How the Marquess Was Won (7 page)

So she’d none of those in her life? Who then, did she have? Surely she was young enough—or old enough—to have any or all of them. She possessed all of her limbs and she wasn’t otherwise deformed. Surely she could have married by now if she’d wished to. Perhaps she was a widow? She didn’t look or act the part.

“It’s just . . . well . . .” She took a deep breath. “Honestly, Lord Dryden, aren’t you ever bored with the same pleasures and pursuits? Don’t you ever feel . . .
confined
?”

Imagine anyone asking him such a question.

“What makes you think I indulge in the same pleasures and pursuits often enough to bore of them?

“I read the London broadsheets.”

Oh.

“It hasn’t been all unrelieved
debauchery
, you know. I am particular about my pleasures.”

“You don’t say.”

His mouth tipped up at the corner. “I have a number of pressing duties.”

“Attending to your estate
s
.” She lingered on that final
S
with gentle mockery.

Well, it
was
true he had as many estates as he had titles. More, in fact. His responsibilities were legion. His skill at delegating them was unparalleled. Because he of course, with an unerring instinct, hired the very best men for the jobs.

Would that he could hire men of affairs to manage his
family
.

“They are an ever-present responsibility, yes. The gossip sheets don’t write about the fact that I’ve arranged for new drainage ditches in my Hereford estates.”

“Is that so?” She sounded fascinated. “Drainage ditches?”

“Or that I’ve acquired an excellent herd of sheep and am profiting greatly from wool.”

“Wool is one of England’s finest resources.”

“And I served as an officer in the army.”

“Very impressive. I’ve been told that war is boredom interspersed with violence and terror.”

So she
had
known a few soldiers. In
what
way had she known the soldiers? he wondered. He could imagine the soldiers serving under his command being enchanted with her. It was the lively women they met on the Continent to whom they were ultimately grateful for making the war more bearable, not necessarily the beautiful ones.

“Oh, that’s not all it is. If a man
really
applies himself in the army, he can learn an untold number of curse words and catch all manner of diseases. Not to mention acquire a few interesting scars.”

“Have you any diseases?” Unflatteringly, she sounded more curious than concerned.

“None that have a prayer of killing me or you in the course of this conversation.”

Her smile appeared again, starting slowly and spreading. He liked the slow smile, because then it seemed to last longer, and light her face gradually, and it was like watching the sun rise. Or watching a . . . beginning. Of any kind.

He was perilously close to feeling . . . well,
happy
, for lack of another word . . . in an unusual way, and yet his nerves felt pulled taut as harpsichord strings. It had been some time since he’d felt surprised by a conversation. Let alone a conversation with a woman. He couldn’t anticipate what she would say next, and this wasn’t true of anyone else he knew.

Then again, he didn’t think he’d ever had a conversation with a schoolmistress.

Confined.

And now that she’d said it, he could almost feel the sides of an invisible box all around him.

“And a man can make friends for life, too, in the army,” he said evenly, feeling the need to defend the institution. “It’s helpful to know who will die for you.”

“And do you know?”

“I do know. Do you?”

Odd, but he thought a shadow darkened her eyes then. Whatever it was, it was there and gone just as quickly. And he’d learned in the space of this conversation that her eyes disguised very little.

“Friends are important,” she agreed, instead.

He raised his eyebrows to let her know he knew full well she’d dodged the question.

She regarded him evenly and gave him back nothing but a pair of similarly raised brows. He suspected she would have grave difficulty ever hiding her thoughts completely, given how her eyes lit with humor and intelligence. The person she was, a crackling, complicated one, seemed to shine through.

He really ought to attend to the business at hand.

“Are
you
often bored, Miss . . . ?” Bloody hell. He’d breeding enough to be ashamed at the loss of her name.

“Vale,” she reminded him, sweetly. Not offended. Amused.

He couldn’t help it: he was genuinely curious. It had never occurred to him that any of the women with whom he was acquainted might be bored enough to bolt to Africa, of all places. They seemed so
occupied
, with things that mystified and often charmed him but when taken altogether, or God help him,
discussed
in his presence, sent him into the sort of foot-shifting, eye-darting, finger-drumming panic that not even having a pistol aimed his way could achieve. The minutiae of aristocratic womanhood. Embroidery and modistes and the like.

And this was a woman who
worked
. Why should she be bored?

“I am grateful for my work at the academy. The girls are a pleasure and Miss Endicott a very fair and kind employer. I suppose one must be cursed with an imagination to be bored.”

“And you are cursed with such?”

He asked it neutrally. Carefully. Because he was acquainted with one or two “imaginative” women. They wrote florid poetry and read horrid novels and sang with an excess of passion during evening musicales, attacking the pianoforte keys like pouncing animals and pulling faces. They often took the form of mistresses who threw vases at one’s head when one took their permanent leave of them by way of a quick, polite farewell and an expensive gift.

“Perhaps.”

“Hence Africa. The imagination caused it.”

“I suppose.” She clearly wasn’t eager to expound. He wondered if she was bored with
him
.

“Your imagination has an impressive reach.”

“Or my boredom an impressive scope.”

He smiled again.

She drew in a short sharp breath. There was some emotion she was suppressing at that moment, he was certain of it. Something very like pain. She dropped her eyes and sent them in search of something else to fix upon, which turned out to be the globe. He had the strangest sense that she was waiting until whatever she’d felt to pass, and it involved not looking at him.

“Perhaps it’s the company you keep, Miss Vale.”

She looked up. “I keep excellent company,” she reproved.

They stared evenly at each other.

Who?
he wanted to know desperately, suddenly. And he felt a twinge of . . . surely it wasn’t jealousy? For this was what prevented him from asking.

It was strangely exhilarating and dangerously too comfortable to look her in the eye.

“I shall take that as a compliment, given my presence here.”

“Please do feel free to take it however you wish, Lord Dryden,” she said politely. “Shall I presume you no longer wish to kiss me?”

She’d deftly snatched the conversation from him, steered it with coquetry, and now here she was casually dropping the word
kiss
into it again, like one spilling a grenade onto a pillow.

It detonated in his mind a moment later.

And all he could think about was what it might be like to kiss her, and how unlikely it seemed now that she’d called him on his ambivalent game.

He wasn’t certain whether he liked her. Though he was fairly certain he liked this conversation. At the very least, he wouldn’t soon forget it.

Or her.

“If you’d like to get kissed in the future, might I suggest a different type of conversation?” he suggested dryly.

“It’s not so much about whether I’d like to simply
get kissed
or not,” she explained mildly, not at all offended or nonplussed. “Perhaps I’m particular about who does it.”

His eyes went to her mouth then, for how could they not? Small and . . . pillowy, he would have described it. The palest shade of pink. Half of a heart sitting atop a generous lower curve.

Something familiar and yet very surprising sizzled along his spine. Like a lit fuse.

She noticed him staring. That half-a-heart tipped up at the corner.

“
Have
you been kissed before?” He for some reason
needed
to know.

“Why? Are you worried you’ll pale in comparison should
you
kiss me?”

Christ, but she had a volley for everything and a very direct gaze, and he suspected she knew full well the effect she was having on him. He supposed her eyes were . . . green? They were clear and large and her lashes were blond at the tips and her eyebrows were fair near to invisibility and shaped like little wings. She was altogether comprised of muted shades, which a man ought to find soothing.

She was anything but.

“You’ll forget you’ve ever been kissed before once I’ve kissed you.”

The words were quick and fierce.

He actually
saw
her breath catch, and then she went so still. And though he was certain she was even now silently cursing the fact, a faint flush slowly invaded her—admittedly
fine
—complexion. It was like watching dawn flood into the pale sky.

In short, he’d managed to shock both of them. The words had somehow managed to bypass reason on the way out of his mouth. And this rarely happened.

So she was
not
impervious to him as a man. Nor was she as worldly as she’d like him to believe. Perhaps it was just that she flung flirtation at men as a way of keeping them at bay.

What was she afraid of?

He wasn’t certain how much he cared.

And having chased the conversation to an unnerving crescendo, a fidgety, awkward little silence ensued between them.

“I might be more persuaded of the truth of that, Lord Dryden, if I wasn’t certain you’d said that very thing to a legion of women in your lifetime,” she finally said lightly.

Though he thought he detected a hint of a question in it.

He wasn’t going to take that question up.

The trouble was, he was fairly certain he hadn’t ever said such a thing before to anyone, ever. He was shocked he’d said it at all. If he wanted a kiss from a particular woman he generally got one without taxing his powers of persuasion overmuch. He was the Marquess Dryden, he was wealthy, and he looked . . . well, he looked the way he looked. He imagined he could count himself fortunate to have inherited his father’s eyes and not his character.

But if even his
original
thoughts rang like clichés to this woman, then impressing her was going to be—

Had he really begun to think in terms of
impressing
her? The schoolteacher?

It was time to remember who he was and why he was here.

“Alas. And here I thought it had the ring of spontaneity.” He took pains to sound bored.

She tipped her head slowly to the side, perhaps to examine him from another angle, one she found less
boring
, but if she came to any conclusion her expression didn’t betray it.

And then one of her shoulders went up, came down.

She wasn’t even troubled enough to
shrug
completely.

He ought to be amused. Instead, he was silent. He was uncertain how to speak after they’d banked the conversation to such a pitch.

She
had no trouble speaking. And once again he had cause to admire her self-possession.

“I’ve a group of young ladies to instruct this afternoon. Miss Endicott is very fair but strict and I shouldn’t like to be tardy.” She was all gracious, deferential, distancing apology.

She took his silence for acquiescence. Then she turned and continued up the hall while he remained still. And perhaps because his equilibrium was shaken, he noticed a dozen distinct little things about her at once, as though she were a faceted gem turning into the light: Her neck was long and white, and her narrow back flared into a pair of pleasingly consequential hips, and the hair that traced the nape of her neck shone every bit as fine and golden as his sister’s most expensive embroidery silks, which was as florid as he was willing to allow his metaphors to become.