Page 11 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
Valeria left the table at the cheese course. Sir Marcus had been telling her about his stables for twenty minutes. The stables could hold forty horses. The stables had been redesigned by an architect from London. The stables had won some kind of award that Valeria had not known existed and did not care about. She said something about needing air. He stood when she stood. Polite. Then he sat back down. She could have kissed him for sitting back down. She did not.
In the corridor, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. The evening had been long. Lord Barton spent the soup course apologizing for something he had done at a ball six years ago. Mr. Ashworth read her a poem he had written that afternoon, which rhymed “grace” with “face” and “heart” with “art” and was so sincere it made her teeth hurt. The young Viscount, whose name she still could not remember, had knocked over his wine twice and apologized both times to the tablecloth rather than to her.
And throughout all of it, Edward Langton sat at her right and said almost nothing. He ate. He drank water. He watched. Every so often, she would feel his attention shift to her and then away again, quickly, like someone checking a compass.
She did not like how acutely aware she was of him. She did not like that she could feel exactly where he was in the room without looking. She did not like any of it.
She went up to the guest wing. The corridor was dark. Most of the candles had burned down, and the servants had not yet replaced them. She could hear muffled sounds behind doors as she passed. Someone was snoring. Someone else was having a conversation she could not make out. A thud, then laughter, then silence.
Mary had told her which room. Valeria asked about it while they were turning down beds.
“Where did we put the Duke of Welford?” she said casually, as though she were reviewing arrangements.
Mary answered with a straight face. Room twelve. End of the corridor. Away from the others, which was either Mary’s doing or a coincidence, and Mary did not deal in coincidences.
“Will there be anything else, Your Grace?” Mary asked, and the way she said it made it clear that she knew exactly why Valeria was asking and had decided not to comment.
“No. That will be all.”
Valeria stopped in front of his door.
Terrible idea, she knew that. A woman, alone, standing outside a man’s door at night. If someone saw her, the auction would be over. Everything she planned for a year, gone.
But he had dared her. And she could not let a dare sit.
Three years of being told where to go. If she wanted to walk through a door, she would walk through it.
She smoothed her dress and checked the corridor both ways. It was empty. The candles in the sconces were burning low, and the shadows were long. Somewhere downstairs, a door closed. The floorboards were cold through her stockings.
She had thought about this throughout supper. While Sir Marcus talked about drainage. While Lord Barton made a complicated toast that went on so long, the wine grew warm. While Mr. Ashworth read a poem that compared her eyes to the sea in winter, which was flattering but inaccurate, since the sea in winter was grey and her eyes were blue, and she was fairly sure he had recited the same poem to someone else because he stumbled over her name.
Through all of it, Edward sat beside her and said almost nothing and ate his food and drank his water, and his silence was louderthan every other man’s conversation combined. She had been aware of him the entire time.
The warmth of his arm near hers. The way he held his knife, blade inward, out of habit. The way his eyes moved constantly, checking the room, the doors, the windows, as though he expected someone to burst through them at any moment.
Old habits. She recognized them. She had her own.
She knocked before she could change her mind.
“It’s open,” he called from inside.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside. If anyone had seen her cross that threshold, the ton would have had them married by morning. She realized a second later that she had also made a catastrophic miscalculation.
He was shirtless, just out of the bath. His dark hair was wet and pushed back. He was holding a towel in one hand. Trousers covered his muscular legs, but there was nothing on his upper body but skin and scars.
Scars everywhere. Pale lines across his torso, some thin, some rough and wide. One across his right shoulder that curved like a crescent moon. Another below his collarbone, small and round, the kind a bullet made going in.
His arms were heavy with muscle, the kind that developed by climbing walls and carrying wounded men and doing the hundred other things that spies apparently did with their bodies. There was a scar along his left side, above the hip, pink and puckered. Something had tried to open him up there. But he had resisted.
He was still standing. Still breathing. Still half smiling at her from across the room, as though this were perfectly normal, as though women walked into his bedroom at midnight every day of the week. And maybe they did, but she did not want to think about that.
Her mouth went dry. She had seen shirtless men before. Stable hands in July. Laborers on the road. But that was different. Those men were working, and they were not looking at her. There was daylight and open air, and the context was entirely different from a bedroom at midnight, with a candle throwing warm light across the kind of body that did not come from leisure.
This was a body that had been used hard and put back together more than once. Every scar was a story she should not want to hear, but she did.
She turned around so fast that she nearly tripped.
Behind her, he laughed. Not polite. But real. Low and rough. It hit her like a punch to the gut. Her face was burning.
