This was so disorienting, she nearly brought a hand up to touch her face to make sure it was still there.
“How do you do, Miss Wylde.” His voice was a wonder. All bass she could feel right in her chest. She noticed his dark hair was a bit longer than fashionable, and unlike the rest of him, hinted at a disinclination to remain in formation. A shock of it dropped over one brow, and in this a few silver threads glinted.
They regarded each other in silence. Hers purely dumbstruck.
His unmoved.
No pupil flare, no twinkle, no slow lowering of eyelids to appreciative slits. Nothing remotely akin to the things she was accustomed to seeing in the faces of men the moment they got a look at her. Instead: hard, speculative, and cynical.
The backs of her arms went cold.
She had a terrible feeling that the Duke of Valkirk read the entire paper. Even the gossip columns.
“Miss Wylde,” he said politely, in that voice. “I apologize if this is a presumption, but you’ve the same name as someone who has lately made an appearance in theLondon Timeswith reference to a duel.”
Her heart slowly, slowly contracted into an icy fist.
He wasn’t one bit sorry for that “presumption.”
And did heeverblink?
He seemed to be, in an entirely dispassionate way, merely curious about how she’d respond. As though he couldn’t care one way or the other, but he might as well prod with a stick at a small, flat animal to see whether it was sleeping or dead.
He already knew that her only options were to lie or to admit to being at the center of a sordid scandal.
Or: to turn tail and run out of the room.
She understood instantly that he was a terrifying man.
Dear Mama—I regret to inform you that the Duke of Valkirk is a right bastard.
Then again, he was still a man. Wasn’t he? Even if he was orders of magnitude more potent in real life than other men? She had not yet met one she couldn’t ultimately decipher. They’dallthus farregrettably proved the same beneath the skin, even if this one’s skin was made of battered steel plate, granite, and meanness.
She would need to be very careful. Most of her instincts had been clubbed senseless, but pride and flirtation, both possibly stronger than they ought to be, formed a hopeful team.
“Everything I know about you I’ve learned from the newspaper as well, Your Grace,” she said lightly. “There’s something we have in common.”
“That, and having the misfortune to be present when young men were shot. Of course I considered it my duty to prevent it, if I could.” He said this mildly.
She went still, as winded as though she’d slammed into an invisible wall.
The subtle implication being that she’d all but stood there and cheered on two men aiming pistols at each other as though it were a horse race. After, no doubt, untangling her naked limbs from the pile they’d all formed during their sexual debauch.
“Since you’ve evidently found shelter here, Miss Wylde, you may yet be ignorant of the fact that Lord Kilhone continues to cling to life,” he added.
How could anyone say such brutally direct things and make them sound like casual conversation?
“I’m happy to hear it. It wasn’t for lack of trying to get himself killed,” she said, mimicking his lightness. Because she owed her survival to the fact that she was a quick learner.
Contempt would have been better than whatever it was he directed at her from beneath those thick brows now. It wasn’t even indifference, precisely. His seen-everything eyes—she could imagine they’d gazed upon shattered bodies on the battlefield, down the barrels of rifles and cannons, at kings and lords and enlisted men and doubtless every imaginable type of female, naked and clothed—burned through her as though she were scarcely worth the effort of keeping them open.
She’d once seen a flaming scrap of newspaper cartwheeling through the air on a breeze. That’s precisely how she felt.
And now he was just toying with her. As though this, not spillikins, washisidea of a game.
A stray thought meandered through her focus: nowonderwe won the war. For God’s sake.
“I believe they’re out dragging the Thames for you,” he told her. “The current theory as to your disappearance is that you cast yourself in out of a fit of remorse.”
