“Will you answer the door?” she whispered, her breath leaving a cloud of white as she spoke. Myrtle increased her knocking, pounding as hard as she could.

Suddenly, the door was wrenched open so that her fist, deprived of the drum surface, hovered in midair.

She blinked, registering the duke’s visage etched in its familiar scowl. “What?” he demanded . . . in his familiar growl.

And a wave of relief so strong at no longer being alone swept through her, and she smiled for the first time that day. “Good afternoon to you, Val!” she greeted him jovially, the joy that lightened her frame real. “May I?” she asked when he continued to stand there, a mountain of a man blocking the entrance.

“May you what?” he grunted.

“Join you?” And without waiting for him to reply, she ducked around him and saw herself inside.

“What in blazes do you think you are doing, Myrtle?” Val demanded in a furious whisper. He swept his gaze frantically over the streets outside before slamming the door shut so hard she jumped. “You cannot be here.”

She frowned. “And whyever not?”

“Whyever not?” he echoed. “Whyever not?” he repeated, his voice climbing. “Because you are a lady, and I am a gentleman.”

Myrtle blinked innocently up at him. “Yes?”

“And if we’re discovered so, you’ll be ruined, and I’ll be trapped.”

Trapped. Hmph. “You aren’t a bear, Val,” she said, unable to keep the indignation from her tone.

“A bear? A bear?” he said for a second time.

She nodded.

Leaning down and shrinking the great space between his taller and her smaller frame, he stuck his face in hers. “I’m not a bear.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know—”

“Because if I was, you’d have sense enough to go running, and we’d both be better off, safer for it.”

Was it really so hideous, the prospect of marriage to her?

If that was the reaction she was destined to garner during her London Season, then her fate and future proved grim indeed.

“You should leave now, Myrtle. Now.”

He repeated himself when he was upset.

It was something she’d come to learn about him in the short time they’d known one another. And there was also . . . an intimacy to that discovery. She had come to learn the nuances of this person—this man.

Perhaps that was why his booming shouts and scowls didn’t send her running in terror, as he so clearly wished for her to do.

Myrtle smiled. “I will go,” she promised.

“Good.” He took several swift, relieved steps toward the door. “That is wi—”

“If you join me,” she interrupted him as he clasped the handle, freezing him in his tracks.

She was mad.

It was why she wasn’t going away.

It was why she remained one of the only people wholly unmoved by him and his shows of anger.