Then she paused.
“It might reassure you to know, Your Grace, that Giancarlo has only a basic command of English, and it was likely a charity to him that you were direct in a way that could not be misconstrued. I suppose it’s an impulse of his age. It seems a reflex with men to have a go if they think they can get away with it. That is, why haven’t you tried to kiss me?”
Those last words emerged like a bullet she hadn’t known was in the chamber.
She’d shocked herself breathless. She felt as though they’d entered the room like a cymbal crash.
The duke didn’t seem to hear them.
His head remained fixed on his foolscap; his quill continued scratching in leaps and darts, making those consonants like the masts on ships and the swoops below like their decks. “Because if I were to kiss you, Miss Wylde...” He jabbed a period at the end of a sentence and looked up at her. “It would ruin you for all other men.”
There ensued an instant of absolute silence and stillness.
Such that when the gold sliver of the second hand on the clock shifted, it echoed like a gunshot.
She sat, airless, as the words all but detonated in her, sending a shocking onslaught of heat through her, tensing her muscles, waking something raw and new and so needful that her eyes burned, and she could not say whether it was longing or fury.
She knew, with a certain despair, that he only spoke truth.
He did not lift a brow. He didn’t duck his head to fix her with a smolder. Such embellishments were wholly unnecessary. After all, everyone understood what went on inside volcanos. It was why one did not recklessly tiptoe about their rims.
Now was the time for a light, insouciant laugh, or a joke.
She parted her lips to do it.
There emerged a sound like the wheeze of a gently squeezed concertina.
He gestured to her foolscap. “Shall I have a look?” he said mildly.
He seemed to have complete command of his voice. His expression hadn’t changed.
But she had no doubt that he’d read her as clearly as he read Italian or the map of a battlefield.
Mutely, her palms damp, she pushed it over to him.
She didn’t take her eyes from him when he lowered his head. She studied the severe lines of him: the narrow part in his hair, the vast horizontal shelf of his shoulders. The gold-brown hands with the copper hair at his wrists. She realized only then that while she was learning Italian, she’d also been learning him with an unseemly hunger.
She’d written only one sentence.
But his head stayed lowered a second or two longer than this warranted.
She wondered—it occurred to her—that perhaps his own composure wasn’t entirely shatterproof. That perhaps he had shocked himself.
And at this notion, her heartbeat became nearly painful in its slamming.
He read aloud finally.
“‘I use my sword to cut the roast of beef.’”
He slowly raised his head. His eyes had gathered that light she had come to so appreciate, to count on, when he looked at her. His expression was difficult to interpret. He, too, was schooling his features. She was certain of it.
However, she suspected part of this was because he was tempted to laugh.
“I thought they ought to be put to some use during peacetime,” she said, subdued. “Swords.”
He nodded once, gravely. “Swords might indeed languish in peacetime if there were no women to defend from composers.”
Damn.
