Apparently, this man would turn away the help of a perfect stranger rather than appear vulnerable.
Unless…could he possibly have recognized her?
Bess touched a nervous hand to her mask, but it was still tied firmly in place. Thank goodness she was wearing one of her old dresses, not one he’d bought. Most likely, he hadn’t recognized her. After all, if he knew it was her, would he not say something?
If he knew it was Bess, would he still have chosen her?
Ignoring the ache this produced in her chest, she decided the only way forward was to assume he had not recognized his sister’s chaperone in the masked woman before him.
She took another step toward him, squinting into the darkness. He’d put on a shirt, she saw, though it hung untucked over his thighs. His feet were bare, a shockingly intimate sight. “I should like to see the cut for myself, all the same.”
“You and everyone else down there,” he muttered under his breath, but Bess heard him.
“What do you mean?”
One massive shoulder hitched up in a shrug. When he spoke, it was soft and deep, without the usual clipped precision of the Duke of Ashbourn’s polished accent. “That’s what they come to see, what you all come to see. Blood on the floor. The mighty brought low.”
The weary contempt in his low voice surprised her. She immediately wanted to deny that she was like the rest of them, that she’d any interest in seeing anyone’s blood, but that wouldn’t be the whole truth.
“There is something about it,” she admitted. “Watching two strong fighters try to best each other. Something primal and exhilarating. Do you not find it so, to be the one in the ring?”
“Primal.” Beneath the leather mask, his sharply bowed lips curled derisively. “I would say more…bestial.”
She took another step. This was quite a lot like approaching a wild animal. He tracked her progress with the awareness of a predator but made no move away. “But not exhilarating. So why do it?”
His bared teeth glinted white in the darkness. “Maybe I like to win.”
Bess shook her head. Took another step. “If that’s true, you ought to be smiling—you certainly won tonight. Madame Leda says you always win.”
Her eyes were adjusting to the shadows. She saw his big hands clench into fists, then relax as though he’d deliberately released the tension.
“My reasons for fighting are my own,” he said hoarsely. “Everyone who comes here harbors secrets. I could ask why you came tonight.”
The longer they talked, in this hushed twilight of a room, the more certain Bess became that he didn’t know her. It gave her an odd, untethered sensation that reminded her of their conversation in the drawing room after the Devensham ball.
Masks could be freeing, indeed.
A bold recklessness seized her. She took another step, close enough to him now to feel the heat his large body threw off like a bonfire.
This was her chance. The chance she’d been searching for, to feel alive and desired—and for it to be happening this way, in this shadowy space between real life and fantasy with the man who had consumed her thoughts for the past weeks…she had to be brave enough to seize this moment.
If she didn’t, she’d regret it for the rest of her life.
Tipping her chin up, Bess gathered up all her courage and all her hopes and all her most secret desires and said, “I did come for the fight, in a way—but I also came because of what I’d heard rumored about this place.”
“And what is that?”
He was staring down at her transfixed, as though a cannon could blast through the wall beside them and he wouldn’t notice. His eyes behind the mask were crystalline and otherworldly, tonight appearing the same color she’d reminded Lucy of the word for.
Celadon. Like the deepest heart inside a stalk of celery, tinged ever so faintly and brightly green.
A woman could get used to being looked at that way, by eyes like that.
Stop it. There is no future here. There’s only tonight.
She swallowed, her nipples tingling and her core clenching hard on nothing, sending shivers through her. Her heart pounded.
“I heard,” Bess replied, “that the winner of the fight was awarded a prize. A night with the partner of his choosing. And I thought…”
