The carpets had been rolled back to the edges of the room, and Pauline quickly learned why. The room wasn’t a salon right now, but some sort of gymnasium.
In the center of the floor, the duke and a masked opponent squared off against one another. Each man was clad in thigh-hugging buff breeches, a quilted waistcoat, and an open white shirt. Each man held a slender, shining sword.
Neither noticed them enter the room.
“En garde,” the masked man said.
Steel clanged in response.
Pauline looked on as the two swordsmen traded feints and thrusts. She was speechless in admiration.
While his opponent wore a mesh helmet to protect his face, the duke’s features were fully visible. She could make out every furrow of concentration and drop of sweat on his brow. The exertion had matted his hair to his skull in dark, curling locks, and his open shirt clung to his torso. His musculature was revealed by the damp white linen, giving him the look of a marble carving come to life. Arms, shoulders, calves, arse—he was beautifully formed, everywhere.
The masked opponent sent a quick thrust toward the duke’s torso, but the duke deflected it with a sharp flick of his own blade before going on attack. His lunges and thrusts had the grace of a dance, coupled with deadly force.
As the two battled on, the walls echoed with the exciting sounds of steel whooshing through the air and blades clanging against each other—and most thrilling of all, two athletic men grunting with the force of their exertion. The whole space hummed with virile energy.
If Pauline had been suffering flutterings since their kiss, this scene ratcheted those sensations to something even more profound. Stirrings? Quakings? She didn’t want to name them.
In the center of the room, the men locked swords. The shining edge was just inches from Halford’s face, and unlike his opponent, he wore no contraption of metal floss to guard it. A flick of the blade and he could be scarred or blinded.
Take care, she wanted to shout.
The duchess put a hand on Pauline’s arm, restraining her.
Finally, with a primal growl, the two broke apart—each man recoiling several paces backward.
As he swiped at the perspiration on his brow, the duke turned his head in the ladies’ direction, briefly.
Briefly was all it took.
He saw her.
Even from across the room, Pauline felt it the moment his gaze locked with hers. The heated intensity made her skin tingle.
Halford must have felt more than a tingle. While he stood frozen in place, his opponent’s blade nicked his upper arm. A line of red blood quickly soaked through his shirt.
“Oh!” Pauline clapped both hands over her mouth, horrified.
For her part, the duchess made a satisfied noise. “I call that a success.”
Chapter Eight
Griff growled in pain, dropping his sword and pressing his free hand over the wound. “Damn it, Del.”
“Not my fault. Why’d you stop defending?” His friend pushed back his protective mask and looked about the room. When his gaze found Miss Simms, he smiled broadly. “Hullo. I see for myself now.”
Hullo, indeed.
Pauline curtsied, and Griff gave her a brisk nod.
He shouldn’t have been so surprised. It was just that he hadn’t seen her since the library last night, where they’d spent that time talking. Then embracing. Then kissing like lovers who’d been imprisoned in separate cells for ten years and were headed for the gallows at dawn.
Good God. Good God.
Today, he’d resolved to find her and have a brief, businesslike chat to set matters straight, assure them both it wouldn’t happen again—but the talk wasn’t supposed to happen like this. They were meant to be alone, but only to a safe degree. When he was too exhausted from hours of vigorous fencing to even contemplate lust, and when she was . . . not looking like that.
Are you all right? she mouthed.
No. No, he wasn’t all right. He was devastated.
Yesterday she’d turned his head with impropriety and all those sparkling sugar crystals. Now she didn’t sparkle any longer. She wore a frock of white so sheer and pure, the sun-burnished warmth of her skin shone through.
She glowed.
He’d always loved this: a woman’s elemental effect on him, as a man. He used to live for these moments of raw, instinctual attraction. When a source of celestial-grade femininity wandered into the room, and his internal compass recalibrated. It was a sublime shift from internal chaos to single-minded determination. The difference between Ye gods, what next? and . . .
Her. I’ll take her.
Damn. He wanted her. He had from the first. He understood it now, that some deadened part of him was kindling back to life.
But this was the worst possible time, and she was the least possible woman, and whatever effect she had on him, Griff knew he must make absolutely sure that no one in the room—not his mother, not his friend, not Pauline Simms—had any clue.
Well, aside from the bleeding.
Turning away, he used the edge of his sword to shear a strip of linen from his shirt and used it to bind his wound.
“Your grace.” Del stretched one leg forward and made a deep, courtly bow to the duchess.
“Lord Delacre.” His mother inclined her head.
“Will you do me the honor of introducing your lovely friend?”
Don’t start, Griff silently warned. Not with her.
He and Del had a long history of locking horns over conquests. In their most callow, youthful years they’d even made a sport of it, with wagers and a complex system of points. Griff had long outgrown such things, but there was no telling, where Delacre was concerned. He might still be keeping a tally somewhere.
“This is my guest,” the duchess said. “Miss Simms, of Sussex.”
“Well, Miss Simms of Sussex. It’s a true pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Lord Delacre, of wherever I’m least wanted.” He lifted Pauline’s hand and kissed it.
She lifted an eyebrow at Griff, and it was as though he could hear her teasing, You didn’t kiss my hand.
But I saved you from falling on your face, he retorted with a quirked brow of his own.
For a moment they began to share a smile. And then it was though they both remembered the kisses that had followed said rescue—not to mention the implied intimacy of conversing in eyebrow quirks while other people looked on.
Her throat flushed. Griff looked away.
“Don’t be worried about him, Miss Simms,” said Delacre. “We’re expert swordsmen, the two of us. Best in London. We have to be.”
“And why’s that?” she asked.