Chapter 9
Celeste marched into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. Curse the wretched hour she had stepped into his war room. The maddening arrogance of that man.
She ripped off her gloves and flung them onto the nearest chair.
A fie on him!
Had she not been civil? Had she not attempted logic? And he—he had mocked her? To dismiss Shakespeare as if he were nothing but foolishness? Ha! A warlord debating love! The sheer outlandishness of it. As if romance could be drilled into order, like his blasted officers.
She exhaled sharply, but the heat under her skin refused to leave. The room felt too small, too thick with lingering tension, as if the general was still looking down at her, consuming all the air with his patrician nose.
A throat cleared.
Celeste whirled, her fury colliding with two pairs of waiting eyes.
Rue leaned against the vanity, arms folded, her expression hovering somewhere between concern and morbid curiosity, like a soldier debating whether the wounded could still march or if they were about to confess something scandalous.
“No matter the casualties,” Rue said solemnly. “It was worth it. I will never forget Ambrose killing at the piano. A heroic sacrifice. The man fell, but he fell with honor.”
Prue stood near the fireplace, wringing her hands, her eyes feverishly bright. “Tonight, I shall have to drag my naked flesh over hot coals just to erase the memory of Thomas’s thighs working through his ronde de jambes.”
Rue came closer, her expression worried. “You didn’t get yourself into trouble, did you?”
Celeste straightened her spine. “I did not.”
Not precisely anyway… If being sent away like a child after daring to argue with Britain’s most immovable, infuriating, arrogant warlord counted as trouble, then she had walked right into a battlefield unarmed.
Curse him!
He refused to listen to reason. Her fingers twitched at her sides, itching to… to scrape those epaulets from his shoulders. Yes, that’s what she wanted. Of course, she would have to go on pointe to reach them, but she would do it, if only to take him down a notch!
“Prue, be a dear and fetch me a sheet of paper,” Celeste said, sweet as spun sugar, and marched toward the writing desk.
Prue’s eyes widened. “A paper, Lady Celeste? For writing your last words?”
Celeste huffed. “Last words? Goodness, no. I’m in perfect health—though you may summon a physician if I don’t prove my point and expire from sheer vexation.”
She flounced into the chair, but rather than her usual graceful descent, she landed with an unladylike thump, making the desk wobble in protest. Well. That was dramatic. Next time she was in a fit, she would remember to be more generous to her posterior.
She snatched the quill from the inkwell. Ink splattered onto the parchment in a most uncooperative blot.
She glared at it. Traitor.
No matter.
The Earl of Hawkhurst thought himself a strategist? A great military mind? She would outmaneuver him with the sharpest weapon of all—reason. A list. A perfect, irrefutable list of every logical way a heroine found love.
She set the quill to paper. If he wanted to talk of marriage like a campaign, then she would draw the battle plans.
Juliet hadn’t sat politely and waited—she had climbed a bloody balcony.
Rosalind disguised herself as a boy and taught her beloved how to love.
Beatrice spared Benedick into surrender.
Even Hermia ran into the woods with nothing but a dream and a fool’s heart.
One by one, she scribbled their names in defiance, each heroine a dagger in Hawk’s regimented worldview. Love was not assigned. It was earned. It was fought for. And she would prove it—on parchment, on stage, or on the battlefield of his blasted drawing room.
“What was the punishment?” Rue asked. “Did he make you run drills barefoot?”
“He didn’t punish me,” Celeste said quickly. Too quickly. “He only threatened to… tan my hide.”
“Oh, Lady Cecilia!” Prue wailed. “How shall you endure it? Taken to the study, the heavy oak door shutting behind you… Your back stripped to his hungry eyes.”
Celeste blinked rapidly, her cheeks flushing.
Prue moaned. “Will it be the whip? Or will it be his own large hand pressing against your heated skin—”
Celeste’s stomach clenched, heat unfurling in flickering waves, and she covered her ears.
Rue groaned, rubbing her temples. “For the love of all things holy, woman. He just scolded her. Not tied her to the mast and flogged her into submission.”
Celeste forced her chin up. What she was feeling was plain anger… Still, the strange flutter in her stomach refused to fade.
Rue exhaled and gripped Celeste’s hand. “Don’t worry if you shook in your slippers, love. The general is formidable. Grown men have cried for less.”
Celeste stilled. Her mind flashed backward—to the war room.
Papillon should have struggled and fled.
But… not once had she trembled. Not when he had stared her down, his dark eyes a storm she should have drowned in.
Not when he had closed the space between them.
Not when his breath had fanned over her cheek, when his sheer force had wrapped around her.
She was furious.
She was—alive. But she was not afraid. A slow, strange warmth bloomed in her chest, curling there like a secret, powerful thing. She had faced the most fearsome man in Britain, and she had not trembled.