Chapter 2 #2
“And you,” she retorted, “have yet to find out who I am.”
“Then show me.”
He leaned in, enough to feel the thread between them pull until it vibrated. His thumb still rested on her lower lip. The pulse in his wrist quickened. The scent of orange blossom permeated the cold air.
She lifted her chin as if she meant to escape him by a hair. He followed that hair.
“What would you have of me?” he asked softly. “Silence? A vow? A promise written in my own hand? Tell me the shape of the assurance that will satisfy you.”
“The simplest one,” she answered.
“Which is?”
“That you will cease to pester me.”
He laughed, quiet and genuine. “You are very certain of the word.”
“It is the only one that fits.”
“Then be satisfied. I will not pester you.”
He drew his thumb the smallest degree, as if to remove it in honorable retreat. She opened her mouth and bit him.
The pressure was not fierce. It startled rather than hurt.
Heat ripped through him, hot and jarring. He withdrew his hand out of instinct. She had already taken a step back.
“It will do,” she said, her breathing even once more. “I will not tell anyone. Not about your companion. Not about your lack of a mask. Not about your fondness for quiet paths. Provided you keep your promise.”
He looked at the imprint of her teeth on his thumb and could not decide whether to laugh or curse. Maybe do both. “You bite.”
“Apparently.” She bobbed a quick curtsy that signaled dismissal. “Good night, Your Grace.”
“Wait,” he called.
She was already moving, her skirts whispering, the lantern catching a pale gleam at her throat.
She did not run. She did not look back. She slipped into the light with the same speed with which she had arrived, a woman vanishing where everyone could see her.
Victor stood there a moment longer, hand at his side, pulse settling in spoiled increments. Then he lifted his thumb. The sting had already faded.
“She bites,” he muttered under his breath, smiling.
He returned to the ballroom when sense resumed its proper place.
The orchestra had shifted to a set that favored obedience over innovation.
Dancers flowed, bowed, and turned like water poured from one crystal bowl into another.
The chandeliers made saints of ordinary people. The air tasted of musk and sweat.
He traced the edges of the crowd with that careful nonchalance that hid purpose. A lady in a pale green gown wore a mask edged with black lace. Another, in peacock plume, laughed too brightly for the moment.
The mystery woman could be either. She could also be neither. He had not seen her face. He had only seen the way she held her posture, and the clean click of her fan, and the momentary widening of her eyes.
He disliked not knowing. It was a childish admission, but it was true.
He inclined his head here and there, received bows, and returned murmured greetings. Respect followed him as it followed all men who held power neatly and employed it with an appearance of justice.
Respect was useful. It kept people from looking too closely at the few places he preferred to keep hidden.
“Your Grace,” greeted Lord Farthew, a portly gentleman with an honest interest in agriculture and a dishonest interest in cards. “A pleasure to see you out. The wheat report you circulated was most instructive.”
“I am pleased to be of use,” Victor said. His tone was civil, for his mind was elsewhere. “I trust Lady Farthew is well.”
“Very,” Lord Farthew replied, melting like butter under the smallest application of courtesy. He fumbled a bow and retreated.
It was always like this. They admired. They deferred. They never drew too near.
His reputation did the rest. Victor could feel it at his back like a draft. They said he held himself perfectly. They said he lived by the rules. They said he had inherited his father’s temper and would one day reveal it in some spectacular display of cruelty.
He had given them nothing to prove the last point. Yet speculation thrived on air that slipped under locked doors.
He pushed the thought away.
He half turned, looking for his mother’s white plume. Instead, he saw a familiar slant of lazy elegance beside a potted palm. The figure straightened, grinned, and braved the crush with the nonchalance of a man for whom all rooms had been designed.
“Greystone,” Roderick Hales, the Duke of Wycliffe, greeted with pleasure that managed to sound both genuine and irreverent. “I thought you were toying with crop yields this evening. Yet here you are, in satin.”
“Wycliffe,” Victor uttered. “You are late.”
“I was detained by a countess who wished to show me her lapdog,” Roderick replied. “The lapdog had more sense than its mistress. It attempted to bite me.”
Victor made a small sound that would have been a laugh from a freer man. He lifted his hand, examined his thumbnail, then set his glove more precisely.
Roderick’s eyes caught the motion. “You look as if something has amused you,” he drawled. “Someone, perhaps?”
“No one,” Victor answered. He looked toward the terrace doors. “How have you been, Wycliffe?”
“Idle. Wicked. Improving.” Roderick tilted his head. “Where is the widow?”
Victor considered lying, but it never worked with Roderick. The man did not collect secrets. He noticed patterns. He kept counsel. Those qualities were why Victor had grown to tolerate, and then appreciate, his company. “Gone.”
“Already.” Roderick’s eyebrows arched. “How brisk.”
“Not brisk,” Victor countered. “Concluded.”
Roderick’s grin flashed. “Ah. Seven.”
“Yes.”
“Always seven,” Roderick mused. “The number is neat to look at. I have never seen the virtue of it.”
“The virtue is the ending,” Victor explained. “Clean, civil, with no hope encouraged where none can be satisfied.”
Roderick’s mouth curved. “You speak like a vicar giving a sermon.”
“I speak as a man who prefers order.”
“And yet you have a… look,” Roderick said mildly. “As if some part of the evening had not gone as expected.”
Victor allowed his gaze to drift over the crowd. Masks, silk, light. Somewhere in that mass of prettiness was a woman with a quick tongue and a cooler temper. A woman who had bitten him when warned.
The memory sharpened his senses like cold water.
“The garden was busy,” he admitted.
Roderick’s opinion of busy gardens was generous. “Were you seen?”
“Yes.”
“By whom?”
“A lady.”
“A lady who will talk?”
Victor shook his head once. “A lady who assured me she would not, provided I ceased to pester her.”
Roderick’s laughter was a low, delighted thing. “A woman who puts you under terms. I would like to meet her.”
“I don’t want to keep talking about this. The matter has been resolved. She gave me her word,” Victor said.
Roderick’s mouth twitched.
“Anyway,” Victor continued, “ending it with the widow was the purpose of the evening.”
Roderick sobered a shade. “And she understands.”
“She understands very well. It was our seventh night.” Victor let the words hang in the air. “There will not be an eighth.”
“Then you will sleep, and tomorrow you will bully your steward into discovering a tupping schedule that suits your favorite stallion,” Roderick said. “Everything returns to order.”
Victor inclined his head.
He looked again toward the terrace, but he did not spot the lady’s mask. For some reason, he could feel her watching him.
It was not an unpleasant sensation. It was not sensible either.
“Come,” Roderick uttered. “There is a gentleman in need of a lesson in whist, and I promised him the pain of your company.”
“I am in no mood to teach whist.”
“That is why it will be so enjoyable,” Roderick replied. He touched Victor’s sleeve. “You are scowling. If you scowl, they will say that you beat your footmen.”
“They already say that.” Victor shrugged.
“Yes,” Roderick agreed, happy as a cat in a patch of sun. “And they are wrong.”
Victor pressed his lips together to mask a smile. “Lead the way.”
They turned into the heat and light.
Victor let the crowd swallow him. For the first time in a long while, he felt that something had shifted within him, like a perfectly hung picture slipping half an inch.
He squared his shoulders. He corrected the line. He would not let it slip again.