Striving for control, Valentine shifted her stance so that her weight was centered and gently rotated her free arm at the elbow to point the stick at him. “If you’re dealing with a knife instead of a gun, it’s the same concept. You want to try to get out of the line of attack and aim to disarm by going for your foe’s arm. Even if they manage to cut you in the process, it will likely heal.”

“Is that what you did in Philadelphia?” she asked, glancing at the reddened scar visible over his collar.

“Exactly so.”

She nodded and gave her shoulders a slow roll, settling into the new position. Valentine turned so that the stick was pointing to his back. Before she could blink, he waved his hands slightly in the air as if surrendering, then he stepped in, rotated, and snatched her wrist before breaking her hold on the makeshift weapon in a hard downward motion. “You’re smaller than I am, so put all your weight forward and slam downward as hard as you can. If his finger is in the trigger, you can break it by twisting the gun. Now you try.”

Watching her repeat the simple moves shouldn’t have made him aroused, but it did. Her slim fingers closed over his wrist with enough force to make his breath hiss through his teeth. She did everything with precision and she took his direction exceptionally well. Would she be as compliant and biddable in an actual bed? He snorted. She’d be a tigress in bed as she was with everything else, and he wouldn’t change a thing. Not that there was any intimate future for them in beds or otherwise. She’d turned his proposal down.

Why had she? The solution was both logical and pragmatic.

Matters of the heart are never pragmatic.

Was that it? Did she expect sonnets and odes of undying devotion? She didn’t seem like the type, but she’d spoken of a dream of a husband once. Then again, he didn’t really know Lady Bronwyn Chase. Had he truly ever known the real her?

“What if one of them shoots if I choose to run?” she asked.

“Chances are they will miss a moving target,” he said with a serious expression. “Another technique is to try to distract them before running. That was the reason I wiggled my hands before in a show of surrender. That second of distraction was critical. Throw anything you have at them. A reticule, a bonnet, anything, and then run.”

Though the image of her in mortal danger made him feel sick to his stomach, Valentine sucked in a breath. He wanted to treat her as though she were made of crystal, like every other lady in the ton, but at every turn, Bronwyn showed that she was not breakable. That underneath all that softness, all that upper-crust decorum, she was made of forged steel.