Chapter 1 #3
“Do you expect an apology, Lady Fleur?”
Her annoyance didn’t bother him; it amused him.
“What I expect is irrelevant given you are incapable of apologizing, so it needn’t matter if I did.” Fleur sniffed at the air.
“Rest assured, we have not come to bid on the same book, Lady Fleur.”
“Of a certainty,” Fleur agreed. “You’ll be looking for…” She regarded him carefully. “Not Shakespeare’s First Folios.”
“You believe I don’t appreciate the Great Bard?”
“I anticipate your collection already includes Shakespeare’s First Folios, Your Grace.”
A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth; one that said he was amused—and she had been accurate.
Fleur tapped a finger against her chin. What had brought this hallowed duke here? A duke who was part-owner in a shipping venture.
It came to her; she stopped abruptly.
“You believe that you have it, do you?” His smug tones said he believed she did not.
“It could be A Voyage into the Levant by Tournefort.”
Hartwell nodded slowly.
Her triumph proved short-lived.
“It could be, but it is not.”
“That is helpful.”
His mouth lifted at a corner.
Her heart did its obligatory jump. He really wasn’t all that bad-looking when he smiled. Neither classically nor conventionally handsome, but strikingly distinctive.
That reluctant grin did him favors that his too-square features did not.
Fleur sighed.
She hated herself for noticing that, on account of everyone noticing Hartwell, and she refused to be among their ranks.
“Strange you found it helpful, while a beleaguered sigh tells of your disappointment, Fleur.”
She carried plenty of disappointment, not about her guessing game with Hartwell but with herself for being oddly charmed. Fleur would burn this gorgeous library and all its books and history down before ever confessing such a sin.
And so, she turned the tables. “Tell me, Your Grace, do you always assign emotions to involuntary respiratory movements?”
His brow lifted in surprise.
“DaVinci’s claims,” she said. “Not mine.” Settling in, Fleur arranged her skirts artfully about her and brought her palms together.
“In fact, he asserted that when one forces a breath out too rapidly, it can result in a faint. Therefore, mine was merely a natural movement of my lungs that had nothing to do with any disappointment on my part.” She hoped she had confused him as much as she had confused herself.
Fleur checked.
Pleased with his slightly stunned expression, she buried a smile.
A murmur fell over the crowd as Baron Chilton started his walk to the auctioneer’s podium. The bibliomaniacs all took to the edge of their seats, their whispered excitement reached a crescendo, then cut to a quick silence when the baron took his place.
“Gentlemen,” he began, his voice authoritative, compelling the room. “I would first begin by welcoming you to…”
“Hartwell?” Fleur whispered through the introductions portion.
The duke glanced down at her.
“It seems we are about to find what brought us here. Best of luck with your book.” She held out her fingers.
He stared at her gloved palm, and then at Fleur like she was the housecat who had dropped a mouse on his lap.
The small-feeling sensation crept in, but she refused him the pleasure. Fleur took his fingers, pumped them slightly, and focused her attention on what had brought her here—winning.
Or she tried to. Even with their gloves and barriers between them, warmth radiated from where their hands touched.
Burned, Fleur snatched her fingers to her lap. She clenched and unclenched them to get rid of their tingling.
The auctioneer gaveled the room to order.
“Gentlemen, welcome! Please note the rules of the house: The highest bidder to be the buyer; if any dispute arises, the lot is to be put up again…”
As the handsome young gentleman, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Baron Chilton, proceeded to outline the auction rules Fleur’s mind was elsewhere.
It was on Hartwell.
“We begin the sale with the new releases. Lot 25…”
She wasn’t so much concerned with her physical awareness of the duke. Why would she be? In a world where dandies and fellows puffed themselves up with padding, the duke took care with his form, and she was a woman who appreciated a gentleman with a good physique. That could all be explained away.
The part that could not?
Fleur found herself somewhat enjoying his company today.
All right, more than somewhat. If she had to put a percentage upon it, she would say it was a bit over sixty percent. At least, that number held when he was not acting the total blockhead.
“…The Pirate by Walter Scott—”
Fleur and Hartwell’s backs climbed the exact same moment and they looked at one another.
“No,” he mouthed.
“Nor mine,” she whispered.
His eyes held hers with a gentle amusement.
“Do I hear three pounds?”
She nudged her knee against his. “That’s not the book I’m here for.”
“Three pounds!”
“Three pounds for The Pirate. A fine provenance, gentlemen. Do I hear…?
Hartwell leaned lower. “Which is it, then?” he whispered.
“You’ll have to wait and see,” she said coyly.
“I have six pounds for lot twenty-five. Any advance?”
“Six!”
Fleur’s mind wouldn’t let her stay on the current bidding war between Mr. Heber Reverand and Dr. Issac Gossett.
“Hartwell?” she whispered.
Hartwell pulled his attention from the front. A question glinted in his faintly disgruntled gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
Frowning, he glanced at her. “For what?”
“I’m distracting you from bidding on The P—”
“I don’t want the work.” Get on with your question, he said, without saying.
“Did you love Meghan?” she blurted.
“No.”
“Eight pounds fifty from the distinguished gentleman at the front.”
And she believed him.
She would rather she didn’t.
Sad for the jilted duke who had been about to marry for reasons other than love, Fleur forgot all about the fact he considered her family his enemy.
Back when she was a girl of nine or ten, spending a rare summer at her family’s Kent property, she had come upon a village boy.
He had a dead frog pinned by all four tiny, spindly legs to a board.
When she had confronted him, the lad insisted he only did so in the name of science.
That had been the first broken nose she had delivered.
She had cried for weeks—not about hurting the Little Scientist, bugger him—but for the loss of that Natterjack toad.
All the amusement Hartwell packed into a single syllable on the matter of loving—or in his case, not loving—the woman he had been betrothed to somehow disturbed Fleur even more than the Tragic Summer of the Frog—as she came to call that day in Kent.
Not that she wanted him to suffer a broken heart. But that he didn’t left her sad for him.
All the men in Fleur’s life freely smiled. They believed in love. They married for love.
How was this man even related to the affable, playful Captain Jeremy Tremaine, who desperately loved Fleur’s cousin, Linnie?
And more, what had made the Duke of Hartwell this way?