I would know how my days would look.
He’d never even thought about that. A military life meant he’d known, for the most part, how all of his days would look, often to the minute. Not precisely whatoccurredduring a campaign, of course, but he knew that there would be one. It had been a fact of his methodical, rung-by-rung climb to the rank of general. And then, as a commander, he’d been able to determine how his day and the days of thousands of others looked now.
How difficult would it be to find and keep one’s bearings in life when the road wasn’t at all defined? When life came at you as though you were a moving target?
When one was falling, the reflex was to flail out for any steadying handhold, he supposed. He conceded to himself that what she had managed to accomplish—from the cobbler’s shop to Covent Garden and the King’s Theater—was actually rather astonishing. When viewed in this light, it was rather a miracle that she’d been made visible at all by the gossip columns.
He sat with this realization quietly. He considered what to say.
“I spoke hastily, Miss Wylde. A habit of barking orders, and I apologize. I instinctively could not picture it, because... I think extraordinary circumstances are, for better or worse, the lot of extraordinary people. Not everyone is equal to the caprices of fate. Most would lose their heads, literally or figuratively, when confronted with some of the challenges you’ve faced. It just seems to me that you are destined for a more remarkable life.”
As he said it, he was bemused to realize he did, indeed, believe this.
Before his eyes, gradually, slowly, a glow gorgeously suffused her. As though his words had reached every corner of her. It was as elemental as a sunrise.
He had somehow forgotten the simple, piercing joy of making someone happy.
He hadn’t thought her anyone’s notion of a siren,with the pale gold dust on her cheeks and the dark gold tips of her lashes and the rose gold hair that seemed to want to burst from its pins.
For that fleeting instant, he couldn’t imagine preferring to look at anything or anyone else in the world. Those idiots who’d shot at each other had gotten one thing right: she was unequivocally beautiful.
Her bodice lifted and slowly fell as she seemed to take a steadying breath.
“‘Caprices’...?” she ventured quietly.
He’d been staring.
More accurately: staring and frowning.
“Whims,” he said shortly. “‘Vicissitudes’ is another word you might like. It means very nearly the same thing.”
He wrote the words down for her.
There was a little silence.
“So you’ve not yet wed at all, Miss Wylde, unlike Primrose and Phillip?”
It hadn’t occurred to him to ask this yet. It was possible her husband had died.
Or abandoned her.
Men being what they were.
For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer; she was under no obligation to do it. Uncertainty flickered across her face. Then she quirked the corner of her mouth. “Opera singers don’t precisely fit into anyone’s notion of a good or proper wife. And then, once you get that first scandalous duel under your belt, well...”
She shrugged one shoulder.
She wasn’t wrong. She now occupied a singular place in their very stratified society. People liked their labels; they wed to climb rungs, to cement a place in the world. Marriage was a strategic initiative, not a whim.
But Miss Wylde, he suspected, still possessed more than a drop or two of romanticism.
It was difficult to fully kill, romanticism was. Worse than a weed.
War killed it neatly, though.
So, for that matter, did marriage.
“I should think there are some compensations in the theater. I imagine it is all drama and passionate declarations and so forth all day long.”
