“Very well, if you insist on it. Might I have my letter back?” He held out his hand.
Dash it, she was hoping she might get a better look at it, but she had no right to keep it. “Of course.”
She held it out to him. His fingertips grazed the edge of the paper, but then with the speed of a striking snake he seized her wrist, and with one quick tug, jerked her off balance. “Oh!” She stumbled into him, and for an instant they both froze, the long, hard lines of his body pressed against hers before they both shifted at once.
She scrambled backward in a panicked attempt to put some distance between them, but he held her fast, his gloved fingers wrapped around her wrist, and—no,nother wrist, but the barrel of the pistol! He was trying to snatch it from her hand!
A scream swelled in her throat, but it didn’t make it past her lips before a deafening blast rent the air, the resounding crack bouncing off the walls of the kitchen, echoing long after the ball lodged itself... somewhere.
Dear God, had she actuallyshothim? Or had the gun discharged accidentally? Oh, she didn’t know! She stared down at the gun in her hand, at the thin cloud of smoke drifting from the end of the barrel. The acrid stench of gunpowder filled her nose, and yet . . .
The duke was still standing upright. There weren’t any massive holes in his person, and he still held her wrist, his grip too firm for a man whose lifeblood was gushing from a gaping wound.
The floor, alas, hadn’t fared as well. The floorboards a mere hair’s breadth from his foot were now a mess of pulverized wood. She wrenched her arm, struggling to loosen his grip. He released her at once, and she fell back a step, her heart racing. “My God, are youmad? I might have shot you!”
“Youdidshoot, madam. It seems I was wrong about that, after all.” He eyed her calmly, smiling as if a young lady fired upon him every day, and he found it all terribly amusing. “Fortunately, you’re a dreadful shot. Still, you’ve got more nerve than I gave you credit for.”
This close, she could see his gray eyes were as cold as the ocean during a northern winter. He might smile as charmingly as he pleased with that handsome mouth, but his eyes told the story of who he was. “I do indeed, Your Grace. Enough nerve to fire a second time.”
“Very well, madam. You’ve made yourself perfectly clear. I’ll be on my way.” He ambled toward the door, his body loose and his stride careless, for all the world as if he didn’t have a pistol aimed at the back of his head.
But when he reached the door, he turned. “Until we meet again, madam.” He offered her an elegant bow, but this time, there was no humor in those frigid gray depths. “You can be certain it will be soon.”
Then he turned and vanished through the door and up the stairs, the thud of his expensive Hessians against the floor fading as he neared the entryway. The front door creaked open, and a few moments later a carriage door slammed shut.
Once he was gone, and the clop of the horses’ hooves had faded to silence, she slid down the wall at her back until she was sitting on the floor, her legs splayed out in front of her, her knuckles white around Ambrose’s pistol.
Her head fell against the wall behind her with a soft thud, her entire body shaking.
The hole she’d blasted in the floor was nearly as big as her closed fist. It would be the devil to patch it up, but at this point, what was one more hole?
That was the least of her worries, now.
CHAPTER4
She’dshotat Maxwell Burke. Fired upon a peer of the realm. Not a baron, or a viscount, or even an earl. An earl would have been bad enough, butno, nothing would do for her but to fire upon a duke.
Indeed, he’d made it impossiblenotto shoot at him, and it wasn’t as if she’d hit him. Surely, that counted for something?
But then he wasn’t just any duke, either, but the Duke of Grantham. The Duke of Grantham, a man who’d ruined more aristocrats than Hammond Court had spiders, and goodness knew one couldn’t stir a step in this house without one of the crawly, eight-legged creatures scampering over one’s toes.
Even the Prince Regent himself was said to be terrified of the Duke of Grantham.
If one must shoot at a duke, Grantham was the very last one in England one should choose. But it was too late now. She’d nearly blasted a hole through the toe of that glossy boot of his, to say nothing of the foot underneath.
She’d made an enemy of him. A tidy morning’s work, that.
She gripped the edge of the table and heaved herself to her feet, but what had once been her perfectly sturdy skeletal system had abandoned her, and her entire body was now wobbling like a blancmange. Her knees were the first to give up the ghost, deserting her with such suddenness she toppled into one of the chairs with an undignified squeak.
Her heart was battering like a wild thing against her ribs, her stomach was turning somersaults, and her head was dizzy with delayed shock, but there was no time to waste. Abby would have heard the pistol shot, and she’d be in a panic by now.
Rose’s breath wheezed in and out of her lungs as she scrambled up the back staircase to the third floor, either from the exertion, or the shock of nearly shooting a duke—she couldn’t have said which.
She couldn’t have said much of anything at that moment, but she regained her tongue quickly enough when she burst onto the third-floor landing and nearly ran straight into Abby, who was creeping toward the stairs with a hairbrush in one hand, and a pillow clutched to her chest with the other. “A shot. I h-heard a pistol shot.”
“I know, I know.” Rose held out her hands in a calming gesture. “But it’s all right, Abby, I promise you.”
“All right? How can it be all right?” Abby brandished the hairbrush in her fist. “Is he still downstairs? I’ll teach him not to darken our doorstep again, I will!”
