Page 69 of The Captive Duke
“Well, you wouldn’t have. Might we adopt a bit more decorous pace, Your Grace? I will soon grow winded.”
He slowed down, hadn’t even realized he was hustling her along. “You regard my colorful language as a positive development?”
“I do. Maybe you’re getting adequate rest and proper nutrition, maybe you’re healing in more subtle regards, but you’re making great strides.”
They’d reached the back terrace, and when she tried to march out from under his arm, he let her get a few paces off.
“I want to kill Girard,” he said, having no earthly idea where the words came from. “I could get passionate about that, about choking the man to death with my bare hands. Slowly. Lethally passionately.”
Her expression didn’t change, save for a slight raising of her eyebrows. “Such thoughts are to be expected.”
He laid an arm across her shoulders and resumed a more sedate progress across the terrace. “I lie awake at night, and instead of reliving the torture, I think now of putting Girard where I was and watching impassively while what was done to me is done to him. What I want to do to Anduvoir ought to shame me. This is not a fit topic for a lady, particularly not for a lady who nearly came to harm in my care. You will please give me your opinion of the roses.”
She shrugged against his arm and brought them to a stop. “Bother the roses. In all likelihood, I would have come to no harm save for a few bruises. I’ve come off my share of horses, and I tend to heal quickly. You were about to fetch me a brandy.”
She took him by the wrist and steered him toward the French doors that led into the library.
“God, yes, a drink.”
She was hauling him along barehanded, she’d called his name from the back of her horse, and she hadn’t turned a hair when he’d mentioned his most recent and bloody version of a lullaby.
Of course he needed a drink, preferably several.
His Grace downed a finger of brandy in a single swallow. Gilly, by contrast, took a cautious sip of her drink and let the heat slide over her throat. Why, when heat in quantity galloped through her veins, was she imbibing spirits?
His Grace was regaining his equilibrium and not merely regarding the mishap with the saddle.
While Gilly was losing hers.
“If you actually imbibe the drink, the benefits are more apparent, though even the feel of the glass in one’s hand can be steadying too,” he said.
He imbued his words with more force, his step with more energy. On the occasion of St. Just’s parting, His Grace had smiled. By the week, if not by the day, he was less the man who’d survived torture and captivity and more the man…
Whom Helene had termed “aggravatingly virile.”
Oh, Helene.
A tap on the door spared Gilly further scrutiny from the duke, though she wasn’t expecting a footman to come in bearing her sidesaddle.
“How old is your saddle, my lady?” Mercia asked. He took it from the footman, dismissed him, and hefted the whole business onto a reading table.
“Less than ten years. I brought it with me when I married, so I took it when I decamped from Greendale.”
“Does Lucy use it?”
“No, Your Grace. Sidesaddles are usually built to a lady’s particular measurements, and the horn wouldn’t be placed properly for Lucy.”
He gave her a look that meant he—a decorated cavalry officer—regarded the information as suspect simply because it hadn’t crossed his notice previously.
Aggravatingly virile, indeed.
He peered at the girth and waggled the fingers of his left hand at her in a beckoning gesture. “Come here.”
“You might at least append a palliative question mark to your commands,” she said, but she went to him and set her drink aside.
“Look at this.” He pointed to the billets that held the girth’s buckles. “You see the stitching here and here is in perfectly good repair, but it broke here, or was cut.”
“Cut?”
