Chapter Thirty
Celine had expected the duke to drive the way she did everything else: with cool control. In fact, the duke drove like a maniac. She drove with such absolute confidence in her abilities that she didn’t leave any margin for error.
The phaeton was a highflier, its lines bold, simple, and elegant, as though it had been drawn against the world in pencil and lovingly coloured. The seat perched impossibly high. The tiniest misjudgement, and the duke would tip them directly into the nearest ditch.
Celine, jostled against the duke’s side and away again, the wind rushing beneath her bonnet and making the ribbons dance, was grinning from ear to ear. It was all she could do not to let out a loud whoop of joy.
The duke slanted a look at her (the quick intensity of diamonds), then snorted and looked back to the road. “Enjoying yourself?”
After a struggle, quickly lost, she said, “Yes.” Then again, “Yes.”
The duke looked at her, brows raised, and shook her head in amazement.
“Watch the road,” Celine said. She couldn’t stop smiling. Her whole body was smiling. She had been indoors too long. She had needed to rest until suddenly she couldn’t stand it anymore. Her body felt strong and full to the brim with energy. Overflowing.
She watched the scenery that passed, watched as the houses eased farther apart and the throngs of people thinned, like someone had taken the busy streets of London by either end and stretched them wide, allowing a sighing space where trees and sky and grazing livestock might enter.
Soon the roads were narrower and emptier, and the duke’s matched horses settled into a long stride.
They crossed a river on whose bank a girl sat beneath a weeping willow, her face disconsolate, a goat nibbling nearby with a fat pink ribbon tied around its neck. The sunlight painted the scene as a masterpiece, a moment captured. They passed swiftly by.
“A perfect spring day,” she said warmly. “I had supposed England would be grey, and raining.”
When no response came, she looked around at the duke—and found the duke looking back, brows raised. “I wondered when you might speak,” the duke said, “but I hadn’t expected niceties about the weather.”
She pouted and said, “Are you questioning my professional skill, sir?” She was flirting. Blatantly. Happily. She ignored the distant, alarmed voice that told her to stop.
The duke looked back to the road, the corners of her lips depressing in one of those minute signs of pleasure Celine had taken such care to learn when they spoke in Paris. “You astonish me. Is conversation part of the public woman’s art?”
The sun, the speed, the—in all honesty, the duke’s company—She couldn’t deny herself the enjoyment she felt in her whole body. She wanted more.
“Of course you would question my conversation, having been too impatient to experience it yourself,” she said, the allusion to Paris a piece of daring. “But others find my company a great pleasure. I have seen my witticisms repeated in the morning papers more times than I can count.”
“Can you count?” the duke returned blandly, and Celine made a sound of scandalised astonishment.
In truth, she was delighted by the petty riposte.
The duke’s lips depressed deeper in the corners, drawing her cheeks into smiling lines.
“Go on, then,” the duke said. “Show me what you can do. Converse like a professional.”
She sat back in the seat and regarded the duke. She was, as it happened, a gifted conversationalist, but this was her greater skill. To know what conversation would most please the person with whom she spoke.
She turned her head, considering, and ran an absent finger across her lips. They drove through true countryside now, long expanses of sun-drenched green rushing by. For once, there wasn’t a single footman riding with them.
“Well?” the duke said, flicking an amused glance at her.
“Prepare yourself,” she said. “I am about to do the impossible.”
“And?”
“I am going to charm you silly.”
The duke turned back to the road, and a smile spread slowly over her mouth.
Her hard, sculpted, treacherous mouth. Her cheekbones were high and sharp, her nose an aristocratic line from its proud arch to its fine, pointed tip.
And everywhere, the subtle incursions of happiness—narrowed eyes, lines around her nostrils, the peeping tip of her left incisor.
Celine realised she was staring, but she couldn’t look away.
The duke’s happiness, once witnessed, took up residence within her own breast. A small, piercing pain.
It didn’t make any sense. It shouldn’t be so meaningful to her.
It shouldn’t have crossed into her. It shouldn’t feel like the only thing of its kind in all the world, utterly unique, and her breast the only safe place for it.