“It’s not a secret,” she said, aware of the petulant tone of her voice. “Ladies simply do not discuss such things. Ever.”
“But it’s such fun.” His voice was so innocent, his blue eyes wide and guileless. A stray breeze blew a lock of his tawny hair across his forehead, and she was struck by the annoying urge to brush it back.
“It is not, and it does not endear you to me.” She resisted the urge to pat her cheeks—she wouldn’t be able to feel a blush through her gloves anyway.
He hid a grin behind his glass. “You don’t need me to endear myself to you,” he said. “You need to be challenged. Provoked.” He leaned closer and summoned a leer. “Perhaps teased.”
“I most certainly do not.” She drew herself up to her full height which was, admittedly, not quite as impressive as she would have wanted it to be. And it was frustratingly difficult to look down her nose at him while having to look up at him. And especially with a loose amber curl bobbing before her eyes, which she puffed away, striving to look severe and uncompromising.
“Of course you do,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You’ve stopped blushing, by the by.”
She had? She had. He had successfully needled her out of embarrassment. Well, she had wished she could look at him without blushing. Provided she could manage to keep at it, she might come out of this with her reputation intact.
“You are quite proficient at a cutting tone,” he observed casually. “But I suspect you know that already.”
“I beg your pardon?” Now she was actually baffled.
He pitched his voice to a mocking reflection of her own as he said, “I most certainly do not,” and followed it with a snicker. “It’s quite good. I’ll bet you could skewer a man at twenty paces with only a look. Have you practiced?”
She blinked, unsure of whether she ought to be offended or flattered. “Have I practiced what?”
“Skewering a man at twenty paces with only a look,” he repeated. “I can’t imagine you would have succeeded in remaining unwed so long had you not.”
Somehow she had entirely lost the thread of conversation. “Most gentleman are rather easily discouraged,” she said. “I cannot recall a time I have ever found it necessary to skewer one—with a look or otherwise.” She peeked over his shoulder in a desperate bid to locate Nora, who would surely come to extricate her from her unenviable situation, if she were any sort of friend at all.
“I am not easily discouraged,” he said, as if he felt she had needed the reminder. Which she had not.
Tartly, she muttered, “I have noticed, Your Grace.”
A wry twist of his lips. “James,” he said.
Was he stark raving mad? “I cannot call you that in public!” And when he opened his mouth, most assuredly to argue, she interrupted with, “Or in private—which is irrelevant, as we shall never be in private!”
“Pity,” he said.