rage would be preferable to the empty grin he gave.
Alas, having survived and thrived amongst six sisters and an older brother, it would take a great deal more to throw her off.
The duke dropped his fake smile. “Where are you going?”
Daria pressed her palms together. “I—”
“Never tell me,” he sneered. “You are not at liberty to answer?”
She lifted her eyebrows a fraction. “Perhaps you have the vision too.”
“A joke?” Angry color suffused his cheeks. “Do you find this amusing?”
“Not at all.” Given the bombastic duke didn’t appear capable of a sincere smile, she wouldn’t have—if she were the diverting sort—wasted humor on him.
At her silence, the duke draped his arm along the back of his seat. He drummed his fingertips in a way meant to menace.
For all the ways the Duke of Argyll professed Craven to be a former friend and enemy, the two gentlemen, in addition to their titles, seemed to possess similarly dark personalities and peculiar ideas of what qualified something as entertaining.
A crackling of energy shrunk Daria’s vision. A sharp bolt of white flickered like lightening behind her eyes. That consumingforce tugged Daria further from herself. She heard nothing. Saw nothing. But knew…
Perhaps those similarities and shared pasts and futures accounted for what she knew would come to be.
Daria blinked slowly. “We will be friends,” she murmured. “Allof us.” Her sight came into clear focus.
The duke abandoned all pretense of politeness and patience. “I’ve heard you are dicked in the nob, Miss Kearsley. Despite the rumor of your reputation, I’ve allowed your relationship with Miss Caldecott anyway.”
For the lethal aura about him, his concern for Emmy shone through. “Because you love her.”
His jaw slackened. He put it swift to rights.
“You needn’t answer,” she said. “It wasn’t a question.”
“Iam doing the talking, Miss Kearsley.”
“We both are.” She wrinkled her brow. “That is the very nature of a discussion.”
“Is that what you believe?” His lips pressed into a hard, white slash. “That we are having adiscussion?”
How would he classify it? Daria opened her mouth to ask as much, recalled his earlier statement on their exchange, and thought better of it.
Her friendship with Emmy rested on this man’s magnanimity? What a cruel world.
“I’ve been patient with you, Miss Kearsley, for one reason alone—” Emmy. “Because I know you matter to my sister-in-law, Miss Kearsley. That and that reason alone accounts for my civility.”
This was civil? “I would not care to see you angry.”
