Every one of them knocked the breath out of her, unsettled her in a very primal way, and all but guaranteed she would try for another one, whether or not that made sense or was wise. (It didn’t and it wasn’t.)
His barely restrained impatience implied he knew she could do well, he expected her to do well, and he wouldn’t tolerate if shedidn’tdo well. She set out to impress him.
And his brisk yet fervent “well done’s” were frankly as satisfying as the thunderous applause of a stuffed-to-the-brim theater when she sang Giancarlo Giannini’s aria fromThe Glass Rose.
This morning over breakfast, Mr. Delacorte, bless his heart, offered to take a message explaining her whereabouts to Giancarlo at the theater since he was meeting a friend at a pub across from it, and to fetch their handbills advertising the Night of the Nightingale from the printer.
“Tall, dark wavy hair, lots of blinding teeth,” she told him. “Signor Giancarlo Giannini. They should be in rehearsals. But please don’t give it to anyone else.”
The lurking possibility that someone might shout, “There’s the ’arlot! Get ’er!” and lunge at her witha pitchfork or a knife kept her very close to The Grand Palace on the Thames, which ironically was located in what was considered one of the more dangerous parts of London. She was uncertain whether she ought to gauge the emotional temperature of a city by the one small murderous mob that had appeared beneath her window. She’d worn an enormous wig for one of her Opera House performances, but only a tiara and rose-colored silk dress for the afternoon performance. It was conceivable she’d be recognized.
Somehow she’d failed to consider that singing to a crowd of thousands at the Opera House would ever be adisadvantage.
No more gossip items had appeared in the newspaper at least. Perhaps Madame LeCroix had confused everyone about her character, and they hadn’t the faintest idea what to say now.
So she was safe for now here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
And because Valkirk was a gentleman, for the first time she was offered a space in which to be entirely herself. But in some ways she missed the relative buffer of their previous mutual resentment.
Because this space began to fill with an awareness that felt anything but safe.
She supposed that was all her own doing. He sank into her imagination the way the sun from the window warmed her skin. She memorized the interesting cragginess of his face. She estimated that his shoulders were about twice the width ofher own. And when she thought about it, the entirety of her skin seemed to hum with restlessness, imagining how it might feel . . . to be covered with the entirety of him.
She did not know how any of this could be helped, and she supposed that was her own weakness. It had been documented in the newspaper that she was not, er, made of stone.
He certainly never fixed his eyes on her cleavage, for instance, and it was rightthere.
And yet she was truly glad he didn’t.
But there occurred every afternoon a moment more potent than a cleavage gaze, and it lasted all of a few seconds.
When she arrived in the doorway of the room and first laid eyes on him, there was always a distinct stillness to him. As if his breath was held. It was rather like the stillness of an arrow after it was shot into the red heart of a target.
Each time, she could have sworn that those embers in his eyes flared hotly. But vanished swiftly.
And this took her breath away every time.
She was now ten minutes away from this moment. She’d one more sentence to write to complete her assignment.
She scrawled, “The duke has brown eyes,” reached for the sander, and then happened to glance down. She froze.
Shocked to discover that what she’d actually written was:
The duke has beautiful eyes.
Her heart jolted. How onearth...? It had sprung from somewhere within her that apparently was outside the jurisdiction of her senses.
She stared at it. Her heart began to jab painfully at her as she mischievously entertained leaving the sentence just like that. Imagining him discovering it at the end of all those other sentences.
What if she did?
What then?
She swiftly realized her nerve did not extend to that. He was, indeed, a gentleman, and she was grateful. It seemed intrusive and unfair to spring such a thing upon him.
And dangerous and absurd to reveal such a vulnerability in herself.
She scratched out “beautiful” and replaced it emphatically with the infinitely safer “brown.”
