There was a beat of silence.
“No,” he said.
It should not have felt like absolution. She was not Catholic. This was not confession. He was not St. Peter at the Gates. But he was the national arbiter of honor, and it was the best she was going to do, and it was enough.
She exhaled.
“And I don’t feel as thoughmyhonor was harmed—im...”
“Impugned.”
“Even so, one can be angry and not lose one’s head. Is that not so?”
“Yes. Being angry without losing my head is, in fact, my specialty.”
“I thought glaring was.”
A vanishingly swift smile here. “The glaring is usually a result of that.”
There was a pause.
“And so, Your Grace, that is my story. Knowing it, you may continue to hold me in contempt if you so choose, but I should be obliged if you would disguise it better.”
His eyes flared in fleeting astonishment. His jawtensed against a reflexive jolt of temper, or perhaps arrogance.
But she’d been right. He was a fair man.
But what settled in was a certain wry speculation. For the space of a few seconds, he assessed her.
“I hold you in the utmost respect, Miss Wylde,” he said quietly.
She gave him a little smile.
He continued to study her, a tiny furrow forming between his eyes.
“Gentilmente non sparatevi l’un l’altro,” he said suddenly, firmly.
She gave a start.
“Kindly do not shoot each other,” he translated.
“Sono spaventata,” he continued. His voice softened. “I am frightened.”
He wrote them down for her to take away.
She departed in possession of a sheet of foolscap that said, “I want to fuck you” in Italian and English, below which were written the word “impugn” and two new sets of Italian nouns (buildings and food) and some more verbs. All in all, representative of a satisfying day’s work, if a confusing document for anyone who might happen to come across it out of context.
Chapter Eight
Mariana tapped the feathered end of her quill against her lips, mulling the last sentence she wanted to write in order to complete the assignment the duke had given her. The clock downstairs had bonged the quarter hour. She was due in the Annex in about fifteen minutes.
Now that they’d peeled away the last of their previous mutual resentment, she’d felt oddly a bit exposed and off balance during the last three days’ worth of lessons with the Duke of Valkirk. As if she’d been dressed for and braced against a stiff wind all her life and it had abruptly stopped blowing.
Because her experience of the world of men had thus far included three types: the men who wanted to employ her to sing; the men who wanted to shag her; and the men who needed her to sing and also wanted to shag her.
The duke was an entirely new type. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word, not in the Lord Kilhone or Lord Revell sense of the word. He wasverybrisk, frequently impatient, but always respectful and polite, and unless she counted theoccasional devastatingly sensual smile that implied he knewpreciselywhat she was up to, he did not take up the flirtation baton that she could not resist, every now and then, extending.
Every one of those smiles were like a swift peek through a crack into the earth at something molten.
