She came to an abrupt halt when she noticed a man standing between Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy.
Something about him seemed immediately as stark and strange as if an obelisk had been dropped into the sitting room. The lines of him—the span of his shoulders, the incline between them and his waist, his jaw—were as elegant, severe, and clean as if his maker had trimmed them out with the tip of a rapier. The top of her head, she suspected, would just about reach the knot in his cravat.
She was a cobbler’s daughter and she always looked down. His boots—Hoby, if she had to guess—were black mirrors.
Mrs. Hardy saw her, and her face lit in welcome. “Your Grace—”
Your Grace? Holy Mother of—!
“—we should like to introduce Miss Mariana Wylde. Miss Wylde, His Grace, the Duke of Valkirk.”
Thusly the first legend she’d ever met in the flesh turned to face her directly.
She didn’t know whether she would call him handsome. Only that his presence worked on her senses like the clash of a gong.
His nose seemed to have been broken at least once, but the result suited the terrain of his face, and intriguingly suggested he’d come up against violence and walked away the victor. His mouth was long and rather fine. Beneath thick, straight brows, his gaze was deep-set and uncomfortably penetrating, as though he was forever searching for enemies on the far horizon. He could probably frisk a soul for sins and, once discovered, keep the knowledge of them to himself, for strategic use at a later date.
The stark colors he wore implied he thought he needed no embellishment. She was inclined to agree. But she knew one would need to pay a tailor dizzying fortunes for that fit and that fabric, not to mention the staff to keep it jet black and snow white.
She was instinctively certain there wasn’t a soft place on the man.
When she wrote to her mother about this later, she would leave out the part where she stared up at him, mutely, like a looby, for a full three seconds, and go right into the part where she curtsied.
Because her curtsy was a thing of beauty. She knew, because it had gotten rave notices when she’d played a perfidious courtier in The Glass Rose, before she’d been promoted to queen for a night, which was more or less immediately before two men decided to shoot at each other over her. She had not been born genteel, but damned if she couldn’t convince anybody that she was.
“Your Grace . . .” Nerves had made her voice go a little too seductively breathy. “Meeting you is an honor I never dreamed I’d have in this lifetime.”
When she was upright, she thought it best to appear simultaneously devastating and virtuous. This meant lowering her gaze shyly at least a second or two. This was a brutal sacrifice, because her entire being wanted to continue studying his face to decide how she felt about it.
She raised her head what seemed like a vast distance to meet his eyes.
Only to discover that a screen of faint but unmistakable bored cynicism had moved across his features.
This was so disorienting, she nearly brought a hand up to touch her face to make sure it was still there.
“How do you do, Miss Wylde.” His voice was a wonder. All bass she could feel right in her chest. She noticed his dark hair was a bit longer than fashionable, and unlike the rest of him, hinted at a disinclination to remain in formation. A shock of it dropped over one brow, and in this a few silver threads glinted.
They regarded each other in silence. Hers purely dumbstruck.
His unmoved.
No pupil flare, no twinkle, no slow lowering of eyelids to appreciative slits. Nothing remotely akin to the things she was accustomed to seeing in the faces of men the moment they got a look at her. Instead: hard, speculative, and cynical.
The backs of her arms went cold.
She had a terrible feeling that the Duke of Valkirk read the entire paper. Even the gossip columns.
“Miss Wylde,” he said politely, in that voice. “I apologize if this is a presumption, but you’ve the same name as someone who has lately made an appearance in the London Times with reference to a duel.”
Her heart slowly, slowly contracted into an icy fist.
He wasn’t one bit sorry for that “presumption.”
And did he ever blink?
He seemed to be, in an entirely dispassionate way, merely curious about how she’d respond. As though he couldn’t care one way or the other, but he might as well prod with a stick at a small, flat animal to see whether it was sleeping or dead.
He already knew that her only options were to lie or to admit to being at the center of a sordid scandal.
Or: to turn tail and run out of the room.
She understood instantly that he was a terrifying man.
Dear Mama—I regret to inform you that the Duke of Valkirk is a right bastard.
Then again, he was still a man. Wasn’t he? Even if he was orders of magnitude more potent in real life than other men? She had not yet met one she couldn’t ultimately decipher. They’d all thus far regrettably proved the same beneath the skin, even if this one’s skin was made of battered steel plate, granite, and meanness.
She would need to be very careful. Most of her instincts had been clubbed senseless, but pride and flirtation, both possibly stronger than they ought to be, formed a hopeful team.
“Everything I know about you I’ve learned from the newspaper as well, Your Grace,” she said lightly. “There’s something we have in common.”
“That, and having the misfortune to be present when young men were shot. Of course I considered it my duty to prevent it, if I could.” He said this mildly.
She went still, as winded as though she’d slammed into an invisible wall.
The subtle implication being that she’d all but stood there and cheered on two men aiming pistols at each other as though it were a horse race. After, no doubt, untangling her naked limbs from the pile they’d all formed during their sexual debauch.
“Since you’ve evidently found shelter here, Miss Wylde, you may yet be ignorant of the fact that Lord Kilhone continues to cling to life,” he added.
How could anyone say such brutally direct things and make them sound like casual conversation?
“I’m happy to hear it. It wasn’t for lack of trying to get himself killed,” she said, mimicking his lightness. Because she owed her survival to the fact that she was a quick learner.
Contempt would have been better than whatever it was he directed at her from beneath those thick brows now. It wasn’t even indifference, precisely. His seen-everything eyes—she could imagine they’d gazed upon shattered bodies on the battlefield, down the barrels of rifles and cannons, at kings and lords and enlisted men and doubtless every imaginable type of female, naked and clothed—burned through her as though she were scarcely worth the effort of keeping them open.
She’d once seen a flaming scrap of newspaper cartwheeling through the air on a breeze. That’s precisely how she felt.
And now he was just toying with her. As though this, not spillikins, was his idea of a game.
A stray thought meandered through her focus: no wonder we won the war. For God’s sake.
“I believe they’re out dragging the Thames for you,” he told her. “The current theory as to your disappearance is that you cast yourself in out of a fit of remorse.”
Who was she if he’d burned her down to nothing? Pride struggled through again. Of a certainty there were more beautiful women in the world. But she doubted there were any more bloody-minded.
“I suppose I’m touched that I’ve been missed at all,” she said lightly, self-deprecatingly. “I understand some of the rooms here even have a view of the Thames.”
“My rooms do.”
Rooms. Plural. Because of course a single room could never possibly contain his big, fat duke head.
“Well, only think, Your Grace. If this were a game of blindman’s buff, they’d find me in no time as the river is not more than, oh, fifty yards from where we stand now.”
Behind her, her best audience, Mr. Delacorte, chuckled softly. Bless him.
“Ah. So you’re saying what happened was a game to you?”
His tone was mild, curious. His voice was baritone silk.
His eyes were mercilessly negating.
She could imagine the testicles of a thousand enemy soldiers shriveling at the tone.
She would be damned if she would give him the satisfaction of watching her prostrate herself for his absolution. She’d done nothing wrong.
If only she truly believed this, in her heart of hearts.
If only she knew for certain there was nothing she could have done differently.
“No doubt a man of your stature seldom has time for games, so perhaps you’ve forgotten the meaning of the word, Your Grace,” she soothed. “You ought to play a few games with us.” She raised her voice a little. “But I must warn you, Mrs. Pariseau is to spillikins what Gentleman Jackson is to boxing.”
Mrs. Pariseau, who did like her and could be charmed, laughed. “And Miss Wylde will win your estate in Faro, Your Grace, if you aren’t careful.” She winked.
Mariana froze. Oh, for God’s sake.
“I shall always be careful around Miss Wylde,” the duke said, and winked back at Mrs. Pariseau, winning her devotion for life.
He settled in with a pen and a sheet of foolscap, and, Mariana was certain, forgot her promptly.
The duke didn’t forget Mariana.
Or rather, one would have to be first remembered to be forgotten. She’d simply disappeared from his thoughts, the way the tables and chairs in the parlor had now that he was no longer in it.
She was right. To him, she did not signify.
He’d gone with some relief to the smoking room after about an hour of sitting in the drawing room, per the rules. And now he was thinking about his late wife, Eliza. Sometime during the seventeenth century, well before he’d bought his London townhouse to please her, the twenty-foot-high ceilings had been painted with blue skies and clouds, among which cherubs swathed in gossamer scarves cavorted. If one must have cherubs in the house, the ceiling was the best place for them, he’d thought grimly. He did not often look up. He’d always thought painting a sky on a ceiling confusingly suggested one would rather be outside. Which, for him, was generally true, so that’s where he went.
Metaphorically speaking, he’d been the smoking room in his marriage, and his wife had been the parlor just outside. They’d lived adjacent lives, with an invisible impermeable wall between.
His taste in art was more prosaic: he favored good paintings of horses and dogs and ships, preferably hung where he could see them, at eye-level. And quality in all things, damn the expense, and he’d been able to damn expenses for nigh on a decade. He’d slept rough on muddy ground as an ensign and on the finest four-poster beds in rooms so vast and marbled-clad one could hear the soft “tick” of a dropped crumb. He appreciated comfort. He preferred comfort.
But he frankly thought he might still love small, smoky rooms the best.
This one was kitted out in all the colors of a snug den: various shades of browns and mahoganies and creams, heavy curtains and a good rug scrolled in stain-hiding colors, on the premise that men are essentially animals once let out of sight of women, and it was of no use to fight it.
Big, sturdy chairs, a battered table perfect for propping up booted feet. Brandy in the snifter and cigars in the humidor. A cloud of smoke, and three other men leaning against the walls, in that reverie caused by the first suck on a good cheroot. He knew and liked and, more importantly, profoundly respected Hardy. He’d heard of Bolt, because everybody had. Hardy had attempted to describe Mr. Delacorte to him but, apparently at a loss for words, stopped himself. “You’ll see,” was all he’d said.
Mr. Delacorte was the first to break the silence. “We had an earl here some weeks ago,” he volunteered, hopefully. “His whole family. They felt right at home.”
“That’s a relief to know, Mr. Delacorte,” he said gravely, ironically. “Thank you.”
“Right nice bloke,” Mr. Delacorte added.
There was a little silence.
“. . . for an earl?” the duke suggested mildly.
This was, in fact, true. But Mr. Delacorte, who at the best of times was often a bit like an exuberant pet struggling to remain on its best behavior, was nobody’s fool. His smile was tentative. He was not willing to believe the duke was funny yet, lest his hopes be crushed.
“Put your trousers on one leg at a time, though, Your Grace, like the rest of us blokes, I imagine. Ha.”
The duke exhaled smoke. “I’ve a staff of a dozen who gently lift me with a series of pulleys and then lower me into them, lest I’m abraded unduly.”
“HA!” Delacorte bellowed happily and slapped his own thigh.
The duke gave a start.
From within their individual veils of smoke, Hardy and Bolt suppressed smiles.
“Some mornings I need to do a little dance to get into mine,” Delacorte said.
“I’ve gathered we’re fed well here. As dancing is not one of my talents, I shall have to exercise restraint at the dinner table,” the duke said.
Delacorte smiled broadly, as if the duke just kept exceeding his expectations. “They mend us well, here, too.” Delacorte gave a pat to the egg-like curve of his belly. “Shirts, waistcoats. Should you find things need letting out or fastening back on.”
“Very good to know.” He had an expensive tailor now and a fastidious, underutilized valet. He knew how to sew his own buttons, mend his clothes, black his boots, and knit, thanks to the army. He didn’t particularly want to do any of that anymore, but at forty-three years old, there was almost nothing he could not only survive, but shape into a triumph.
Except for his bloody book.
He looked across at Lucien Durand, Viscount Bolt, another former denizen of the gossip columns. No youth had been wilder or angrier. He’d been assumed drowned after a night at gaming hells a decade ago. Precisely the sort of man the duke had raised his own son not to be. Bolt had allegedly returned from the dead harder, wiser, and much reformed, so reformed that Hardy had gone into business with him.
Much more like the man Valkirk wished his son would become.
Sometimes Valkirk thought it was the only way anyone could transform: a death, metaphorical or otherwise.
“I’m acquainted with your father, Bolt.”
“I imagine your paths would have crossed,” Bolt said idly. “Given that there are only a handful of dukes in the world, the temptation to congregate must stir now and again.”
“Brexford,” the duke mused. “He’s a bit . . .”
There was a small, fraught silence.
“. . . of a bastard?” Lucien supplied. Ironically, given that he was a literal bastard.
The duke blew a languid smoke ring. “I was going to say he’s not very interesting, is he?”
It was such a scathingly perfect indictment of the man who had cut Lucien so callously out of his life that everyone else in the room went motionless with awe.
Brexford was dull, wealthy, shallow, smug, and content. He possessed no qualities a man like Valkirk could catch hold of or relate to.
“I suppose he isn’t.” Lucien was both amused and somewhat touched. “Faultless, though, one might say.”
It was a little dig, his own way of exercising Valkirk’s sense of humor.
Valkirk rewarded him with a small, patient smile.
There was his reputation as a sort of national saint. And then there was the man he truly was, which was a good deal more complicated. No one got through war with an unstained soul, especially not a brilliant, effective general. And everyone in this room, save Delacorte, had served in some way.
“I’m not related to any dukes,” Delacorte volunteered. “I’ve a brother, mind, and relatives scattered about Scotland and Ireland. But I’ve sold remedies to apothecaries in London who’ve sold them to dukes.”
Both Lucien and Captain Hardy had privately discussed how they both longed to meet and dreaded one day meeting Mr. Delacorte’s brother, not to mention his other relatives.
“Speaking of other people who allegedly wound up in the drink, but remain among us,” the duke said to Bolt, “I must say I did wonder at the inclusion of Miss Mariana Wylde among the guests, given the rigorous interview process.”
There was a sudden, wary silence and a swift glance exchanged between Bolt and Hardy.
Captain Hardy apparently lost the mute coin toss, so he spoke.
“My wife and Mrs. Durand are kind people possessed of excellent judgment,” Hardy began evenly, “and Miss Wylde was in immediate need of shelter when she came to us as she felt her life was in peril in her own home. They could not find it in their hearts to refuse her. We have so far found her to be a fine and amiable guest. You have my word of honor that our wives and everyone who lives here exercise the utmost care in protecting the privacy of our guests. And should Miss Wylde somehow manage to instigate a duel in the parlor, she’ll be promptly evicted.”
Hardy’s word of honor was worth gold.
But the duke was a little skeptical on one point. “Has anyone ever been evicted?”
“I was,” Captain Hardy said.
“. . . before we were married,” Captain Hardy expounded, faced with Valkirk’s incredulous silence and single arched brow.
“It’s a long story,” Hardy finally muttered.
The silence stretched.
“Wives,” the duke said, finally. Thoroughly, sardonically amused.
Both Lucien and Captain Hardy offered careful smiles.
As a blockade captain, Hardy had run notorious smugglers to ground. He and his men had set fire to all the boats in a village known to have abetted criminals. He was as ruthless and rigidly disciplined a man as Valkirk had ever met.
And he’d gone and married himself an Achilles’ heel.
Valkirk had been the son of a farmer and was a twenty-year-old soldier when he’d wed the youngest daughter of a viscount who’d been over-blessed with five of them. And while it was generally considered that Valkirk, then James Duncan Blackmore, had married well above his station, she was much later congratulated on her foresight to marry a man clearly destined for greatness. Perhaps she’d known. James hadn’t known. He’d only known that when one began life at the base of a mountain, the only option was to conquer the bloody hell out of the mountain. The safest view, the best air, were at the very top.
And so that’s what he’d done.
He knew a sort of steely, immutable pride that his grandchildren, and all who came after, would be safe from harm or struggle or the sort of upheaval and poverty he’d known as a child. He’d made certain of it. From up there, as a sort of lookout, he could keep all of them safe.
It was why, in large part, the presence of Mariana Wylde, of all people, set his teeth on edge. She, and the young men who congregated in the dressing rooms of opera singers, and those that milled about them, were shallow and volatile and reckless, an affront to his life’s work, destined for bad ends and, like people who were drowning, they pulled others in with them. She was pretty, he supposed, in an ordinary way. It was hard to imagine a man shooting anyone over her. Reputations like hers rubbed off on others like newsprint.
“The on dit is that you might be looking for a new one,” Lucien said.
“A new wife?” Delacorte perked up.
“There’s always on dit,” Valkirk said, taking pains to sound bored. “This is nothing new.”
There was a short silence.
“But the acceptance of invitations to dine . . . that’s a little new?” Lucien suggested slyly.
Hardy stared a warning at Lucien.
But Valkirk just shot Lucien a balefully amused glance. “I forgot that at least one of you was a member of White’s.”
Men liked to complain the women were gossips, but men, in his experience, were almost worse. Though he’d found listening to it at White’s had been useful more than once.
Lucien gave a low whistle. “Titled mamas must be all but shot-putting their daughters at you.”
Valkirk handed his empty brandy glass to Hardy, who had gestured questioningly with the decanter in his direction. “It’s really more of an underfoot type of thing. And an every-time-I-turn-around type of thing. And an ‘oh my goodness, I didn’t know you intended to visit the National Gallery today, Your Grace, have you met my daughter, Prudence?’ type of thing.”
He wasn’t unsympathetic. The mating games of the aristocracy were ridiculous on the surface and serious as a guillotine beneath.
He was a mere generation removed from peasants. He wanted a legacy that would withstand the test of centuries, an edifice of extraordinary wealth and power that could not be broken or breached, built from powerful ancient names entwined and intermarried. So if he married again, he’d marry damn well.
It just seemed ironic that he could choose any pretty thing with a title now when his first marriage had been built on gratitude (his) and ambition (mutual). Still, beneath—far, far beneath—the thick armor of cynicism and glory the years had layered on him, there remained something of that twenty-year-old soldier who could not believe a woman had said yes to him when he’d asked.
He didn’t know what he would base a new marriage on.
He didn’t hate the idea of more children.
Or a woman in his bed.
He’d never kept a mistress. That sort of arrangement had always struck him as impractical, improvident, an invitation to chaos. And not only that, dishonorable, if one was married. So few wives were truly ignorant of a husband’s mistress, and even fewer were happy about it if they knew. They merely endured the indignity. This struck him as unjust. Just because a man could get away with something didn’t mean he should.
He had not been a saint throughout his marriage.
But he could not have done that to his wife.
And he definitely wouldn’t do it now, when the nation, still somewhat reeling from a bloody, brutal war, looked to him as their hero, the example of all that was right and good. They needed him to be the man they believed him to be, honorable, decent, brave, a beacon they could point to and say, “Be like him, son.”
“So that’s why you’re hiding here to write your memoirs,” Delacorte mused shrewdly.
Bolt’s and Captain Hardy’s eyes went huge at the word “hiding” directed at, of all people, Valkirk.
With the vision born of decades of peering into the souls of men, Valkirk inspected Delacorte and found not a shred of guile; besides, his own pride was woven into his fiber. In other words, one couldn’t insult him into shooting anyone simply over a feckless soprano who juggled one too many lovers.
“I find The Grand Palace on the Thames, on the whole, a handsome and congenial place, and I expect to accomplish a good deal of work,” he said pleasantly.
In other words: yes.
“In other words, yes,” Delacorte said.
The duke couldn’t help it: he grinned at him.
“I expect it’s like a buffet, all those young ladies. Like when Helga sets out kippers, bacon, ham, and sausage on Sundays,” Delacorte suggested wistfully.
“If that’s what happens, I’m looking forward to Sunday,” the duke said.
“Too much choice can be a little dangerous, Your Grace,” Delacorte told him. “On my last trip to India—I’ve been importer for some years of remedies from the Orient and the like, you see, and I sell them to apothecaries here in England—I met a bloke who worked for the governor. Had a little headache and was offered a choice of about ten different headache powders, and he couldn’t decide, so he finally closed his eyes and chose one. He woke up three days later naked in the jungle next to a Bengal tiger who was sniffing his genitals. He had no idea how he got there.”
The three other men froze, drinks and cigars halfway to their mouths.
“The whiskers tickled him, you see,” Delacorte explained. “That’s why he woke up.”
“Friends to this day, he and the tiger,” he added into the elongating dumbstruck silence.
“Thank God for whiskers, I suppose,” the duke finally said.
Hardy and Bolt grinned.
“Perhaps it’s better to just let the wife come to you, Your Grace,” said Delacorte. “Sometimes they just show up, like, out of the blue.”
“I think that’s how you get a cat, Delacorte,” Captain Hardy said. “Not a wife.”
* * *
Dear Mama,
Mariana stared at the foolscap and mulled. The quill was in her hand, but she wasn’t yet prepared to write. She imagined saying:
Plans for the Night of the Nightingale are going splendidly! The ballroom has wonderful acoustics, and I think I know just what I’ll sing. We are going to decorate the ballroom like a garden in the moonlight, with flowers, trees, stars, and the moon! We are going to place handbills all over the city! And sell tickets for the show—for four shillings. Almost the cost of an opera box. It will be very exclusive.
Now, I fear I have some disappointing news: the Duke of Valkirk is a dull and unpleasant person. He only speaks a few words at a time and won’t join in any of the games in the sitting room at night. Perhaps because he’s getting old and tired. He has a fine line right across his forehead.
She wouldn’t, of course, write any of that to her mother, who was not free of lines, fine or otherwise, and she had no illusions about escaping that fate herself.
She in fact still hadn’t written anything at all to her mother, and her letter was now nearly a week late.
It was another example of a truth that wasn’t a truth. She wished the duke was anything so benign as dull. He had only to be himself to be considered interesting, and in merely being himself, he had somehow all but eliminated her, the way an ocean engulfs a drop of water.
But Mariana yearned for a confidante. Her circumstances remained roughly as secure as a lifeboat on a sea that could turn stormy at any time. She was very aware she was here on the gentle sufferance of the ladies of The Grand Palace on the Thames until the time came for her to sing, and she was unaccustomed to charity. She’d need to get a message to Giancarlo somehow to let him know to where she’d fled. He might be a bit of a rogue, but as a composer and director, he knew talented sopranos were not so thick on the vine that he could afford losing one to tar and feathers. Or starvation.
And before the ladies went through the trouble of printing handbills and placing them in the finest establishments on Bond Street, in Grosvenor Square and St. James’s Square, and all about the Italian Opera House, there was a little matter of reputation repair. Otherwise the little audience that had been underneath her window the other night might show up at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“Have you anyone who might be willing to speak on your behalf? Someone the newspapers might find newsworthy? Perhaps someone with a title, or, er . . . a certain stature?”
Lord Bolt had asked this during the planning meeting they’d held yesterday afternoon, before the arrival of the duke. He’d had more than a little experience with renovating a reputation.
A number of titled men liked to congregate backstage after performances, but she personally knew only four of them. Two of them had shot at each other, ostensibly because of her, the third was Lord Bolt, and the fourth was the Duke of Valkirk, who had already court-martialed her in the tribunal of self-righteousness.
“Madame LeCroix?” she suggested, tentatively. “I sang alongside her in a production last year, and we got on well. She was kind to me.” Madame LeCroix had since retired from the stage, but was still much admired and respected in London for her charitable works. How charitable the retired diva might be toward a young one caught up in a scandal was anyone’s guess.
“I shall send a message to Madame LeCroix,” Lord Bolt said.
How had it come to this?
She longed to unburden her heart to someone, to anyone. But she could not think of anyone quite like her, and that was the problem. Society did tend to like its categories and labels, and there was no place into which she comfortably notched. One couldn’t be “a bit of a whore,” for instance, any more than one could be “a little bit pregnant.” One either was, or one wasn’t.
She was a singularity. She was feeling her way in the dark, and the dark was littered with pitfalls that looked like delights and delights that turned out to be terrible pitfalls.
She stared at the foolscap and daydreamed words onto it.
Dear Mama,
I hope this letter finds you well.
It’s partly true, what they said in the newspaper. I felt I ought to tell you.
I have always tried very hard to be good. But he was very handsome, and a lord, and he said to me things like “beautiful” and “bewitching.” I think lords learn those words at Eton because they think they’ll work on women like me, and as it turns out, they’re right.
Sometimes, I wish I didn’t remember how our family used to be in our rooms over the shop, because that life was the aria, and everything since feels like just its echo. I suppose I felt very alone, which is why it all happened. I like to think I have learned a lot about men, but I worry I only know how to manage them. Perhaps that’s all I’ll ever need to know. I don’t suppose I will ever get a glimpse inside a man’s heart. I think I would know if I had. Wouldn’t I know? How do you know?
I also sometimes wish I didn’t now know how much I enjoy kissing and—well, everything else. But I do. (Moreover, I’m good at it.) But it’s like a duel, I suppose. Not something one ought to do without a good reason. Ha. At least I now know.
It did not make anything better.
I did not understand that pride, temper, and champagne could make men so apt to shoot each other.
It all happened so quickly.
And I swear to you on Papa’s grave that I only went to a gaming hell once, and the pelisse was a gift, not a payment.
She sighed and put the quill pen down. She wouldn’t be writing the letter tonight, either. That much was clear.
Had the Duke of Valkirk learned words like “bewitched” and “beautiful” and used them to seduce women? It seemed nearly impossible to imagine him in the throes of anything other than self-importance.
If she were being more truthful, it was also impossible to imagine him needing to try to seduce women. He was possessed of unfair charisma and the kind of body that, when considered apart from his odious personality, might tempt a woman to slide right underneath.
It shouldn’t matter to her, given all of her current concerns. But his instant judgment felt like an injustice layered upon an injustice, which was somehow, finally, an injustice too far.
But it was revelatory, too. It was useful to know that it took only one person to make her feel small, when she had tried so hard for so long to be seen. This would never do.
She would make him see her. And the best way to do that was to somehow best him in a way he couldn’t possibly ignore.