She clamped her teeth together as she wrote. She could sense his eyes on her, and the fierce tick of his mind. He was as consequential as a bloody planet, sitting there.
She finished and looked up, to find him watching her.
“I’d like to make something clear, Miss Wylde. I—and the other gentlemen in residence here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, andgentlemenin general—do not ever and would not ever speak about or to women that way, either in the smoking room or in any other social context.”
Which was lovely to hear, of course. Perhaps hemeant it to be reassuring. But the underlying implication was that the contexts in which she moved were at fault. That if these words were being said in her presence, then the men in question were surely not gentlemen.
And then what did that make her?Spirited, she supposed.
She already knew whathethought that made her.
“It’s very gratifying to hear that you don’t seem to have any difficulty respecting women, Your Grace,” she said pleasantly. “Or perhaps your respect is reserved to a type of woman?”
There was a pause.
“Women are people, Miss Wylde. All people deserve and are accorded respect until they prove they do not deserve it. It’s a simple rule, really.” He issued these words with a sort of patient, maddening certainty. As though they ought to have been self-evident but he was unsurprised she didn’t know it.
“How might someone lose your respect?”
His mouth curved slightly.
He knew precisely what she was asking. Because the splinter, as it were, had not yet been pulled entirely out of their association. Something remained unsaid.
Her heart began to jab at her breastbone. She realized she was afraid of the answer. But suddenly she could not endure another day without it.
“If one has ever needed to tell a soldier’s mother that he was killed in battle, Miss Wylde, they would perhaps lose all respect for frivolous, careless people who engage in thoughtless, reckless activities that endanger their lives and the lives of others.”
The words were elegantly drawled at first, but they gradually grew more taut until the last few fair glittered with ice.
His composure did not so much as shift a hair. But she heard it. It was a sort of futile fury at fate itself, at deaths not even he could have prevented, even with all of his brilliant rules and strategies. It was pain as much as it was anger. She could feel it echoing in the pit of her stomach.
It only surprised her in that she would not have guessed at it. She sat with this realization a moment.
And there they had it.
She breathed in. Breathed out. Mustering her nerve.
“I would like to ask a question, Your Grace.”
“Very well,” he said easily.
“What is your understanding of the... events... that led to my being here at The Grand Palace on the Thames?”
“That your two jealous lovers fought over you while you were present, a duel challenge was issued, the duel was fought on the spot, and a promising young man was nearly killed.”
He delivered this with brutal, unvarnished calm.
She was still, but her cheeks were hot. “‘Lovers.’ Plural. That word certainly tripped off your tongue, Your Grace.” She said it somewhat bitterly.
“May I refer you to an earlier conversationwherein I shared with you that it’s nigh on impossible to shock or offend me.”
“Irritateyou, on the other hand...”
She reviewed his expression and decided it was wiser not to finish that sentence.
“I should like to say that I don’t owe you an explanation of what truly transpired that night. Would you agree?”
“I cannot disagree.”
