Chapter 3
“Truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.”
Lord Byron
Hart barely managed to collect his wits before the attendees turned in search of the commotion.
The quick-thinking Winterly pounded his gavel at the rostrum. “What am I bid?”
Me. I’m the blasted commotion.
His pulse pounded fiercely.
The bloody hell I am.
It was her. The vexing, shamefully playful Lady Fleur McQuoid.
Hart gave her a hard stare that would send even a pea-brain fleeing.
Fleur smiled. “I know your staff and family are loyal.”
She had no idea the trouble she was going to find herself.
“I advise you to stop trying to bait me.” Any further. “It won’t work.”
“I’m merely trying to point out how ridiculous it is you think my family would send me to smooth things over between our families, or that they could force me to go, when you were clever enough to notice the last person I wanted to be joined by was you, you infuriating clodpole,” she growled.
The lady’s fearlessness should repel. It didn’t. It evoked something profound inside him.
It also called to Mr. Winterly in the middle of bidding.
The auctioneer, previously impeccable in his callings, stumbled. His countenance grew faintly dazed.
Hart followed the addled fellow’s stare.
The little hoyden beside Hart fluttered her curled, sweeping lashes.
The stupid fellow had noted that which Hart had only just noticed—Lady Fleur was a “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
“Five pence for Lot 25A Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Any advance-Last-Call-at-five-pence,” Mr. Winterly said, not even pausing to catch a breath between seeing the bid and closing it. “Sold, to the lady in the back.” He banged the gavel.
The enamored auctioneer had responded as the lady no doubt intended—he brought the auction to a quick end.
The beautiful minx knew the effect she had on men, and that made Hart want to snarl.
Winterly swiftly moved on to announce the next lot.
“Fluttering those lovely lashes of yours to get what you want, you saucy flirt,” he muttered.
“And what exactly is it you think I wanted?” she asked, amused.
“Congratulations,” he said, not meaning it. “You won your desired title.”
If there were a God, someone would come collect the lady. Hartwell glanced briefly at the back door. In vain.
“Are you looking for someone or thinking I will leave?”
Hoping she’d take herself off. The lady was giving him a bloody headache.
“Both.” Both being tied to her leaving was neither here nor there.
“That is rude, Hartwell,” she said, folding her arms and chastening him like a child. “Not surprising. But rude.”
Lady Fleur gave him a smile that said she was hardly offended.
The lady’s brass should utterly repel Hart. It didn’t. It enflamed him.
“Gentlemen, we are continuing the sale…”
“That wasn’t the book I wanted,” she informed him, as a new title was carried to the rostrum.
“Really?” he asked dryly. “I believe the only reason you’re still here is to discomfit me.”
The lady placed her stacked palms under her chin and bestowed him with one of those dangerous lash-fluttering of hers. “I discomfit you?”
Despite himself, Hart’s lips tugged at the corners. “Don’t sound so pleased about it, minx.”
“How could I not be?” She gave a toss of her high curls. “I rattle the all-powerful, imposing Duke of Hartwell.”
He ignored her latest attempt to needle.
“Imposing, am I, Fleur?”
“To most.”
“But not to you?”
Damn himself to hell. He heard the childlike petulance.
The minx did too.
Fleur turned another smile up at him. “Hartwell, if I found you imposing, I would have left when you attempted your first glower.”
She was driving him bloody mad. “I didn’t attempt,” he said between gritted teeth. “I did glower.”
“Yes, you did,” she said soothingly. “Which speaks to my point. Others find you imposing, I, however, do not.” The saucy minx patted his left knee with her lilac lace and satin-encased palm. The frill of her silly lace gloves against his tan trousers added a heightened sexuality.
Lady Fleur drew her fingers back like an afterthought and stared at the podium ahead.
“…We move now to the first edition works and manuscripts…”
While Winterly blathered on, Hart endured his body’s swift reaction to Lady Fleur’s innocent touch. He wasn’t a man who felt guilty over his hungerings. The way he saw it, lust was the natural reaction to a spirited beauty. That the spirited beauty happened to be a lady was neither here nor there.
What was new to Hartwell? Being casually touched by a lady.
His thick thigh had made her long, graceful fingers look small.
“…Lot 425…”
A buzz rolled over the crowd.
Hart ignored it.
“Why did you buy Maturin’s Wanderer?”
Fleur did not take her eyes from the center stage. “I didn’t want to speak with you anymore. The best five pence ever spent.”
Hart didn’t know whether to kiss her or throw her.
Winterly set his gavel down hard several times. “Gentlemen, pray silence. Permit me to remind you of decorum.”
Decorum be damned.
“The hell you purchased it for that reason,” he said, far more amused than he ought to be.
“Shh.” Fleur tapped one of her lacy fingertips against her lips. “Mr. Winterly is ordering us to be silent.”
“…Who bids on this coveted work…”
“Winterly knows better. He was speaking to the fools in front, and if it was on some odd chance for me, he could take his ordering to the Devil. He’ll fare better getting his wishes met.”
“You mean than with you, all-mighty, all-powerful duke?”
“Yes.”
Fleur fought another laugh—and lost.
Gaze forward, she batted her eyelashes at poor Mr. Winterly.
“I have…from the lady… Do I hear…?”
Once she managed to pull the attention off of them, Fleur whispered out the side of her mouth. “Hush, Hart.”
It was the first time she used his name—and she had done so while making eyes at the auctioneer. A roar filled his ears. And all because the little flirt used her wiles right in front of Hart. Like he wasn’t even bloody there.
“Fluttering those lovely lashes at Winterly didn’t close the auction this time,” he taunted.
“I would never be so lucky,” she said under her breath.
“What was that?”
“…Forty-five from…”
“Shh.”
“Now, you’re silent?”
Finally, she turned from the flurry at the front of the room to Hart. “I’m trying to be silent. You should do the same,” she scolded him like a naughty lad.
“There is nothing I should or should not do.” Hart folded his arms at his chest. “I do whatever I want.”
The lady pointed her eyes at the ceiling.
“…I…see a bid from the lady in the amount of…”
“I will not cease, Fleur.”
“You mean you won’t stop badgering me?” she muttered.
“Seventy-five guineas…look to your right…!”
He smiled. “Six of one, half dozen of the other.”
“Eighty to the gentleman in the red frockcoat!”
“Oh, rot it. Chilton anticipates the value to rise, and it seemed a wise investment. Now will you let up?”
Hart would not—surprisingly, he found himself enjoying teasing the minx.
“You trusted a man who is operating the auction, and prospers with increased bids, to most accurately advise you?”
“…One hundred…”
“Do I trust a man who operates a business with his wife as an equal partner, and values her intellect and acumen? Yes.”
If the chit moved a smidge further on her seat to be free of him, she’d fall right on her delectable arse.
Lady Fleur hadn’t just come for a title; she had actual knowledge of books and the bibliophile and book dealer couple, Baron and Baroness Chilton.
“You are a bluestocking,” he said, remarking on the least peculiar thing about the chit.
Fleur gifted him a smile. “I believe the word you seek is ‘well-read.’”
“We are saying the same thing.”
“No, we aren’t.” She lifted shining eyes to his.
“What a strange thing you are,” he puzzled aloud. Fascinating. But peculiar.
“Most would choose the word ‘person,’ but given the empty-headed fluff you keep company with, Hartwell, you likely mean ‘woman.’”
She jerked her tapered chin defiantly up.
“…Thank you. One hundred seventy-five is bid…”
“What do you know about the women I keep company with?”
“Who said I was speaking about women?” she rejoined with genuine mirth this time. “I based my deduction on…” She sent a sideways glance Hart’s way. “Well, you.”
The hard stare he gave her would have withered stronger men.
This impertinent baggage yawned.
He wanted to snarl.
She reduced him to a young-lad-like state where he wanted to snatch the pins from her hair and shake her implacable composure. The man he actually was wanted to slide his fingers through her voluminous sun-kissed gold curls and claim her insolent mouth—
The maddening creature craned her head.
“…three hundred guineas…”
Hart gritted his teeth. Curse her. Now she had him imagining that long, slender, delicate neck of hers arched back as he ravaged her lips.
“…For the first time, three hundred guineas…”
The lady tried Hart and tempted him at the same time.
Currently, even more so, with her face entrancingly flushed and putting him in mind of all the things he could do to bring that very same color all over her body.
“…I will ask a second time…”
“Oh, will you just do it already?”
If she were anyone other than a debutante virgin and related through marriage to Hart’s brother, he’d do so happily and wearing the Devil’s own smile as he did.
“…If there are no additional bids. Lord Byron’s Cantos I through III, with the drafted Cantos III through V to be published in the future, to the lady…”
What in hell!
Every attendee present had turned in their seats to get a look at the lady about to win the coveted lot.
Not Hartwell. He looked next to him.
A composed Fleur sat confidently regal and unconcerned by the scandal she had made by bidding on that scandalous collection.
This woman had him so turned upside down that he had almost missed his entire bloody reason for being here.
“Since there are no further bids…”
The hell she would.