Page 32 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

“I’d never dream of it, Your Grace.” She finally brought herself to blink up at him, offering a shy, if shaky smile.

Somehow the sun shone brighter on the surface of the sea, and the wind caressed skin becoming more sensitive and heated by the moment.

Could one smile do such a thing?

“You misrepresented yourself at the train station.” Her tone was too mild for a reproach, and Piers wondered if she required conversation to divert herself from the fact that she was accompanied by a bloodstained duke and an assassin.

“Did I,DoctorLane?” He injected uncharacteristic levity into his reply.

“But Iama doctor.”

“And also, it would seem, the daughter of an earl.”

She made an unrepentant gesture. “I didn’t want to dangle my nobility in front of a lowly stable hand, especially when he’d come to my rescue.”

“And I gather that Miss Cecelia Teague was your dashing escort Cecil?”

Something in the chagrin painted over her features informed him that she’d taken his point. “I was a woman traveling without a chaperone, who didn’t wish to give her information to a strange man. What’s your excuse for your uncourtly behavior?”

What he didn’t say was that he’d not wanted her to treat him like a duke. He’d enjoyed their banter. He’d been impressed by her uncommon—well—commonness.

He’d appreciated that she’d treated him, a scarred stablemaster, with more deference than she did now that she knew he was a man of power, wealth, and influence.

Piers said none of that, he merely lifted a shoulder. “At first, I thought you knew.”

“How could I possibly?”

“Everyone in the empire has heard of the Terror of Torcliff.”

“Yes… Yes, I heard them call you that.” She stiffened. “Why ever would they?”

“It’s a recent moniker, all told.” He gestured to the scar interrupting his lip. “According to local lore, I’ve been scratched by a werebeast—or a demon depending on whom you’re asking—and I’ve become the monstrous scarred duke who haunts the halls of the accursed Castle Redmayne, eating small children for lunch and virgins for dinner. I’m rather famous.”

He’d meant to be comical, but she stepped even farther away, her smile disappearing and taking the sunshine with it. “Perhaps you’re not as well-known as you think. I’d never heard of you before yesterday.”

“To be fair, it sounds as though you’ve spent a great deal of time out of the country and away from theton.”

“True.” She acquiesced his point with a nod, and bent to pluck a tall blade of foxtail grass, worrying it with the fingers of one hand. “I’ve never been much fortongossip.”

No, she wouldn’t be, would she? Piers gazed down at her for longer than was appropriate, able to do so because she’d become unduly absorbed with tying one-handed knots into the blade of grass.

As educated and well traveled as she was, she harbored an unspoiled air of innocent naïveténot often found in a woman of her age. Her eyes were the color of dark honey and shy as a fawn’s. Her shoulders curled forward slightly, not in an unladylike slouch, but enough to protect a tender heart.

The rest of her… well, her limbs were wound tight as a hare’s, ready to spring into the safety of the closest hedge should the need arise.

How had such a helpless lamb survived the perils of Cairo or Alexandria?

“Do you?”

It took him a moment to register that she addressed him, and not the blade of grass. “Do I what?”

“Do you eat virgins for dinner?”

He made a rude noise. “Good God, no, virgins are terrible fare at the supper table… Though mayhap I’ve indulged in a nibble of one or two for dessert. The villagers keep throwing them at me, and it does one good to treat oneself now and again.”

He directed his most winsome smile at her, ready to bask in her enjoyment of his levity.

She actually grimaced, turning her neck to stare uncomfortably out at the sea.