Chapter 3 #3
Immensely enjoying this reversal of roles, he held his hands up mockingly and demonstrated.
Miss Kearsley’s inky lashes moved in a slow up-and-down sweep.
Wordlessly, she dropped her arms to her side.
“You were saying?”
Her eyes. It was Miss Kearsley eyes. Specifically, the lady’s long, silky eyelashes. They did the same work as her revealing tones, expressive irises, and long-winded words. The rapid flutter displayed confusion.
She chewed lightly on her thin, colorless lower lip.
A practiced beauty seduced with that worrying.
This woman, neither a beauty nor skilled coquette, did so when deep in thought.
He stored away that second, newly acquired detail about his bizarre companion.
“I understand this is disconcerting, Greg—Your Grace.” She wisely corrected herself. “I made an egregious error.”
Argyll winged an eyebrow. “Just one?”
“Having seen our fate, I know our union is inevitable.” The haunting quality of her voice sent a wave of coldness through him.
“But you do not have the vision, and so you are left in the dark.” She swept forward and linked their arms. “Our lives intersect, Gregory.” The searing intensity of her brown eyes speared him to his spot.
A shiver traveled his spine.
He let her go. “And this is where they diverge, Miss Kearsley.”
“You are in want of a wife.”
“A specific one.” One with a figure curved in the places he liked them.
“Miss Emmy Caldecott.”
He thinned his gaze on her. “How do you know that?” No one, not his partners, not his sisters, not even DuMond, whom he kept not a single secret from.
She parted her lips.
“Never tell me.” He scraped a derisive stare up and down her unremarkable form. “Your vision.”
The oddity draped in black nodded.
Note, sarcasm sailed beyond Miss Kearsley. As did common sense. Logic. Beauty. The list really was unending.
“Nor, in honesty, have you been terribly careful about your interest. You’ve been tiptoeing about the wallflowers when, as you pointed out, your preference is for exquisite beauties like Emmy, which can only account for your being there.”
“I…” Flummoxed, he searched for which charge to answer. “I do not tiptoe.”
“No, you more stalk than anything.”
Was she serious? Or was this more again of her disconcerting humor?
“Emmy?” Argyll kept his tones neutral. “I take it you are friends with Miss Caldecott.”
She nodded at another question that wasn’t a question.
Argyll did a full, slow circle about the stiffly-erect chit. “Whatever will she say when she finds out you tried to steal the title duchess from her deserving hands?”
When she gave him nothing but more bothersome silence, he pushed her further. “Your commitment to being my duchess, that you’d betray a friend, is a level of ruthlessness I can appreciate. It is perhaps the most interesting thing about you, Miss Kearsley.”
“I don’t want to be a duchess.”
“Ah, a sacrifice you will make based on your vision.”
She nodded.
When would he remember to save his sarcasm with this one?
“You cannot marry her, Gregory.”
“Because I’m meant to marry you.”
She paused, weighing her words, a feat he’d believed impossible.
Then…
“Yes. Also, Emmy will not marry you, Gregory.”
“Because my former partner, Craven, won’t allow it?”
That accounted for a not so small reason in his selection. With Mac Diggory back from the dead and throwing support behind his son, the Earl of Dynevor, and Latimer by default, Argyll had enough to contend with.
“Her family loves her too much to let you marry her, Gregory.”
“And what of your family?” he drawled. “Do they not hold you in the same esteem as Miss Caldecott’s family?”
“I love them too much not to marry you.”
That took a moment to untangle. “Ah, I see it. You’d be sacrificing yourself at the proverbial and literal altar.”
Miss Kearsley started to nod. She caught herself.
Too late.
Argyll laughed. God, the chit was fascinating in her own way. He’d give her that.
“I saw it, Gregory. All of it.”
Had she been a flesh and blood woman with even a remote hint of passion in her veins, her cryptic tones would convey something other than their absolute nothingness.
“You saw us married. Me and…” He slanted a look down his nose. “You.”
There came no tears, nor visible recoil over his slight.
She nodded, and lifted her palms and shoulders in a shrug that said, Utter madness, but there you have it.
That was it? Concurrence on the offended lady’s part?
Boredom, suspicion, something compelled him to remain.
Argyll folded his arms. “And what were we doing in this vision of yours, Miss Kearsley?”
“We were in a grand residence.”
Again, her gaze went distant. This time, as she spoke, she did so to only one of them.
And it wasn’t Argyll. “I saw our wedding,” she murmured.
“Three men whom you know well, were there. And two…” That crease of contemplation furrowed between her strongly arched eyebrows.
“Nay, three women Two share the same face. And the other is darker. We were there together.” Her vacant eyes expanded.
“It is your office. So floral. So light.”
The strangest, darkest unease settled in his bones.
He searched for some hint that she’d been set up by someone, that even now Argyll was at the center of some outrageous act a friend, a partner, or enemy were having at his expense.
The lady’s eyes came into focus on Argyll. She’d journeyed back from whatever far-off place she’d gone, and he along with her.
Miss Kearsley gripped him by the coat sleeve. “We do not have much time, Gregory.”
A fresh wave of disquiet shivered through him. He forced his rogue’s humor through. “The only promising idea there is it would be a short union.”
Sadness slipped into her eyes. “It is a no, then.”
Him married to her? A woman who favored widow’s weeds when she wasn’t even a widow. Who spoke in a flat, toneless way that raised the flesh of a fellow’s arm? Another shudder went through him.
“A firm, unwavering, definitive no, Miss Kearsley.”
If he were a better man, he’d have felt a shade of remorse.
“If you’ll excuse me. I have my actual future-bride to court.”
After Argyll dropped a cruelly mocking bow, he took his leave.
The Lady in Black’s chillingly empty gaze followed Argyll until he’d gone. And it lingered, even longer, after.