Page 8 of My Deceitful Duchess
“I assumed that talking would not be a necessity during the act of intercourse, so it seemed irrelevant,” he said, and he watched her shoulders roll as she smothered a laugh in her palm and the knife’s edge of her smile dissolved beneath it. “Was I mistaken?”
“You—” She hesitated. “What do you mean, youassumed?”
“Having no such experience myself, I can only draw so many conclusions from—”
“No experience?” She paused, and the morning sun glinted off her fair hair, almost blinding him when he glanced down. “Noexperience?”
“None.” Why was this so perplexing to her?
She had all but forgotten her profiterole, and it drifted to her side in the clutch of her hand. “But you must be close to thirty.”
“Seven and twenty, as of last summer. Why is that relevant?”
“Am I to understand that I am the first woman you have propositioned in this manner?” She peered up at him, her eyes narrowed, as if she might divine truth from lies just from his face, which Sebastian found to be a bit unnecessary, given that he hadn’t lied to her.
“I admit that in retrospect, perhaps I was a bit clumsy in the asking, but as I have never asked before, I wasn’t certain how I ought to go about it.” Again, a sliver of amusement cut across her face, readable in the smile she pursed her lips together to hide.
“But you decided I would do,” she said, “and risked it anyway.”
“I decided you were theonlywoman who would do,” he said. “You did not seem to have a current lover, and you showed no outward signs of the pox—”
“A rare compliment indeed. Why, I can count on just one hand the number of occasions in which a prospective paramour has pronounced me to benot syphilitic.”
“—And you wereinteresting.” He paused. “Are.Areinteresting. I suspect that any other woman would have slapped me at least three times by now. But you have not—nor have you stormed away, which you would have been perfectly within your rights to do.”
“I had considered it,” she said, but still those eyes glimmered with—mirth? And it seemed that against all odds she had electednotto take offense.
“I can only assume,” he said, “that you must also hold some interest in me. Perhaps not enough to bed me—”
“Oh, no, certainly notthat.” A brisk wind breezed down the street, collecting a loose lock of her hair and making it dance before her nose. Sebastian experienced the oddest sensation of wanting quite badly to catch it in his fingers and tuck it back behind her ear. Madness. Instead he shoved that hand into his pocket and fiddled with his pocket watch which was tucked away within it to still the twitching of his fingers.
“But youmight,” he said. “Eventually.”
“Hm,” she said, this woman whose name was most certainly not Jenny, and whom he wanted anyway. And as she turned to her left, he realized that they had stopped on the street before her club, and she—she had waited outside with him for at least an entire minute. Today’s walk had taken five minutes in total, but she had granted him anadditionalminute when she might otherwise simply have taken her leave of him.
“Good day, Mr. Knight,” she said, and disappeared within. But this time she looked back—just once. Just the tiniest glance over her shoulder. The meanings people tended to convey in those little looks generally escaped him, but he thought perhaps he had studied her long enough to have learned just a bit ofhers. It was the same expression he felt upon his own face when he watched her—curiosity.
Tomorrow morning, when she went to collect her morning profiteroles, she would be anticipating his arrival. He was certain of it.
∞∞∞
Fire.
The acrid scent of smoke burned in her nose, clogged her throat. The urge to cough, to relieve the terrible heaviness choking her lungs was overwhelming, but her chest refused to move, staunchly resisting the clawing desire to cling to life.
Twice now she had escaped a fire which had threatened to consume her. Perhaps she had always known she had thwarted fate—perhaps there was some part of her that simply accepted it now, understood that she had lived all these years on borrowed time. Time that had now come to an end.
She would not escape a third time.
And that smoke slipped deeply into her lungs, weighted like lead, until—
Jenny jerked upright with a gasp, her lungs straining against the phantom weight that had suffocated her. In her mouth she could still taste it, the sooty remnants of smoke and flame. She was drenched in a cold sweat, her nightgown sticking to her spine, her shoulders—even her hair clung to her face and neck in damp tendrils that pulled along her skin unpleasantly when she moved.
The nightmare was not unfamiliar. It—or a variation of it—had plagued her for years after she had escaped her old life. Many nights she had awoken just like this, shivering and sweating, still caught fast within the clutch of terror. Only time and distance had relieved them, and slowly, so slowly, they had become a rare occurrence.
But the fire that had destroyed her dress shop and Ambrosia’s first location some months ago had brought them back once again. How lucky did one have to be to escapetwosuch fires? How long until that luck which had saved her at last ran out?
Pressing her hands to her face, she breathed deeply, waiting for the thundering of her heart to slow to a normal pace once again. Her pulse pounded in her ears, all but drowning out the faint sounds of merriment creeping in from two floors below.
