Chapter One #3
He did not take his eyes from the fire. “That depends entirely on whether you intended to win.”
Heat climbed her throat, washing up towards the sweep of her auburn hair, and she was grateful for the low light, though it did nothing to hide the sudden warmth in her amber eyes.
“I intended no such thing. I intended to refuse her, and I did refuse her, and then Mr. Ashwick opened his mouth on the other side of a shrubbery and I stopped intending anything sensible at all.”
“A pity. I should have enjoyed watching you try to win. You do not lose gracefully. It is written all over you.”
“I lose very gracefully. I have had practice enough at it this Season.”
“That is not losing, Miss Fairbourne. That is being robbed and thanked for the convenience. The two are easily confused, but they are not the same.”
The duke rose from the chair without hurry and crossed the small distance between them, stopping an arm’s length away, close enough that she had to lift her chin to hold his gaze and not one inch closer. He did not touch her. He did not so much as reach.
“A dare is a dangerous game to play with a man like me, Miss Fairbourne. You will find I always collect.”
She did not step back, though her heel had found the shelf behind her. “And if the lady has changed her mind?”
“Then the lady keeps her kiss, and I keep my disappointment, and we agree the debt stands open. I am a patient creditor. It is nearly my only virtue.”
“You speak of a kiss as though it were an account at your bank.”
“Most things are an account at somebody’s bank. I merely have the poor manners to say so aloud.”
“And what interest would you charge on such a debt?”
“That would depend entirely upon the borrower.” He looked at her a moment longer than was strictly decent. “You are not frightened of me. I confess I find it novel.”
“I have been frightened of several things tonight, Your Grace.” She tipped her chin up the last half inch it had left to give. “You are, at present, the least of them.”
She had a proper look at him then, which the corridor and the shrubbery had not allowed.
He was perhaps forty, and built long rather than broad, and he wore black because black asked nothing of a man.
His hair was dark and going iron at the temples in the manner that improves some faces and ruins others, and it had improved his.
The face itself was all straight lines and no apology, with a mouth that had plainly been unkind for a living, and grey eyes that did not move about the room the way other men’s did, because they had already finished with the room and come to rest on her.
“You wound me. I have worked years for my reputation.”
“Then you have been badly served by it, because it did not survive five minutes of your own conversation.”
Which was the moment the library door swung wide.
Lamplight spilled in from the corridor with the noise of the ball.
Julian Ashwick stood framed in the doorway with three curious guests ranged behind him, wearing an expression of such immaculate concern that she understood at once.
Marianne had told him where she had gone, in the way one tells a thing to make a wager pay, and had not troubled to wonder what else it might pay for.
He had waited, and the open door and the arranged witnesses had been the plan from the very start.
“Miss Fairbourne,” Julian said, warm with false alarm. “Your family has been searching everywhere for you.”
Nobody in the doorway moved, and behind Julian a woman in grey lifted her fan and murmured to her neighbour, and the murmuring had already begun.
Alone at midnight in a dark room with the Duke of Wycliffe near enough to touch, and the last three weeks folded up small and cold inside Lucy’s chest, because there was no version of the story that saved her now.
Then the duke stepped, unhurried, to her side.
He did not take her arm, because he did not need to.
He placed himself beside her so that any account of the room now had to be an account of them both, and when he spoke he spoke to Julian with a mild and lethal courtesy, having already decided the outcome and being content to wait for everyone else to catch up.
“Excellent,” said the Duke of Wycliffe. “Then you may tell them they have found the future Duchess of Wycliffe.”
Julian’s mouth opened and produced nothing at all for the length of a breath. “Wycliffe. You cannot be serious.”
“I am almost never serious, Ashwick. This is one of the rare occasions, and I recommend you enjoy it, since I do not expect to repeat myself.” Godfrey inclined his head a precise degree towards the woman in swan-grey silk and her busy fan.
“You will want to be first with the news. I should hate to deprive you of the pleasure.”
Lucy turned to look at him. The words came slowly, one at a time, arriving long after the ground beneath her had gone, and she stood in the ruin of her careful forgettable plan and understood, far too late to do anything about it, that the most dangerous man in London had just announced a betrothal she had never once agreed to.