Page 11 of The Duke Decides

She was stepping toward him. Her eyes behind the mask swept over him, a flicker of lashes. She was saying something to her companion, and still moving. In a moment she would be past, and yet he could not speak.

So he simply stepped forward, blocking her progress, and stared down at her.

She stared back. He would have thought the moment frozen but for the slow swish of her fan and the way her lips parted, ever so slightly, as if she were preparing for a rebuke.

Or a kiss.

“I’ll leave you then, shall I?” said her companion in an amused tone.

Neither answered. The other woman—she had been in the reception line—shrugged and strolled away.

Gabe leaned forward, trying to discern the color of his siren’s eyes. The black silk mask shielded the upper half of her face, but he had never seen this woman before. He would know if he had.

His body tightened, and the air between them felt hot and dry, charged, the way the air did in Egypt before the khamsin winds blew down in the spring carrying the stinging dust of the desert. He knew those winds, the way dust in the mouth could choke the lungs, the way walls of sand moved for hours, rearranging the landscape, leaving everything raked over and strange.

“Do you have a name for me, then?” she asked. Her voice was low and musical, but steady. There was nothing cautious or uncertain or self-conscious in her manner, as one might see in a younger girl. She was a woman in her prime, he would guess, accustomed to command. And to being obeyed.

An odd request. Was he supposed to know her costume? Would that mean something?

“The Marquis de Pompadour,” he guessed. “Mistress of Louis XV.” Stupid to add that last bit. Everyone knew who Madame de Pompadour was.

She arched a brow as black as his. Artificially darkened, perhaps, since her hair had been powdered, quite artfully, a deep cinnamon red. Glints of gold and crimson peeked from the auburn depths as the wicks in the oil lamps shivered and danced in the draughts of the room.

“No, of course not,” he said when she did not answer. His tone sounded foreign to his ears, as if he’d entered a second manhood and his voice had dropped a register again. Perhaps he’d never known what being a man meant until he met a real woman.

“And not Jeanne du Barry, a commoner’s daughter. You would be Diane de Poitiers. Her colors were black and white.” He ran his fingers along the ostrich feathers attached to her mask, skimming the black silk as he reached toward her.

She shivered. “Why a mistress? And why only to a French King?”

“Because the French Kings were known to choose only the most beautiful women,” he answered. “And because you could be no mere queen. You were made for pleasure and rule.”

What maggot had entered his head? He never spoke like this. He never bantered with a woman, never teased or flattered. But the tactic kept her standing before him, head slightly tilted as she listened.

“Yet you would take that rule away from me, would you not?” There was a note in her voice, low, hopeless, that pulled a loose thread in his heart, paining him.

“I? Never. I would see you on a throne, with followers about you on bended knee, and your enemies vanquished at your feet.”

He was being exceedingly foolish to talk this way. He couldn’t give her any of these things.

The most he had to offer any woman was his roughened hand and the title of duchess. Which was all she might be able to keep once Fenton succeeded at doing Gabe in and taking the title of duke for himself.

Her brows pulled together. Someone bumped him from behind, but he took no notice. They stood alone in the swirling crowd, with the haze of burning oil thickening the room, music thrumming in his ears as the background to her voice, and some subtle scent rising from her gown and skin, complex, layered, deep.

She tilted her head to the side, and he wanted to run his mouth down the slope of her exposed neck. “Are you not one of my enemies?”

“Not I, Reinette. I will be your sword and shield.” And also her lover, if she allowed it. That first and foremost.

Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “Are you by any chance making your way to Strawberry Fair?”

He frowned again at her odd question. “No, I—” Oh, blast. “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “There’s a maid I am to meet along the way.”

She snapped her lips together. “One with ripe cherries and roses red, I presume?”

Blast and damn. “You’re her. She,” he corrected himself.

She huffed out a stream of air, and he could not take his eyes from those red lips. “And you’re him. He.”

He took her arm. Her glove reached nearly to the elbow, but her sleeves cut away above, and there showed a good inch of warm, golden, female flesh. His gloves were silk, but the skin beneath his hand felt equally soft. “We must talk.”