“Will you be all right now, Miss Wylde?” he said finally, a little stiffly.
“Oh, of course,” she said quickly. A flush rose swiftly again. “I’ll just sit here a moment and drink my tea. Please do carry on with your day, Your Grace. Thank you.”
“It was no trouble at all.”
He turned at once to leave. And as he moved across the foyer, he did not slow his pace. But he could not keep his head from turning, just slightly, to look back.
She was still. The light that always seemed to animate her, so that she perpetually glowed like a little lantern, seemed dimmed. She looked weary, stunned, and ashamed.
He was shocked by how this cleaved him.
He turned away abruptly, as if to protect her from his gaze.
Once back in the anteroom, James lowered himself slowly and stiffly into the chair, as if he were gingerly carrying something volatile.
He did not recognize his mood.
He did not recognize himself.
He took up his quill and aimed his gaze out the window, but he didn’t see the river, the milky-blue sky, the man urinating against the building, the black cat making a slinky left turn into the alley.
A knot like a spiked, mailed fist sat between his ribs. His mood eluded naming, and its persistence remained all out of proportion to the circumstances, which had been common enough: he’d come upon a man behaving like a cad, and he’d put a stop to it. Young men, especially charming, good-looking young men, had seized upon such opportunities since the world began, and it was the job of honorable men to stop it when they could.
That was it. Something about that word.
Common.
He closed his eyes as he again saw Giancarlo’s hands at Mariana’s waist, her elbow, her hip again as she twisted and dodged and backed away. If a duke had not issued a threat to his life in the doorway, the man would no doubt have kept at it until she’d had no choice but to knee him in the baubles. Or capitulate. It had been a diversion to that man. It was clear he’d done it lightly.
Thewrongnessof this. It had felt like watching someone use the grail for a spittoon. Or an emerald for a shuttlecock. “Sacrilege” seemed like hyperbole, considering, but James couldn’t think of a better one.
All he knew was that she was not common.
The more accurate—and troubling—word was “rare.”
He knew, in a way that made his breathing go peculiarly shallow, that she was rare.
The flustered, shamed spots of pink in her cheeks, her chin resolutely hiked as she visibly gathered the tinselly shreds of her usual composure about her—he understood viscerally now something he suspected she did not yet fully realize, and he saw it because he was a man. There would be no ultimate winning against the Giancarlos of the world. Flirtation and charm and firmly issued Italian or English requests to behave might forestall them. But she could not ever fully stop them.
And it would surely wear her out in the end.
Unless and until she acquired the armor of a diva.
That mailed fist between his ribs clenched more tightly.
He drew in a long, long breath to prove he could, and released it. He had frightened her, which he regretted, and awed her, which he did not. Her gratitude felt like a warmth against his skin, felt like a medal pinned to his chest.
And then, as he’d stood there unable to speak, a slow-dawning radiance supplanted uncertainty as her eyes searched his. She’d found something there.
He wondered what she’d seen.
She drank her lukewarm tea, and sat in the reception room. She wanted to be alone for a while in a room where, for the first time in her life, a man had come to her defense.
And looked at her the way the Duke of Valkirk had just looked at her before he’d left the room.
She was chagrined she hadn’t finished her assignment, but she fetched the foolscap from her room anyway, before she took herself off to her Italian lesson. There was no sense in wasting it.
She paused for a moment in the doorway, as usual.
