“Ah, yes. I’d like to know what this means, Your Grace. It sounds like this: ‘voglio scoparti.’”
His eyes flew wide.
His entire body went as rigid as the mast of a ship.
Then his face went slowly—and what seemed like irrevocably—hard.
Oh God. Terrifying!
“Miss Wylde,” he said icily. “I cannot tell if you are... is thisflirting? . . . in some—well, I can onlycall itastounding—way, or if you’re trying to disconcert me. Both are inadvisable, and arguably, impossible.”
“Oh, no. Oh, dear. I’m not! You should see your face... your expression... oh, it’s a bad one, isn’t it?”
She brought her hands to her face, then deliberately forced them down and folded them tightly together in her lap and regarded him anxiously.
His expression hovered somewhere between scalding indignation, exasperation, and rank astonishment.
Still, her need to know what it meant far outweighed the mortification. He was never going to like her; she would need to get used to not caring. And now she really needed to know what that phrase meant.
He sighed heavily. “Since virtue demands I cannot say the English version aloud...”
He dunked his quill, scrawled something on the foolscap, and pushed it across to her.
She read it and she could feel herself going pink.
Her voice seemed to have been entirely burned away. She would never speak again from mortification.
She could notbelieveshe had actually said this aloud to a duke.
She could notbelievea duke had scrawled it on a piece of foolscap and passed it to her.
A silence ensued, during which she could feel his eyes boring into her lowered head.
She finally mustered the nerve to lift her face again.
To find his expression ever-so-slightly less censoriousness, but no less exasperated. The cold outrage had shifted to something more curious. Though it was hardly sympathetic.
“Miss Wylde... do men actuallyspeakto you that way?”
She cleared her throat. “Not all of them. I should say most of the Italian performers I meet are perfect gentlemen. But I’m afraid more than a few have. I’ve heard it several times. A stagehand, once. Another time, a man in the chorus. A tenor with whom I once sang. They slip it in.”
His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
“Into conversation!” she added hurriedly, aghast. “I’ve heard it more than once, and something about the inflection has always made me suspicious. They slip it in between other phrases, doubtless to... amuse themselves at my expense.”
His eyebrows remained in scowl position, and he assessed her with what she was beginning to think of as the subaltern glare. It would have withered a weaker person, and she supposed he’d cultivated it for that purpose.
Though gradually, before her eyes, she watched his expression become more thoughtful.
“Where is your father?”
She stared at him. It was the last question she’d been expecting.
“My father died when I was fourteen years old.”
“Your... husband?”
“I haven’t a husband.”
