Page 61 of The Duke and the Darkness

His shoulders remained as stiff as before, even though he’d ended his training session. He reached for a towel and began to wipe at the beads of sweat covering his torso, and she shamelessly watched him. She’d always remembered him as good-looking whenever she’d thought of him ten years ago. But the reality of the man he’d become…breathtaking.

“You’re not happy with our plan, are you?” She noted the rough edge to her voice, and that her words weren’t a question so much as an accusation.

He yanked off his gloves and stuffed them into a hole in the rack. “I’m not happy with what we’re using as bait.”

The pointed gaze he scoured over her from head to toe tingled her skin everywhere he looked.

“Are you certain you want to do this,” he asked, “to reveal yourself to the world like that?”

Not at all.And yet… “It’s the best chance we have of stopping Horrender,” she said, as much to convince herself as him. “It’s a good trap. I’ll be protected.”

She came forward to his side, took the discarded gloves from the rack, and slipped them onto her hands. The warmth of himlingered on the leather, and the musky scent of him, pungent with sweat, filled her senses.

He stepped up behind her and murmured, “Not if it exposes you to unnecessary risks.”

She could feel the heat of him warming her back, and she trembled, suddenly hot and achy. To be in his arms, she simply had to lean back. That was all, just bring herself against him and surrender… The anxious swirl of anticipation that shadowed her before now simply engulfed her. It was all she could do to remember to breathe as she ran gloved fingers along the blade of the foil hanging on the rack. “I know how to take care of myself.”

“That’s what worries me.” He caressed his knuckles along the side of her face, and her breath hitched. “You take too many risks.”

“Because I know what I’m doing.”

He gave a soft sigh that rumbled into her. “Because you won’t let go of the past.”

“I am letting go of it.” In the grandest, loudest, most stunning way imaginable. “But you’re not. You refuse to let the evils your father did come to light.”

“I won’t let him hurt any more people, including you.” To punctuate his point, he touched his lips to her nape, and she shivered. Not a kiss of seduction, but a promise. “Not even from his grave.”

She took one of the blunted training foils down from the rack and turned around, pointing the tip at his bare chest. “You can’t stop me from doing this.” His face remained frustratingly inscrutable as she tapped the foil against his breastbone. “Moreover, once Horrender is no longer a threat, there’s no reason to keep secret what our fathers did.”

“So many reasons you’ll never know,” he corrected beneath his breath.

Slowly shaking her head, she turned the thin blade and watched the metal glint in the lamplight. “One way or another, this has to end.”

“Your life doesn’t have to end with it.”

“Actually, that isexactlyhow it has to end. Elizabeth Wentworth dies, and Peyton Chandler rises from the ashes. It can’t happen any other way, and we both know it.”

She stepped away from him, needing air to breathe and distance to think. Her skin tingled from his nearness, and her belly twisted from the masculine scent of him and the solidity he presented. It would be so easy to surrender, in every way… But he also represented all the secrets that had ruled her life for the past decade. She would never succumb to those.

She held up the foil. “Spar with me.” Not a request. An order. She was determined to prove she could take care of herself.

“You’ll lose.”

“Probably. I’m in a skirt.” She removed his ill-fitting gloves and tossed them to the floor at his feet, as if throwing down a gauntlet. “But I’ll still give you my best go…unless you’re afraid of losing to a woman—again?”

His lips curled at the challenge, and he kicked the gloves aside. “All right, then. Best two of three. Saber rules.”

Saber rules weren’t the finely executed moves of foil fencing. With sabers, contact with any part of the body above the hips counted as a touch, including glancing blows with the side of the blade. In other words, it was anything goes. “All right.”

He snatched up a second foil from the rack and pointed it at an old but large rug covering most of the room’s floor. “The rug serves as thepiste. No touches outside its edges count.”

“Agreed.” She moved to the center of the long rug which was about half the length of a normalpiste. Yet she didn’t care. She planned on giving him the fight of his life.“En garde.”

He took his position in front of her and raised the blade in front of his head in salute to her.

“Prêts?”

He lowered into his stance, and she mirrored his, despite her skirt. A simple dress wouldn’t stop her from besting him.