Chapter 4

It was true, wasn’t it? Every single word about the earl. Although she’d told herself no one was that black-hearted, as Splendor tried to ignore the damp soaking through the paper-thin soles of Gabe’s boots, she knew the extent of that truth.

Dueling was illegal. The thought that Kendall Winterborne could end the day in court on a murder charge was no consolation. Not when the tang of frost sent no shivers up her spine, the caw of crows left her bone marrow untouched. She was beyond these things.

She had practiced shooting last night, trying to hit the door handle. The fact she had blasted a hole in the fender instead was not auspicious. Mrs. Hanney, to whom she had paid four months’ rent in advance, had gone berserk. That was never a good thing.

Neither was Gabe’s terse whisper on the dawn mist.

“The whole of London says he’s a crack shot and you just have to be here now. Ain’t you seen that pair of pistols he’s got?”

“He may yet back off.”

“Back off? Back off? Which bit of I am beyond the furthest reaches of my infinitesimal but stark raving mind don’t you understand?”

She peered over her spectacle rims. .Even at this distance with the mist wreathing Stillmore’s darkly coated and booted figure in white, she could discern the sheer bloody-mindedness of his expression, the darkness that hung about his eyes and brows like a funeral shroud. And the way he leveled both pistols on a hapless tree trunk.

“That is how it may seem to you, but look how it turned out that day at Starkadder’s when the bailiffs arrived.”

Yes. She may have been years too late to save her father from the debtor’s ward, she had still managed to snap up everything she could, necklaces, coins, notes, and escape out the garret window from that rat’s warren of rooms, in advance of the bailiffs breaking down the door. Yes. Her, little Aurora-Do-It-All-Splendora.

Gabe’s breath coiled like smoke in the air beneath the chimney pot hat he’d somehow come by. “This ain’t then.”

“How well do I know that? It’s never too late till it is too late. Papa always said that. Fortune will smile on me again.”

“The count is eight. If there is a misfire, you start again. Fine, if you ain’t dead. As for the one shot, it ain’t exactly calmin’. Three or four might suggest that bastard can’t shoot a peacock’s arse—”

“Excuse me…” Viscount Framerton—she was moving in exalted circles, wasn’t she?—squelched through the fat droplets of dew beading the grass. “Is there something wrong?”

Apart from the fact that her face was probably the same shade as his coat? Mottled green with a distinct yellow tinge and starched as his shirt cuffs, what could be wrong? She squared her shoulders. She was meant to be a man after all.

“Should there be?”

Already it was bad enough she was here. She didn’t want anyone thinking she was getting in another dueling match with her second about it before the first was even finished. Her second who’d adopted another middle name to go with his first. Mulish Moaner when she hungered for his belief, his encouragement, his love. She especially didn’t want anyone knowing there was something wrong when the viscount was surely going to tell her Earl Stillmore apologized for his gross affront in accusing her of cheating. Surely that was the reason Framerton’s lips now parted around what looked to be snake fangs? Because he was about to say …

“Well, then, if that’s the case? If you are ready?”

She swallowed. So he wasn’t going to say Stillmore apologized?

So she hurriedly walked from this field. Now. Ran stumbling from it in fact. Disappeared back to where she belonged.

After all, it didn’t matter how little was left in the trinket box, the one she’d deposited with Mr. Squibbs, pawnbroker extraordinary. The one he’d made such a fuss about because the contents had been stolen from around the wrists, necks, fingers, and safes of half of London, so really she was flat broke. Gabe was everything that mattered, despite how bad it had been of late. Not money. Not anything. So now, now, she also parted her shrunken skeletal lips, and she graciously said …

“But of course, Your Grace. Where do you wish me to stand?” My God. That wasn’t what she meant.

“Over here if you will, sir. Walk this way.” The viscount wasted no time in ushering her across the festering piles of sodden leaves, although whether she should mince across the mud as he did in his ridiculous French shoes was another matter. “The center of the field where His Grace is waiting.”

Trying to look knowledgeable—what else could she do?—she nodded sagely. Mist enveloped the boots Gabe had lent her. Alarming, that with the crows deafening her in the gray sky overhead, the place should have the same derelict quality as a cemetery. Deathly and … ghastly actually, the dank air forming bands on her lungs as if its main desire was to strangle them. The gnarled, leafless trees spread dark branches at the edge of her vision, like fingers that would do the job in advance of the air. The pistol, long, shining silver, and far bigger than that thing Gabe had procured for her to practice with, glared from the box. The beautiful wooden box with silver clasps, the sinuous Viscount Framerton, like some blood-sucking creature from a lifeless crypt, gravely opened for her perusal, then set down on the small folding table she’d somehow failed to notice till now.

What would make a nice funeral hymn? She had always liked, “Who Would True Valor See?” She would rather be a pilgrim and labor night and day than end this one in a box, wouldn’t she?

She gulped a breath. For heaven’s sake, what was she thinking about? She wasn’t going to end today in a box because she wasn’t going to fight this duel. Now Kendall Winterborne was close enough to see how she trembled—and not from cold—he would take pity on her. If he didn’t, she’d tell him nicely. It would mean losing face in front of Gabe, but she could do that, couldn’t she? She glanced across the grass to where he stood sticklike against the blood red sky. The light that lived across the street. How dearly she loved him. How she always had. With her heart, her soul and …

“Do you know what the count is?”

When she was wafting in the thought of how expansive, how deep her love was, must Stillmore’s low-throated voice cut swathes in the air? Must he stand there, right beside her, with his slanting brows dark as dusk although it was dawn?

Because she loved Gabe, she would tell Stillmore. Where was the shame in looking stupid? She’d only to glance at Gabe to know it was what he wanted.

“I—Your Grace, it’s like this—”

“Don’t you think you should load the damn thing? Or do you intend for this to be even more of a turkey shoot than it is already? Hmm?”

Maybe she would tell him?

She dragged her gaze back. Just because he spoke to her like that and had the tautest, the starkest, whitest, yet somehow most shuttered face, she’d ever seen, it didn’t mean she shouldn’t tell him. Now. Before another second ticked its inevitable way toward oblivion.

“Of course. Of course I do. And I know that’s why we’re here, but you see, the thing is—”

“Well, then … Load.” He reached into the box.

That scent, that scent she’d only vaguely noticed yesterday, mainly because it was smothered by brandy fumes, snaked down her throat. His cologne. And cold, unforgiving air. As for his eyes? Eyes were the windows of the soul. His were empty, as if he’d burned them looking into hell instead of the sun. And now he turned these cold eyes on her, riveting her to the agonized depths of his soul, flooding her with the strangest compassion, for a man whose sole, and maybe his soul, purpose in life right now was to kill her. Just when she most needed to tell him the truth, the words I am as tired as you are flitted like exhausted moths’ wings across the tiny bit of light that illuminated her world.

She tore her gaze away, hoping to mask her unease, except it didn’t mask it now that the bits and pieces in the box struck her vision like a cricket ball. The bits and pieces she must somehow identify and assemble in order to fire the gun. The bits and pieces that, mother of God, she couldn’t name to save herself. My God, did it take so many bits to end a life?

She couldn’t possibly do this. She must leave here now while her vision and the rest of her was still intact, but Stillmore didn’t show any signs of backing off. His fingers lifted a lead ball clean from its green resting place in the box and held it to the feeble light kindling into flame at the far reaches of the sky. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Why shouldn’t he? He’d done this a dozen times before. A dozen times she knew of. Meantime, her fingers trembled as if some cold-winged creature had just flitted through her veins.

Fortune hadn’t smiled on her, but there was such a thing as fainting. Now was the time to do it. Stagger to the side, avoid the table. The spectacles didn’t matter but she wouldn’t like to break her nose after all. She surreptitiously inched her foot free of the mud.

“Do you know your cousin visited me yesterday?”

“Cousin?” She was so startled to hear Stillmore speak, in that low vibrato too, she grasped the ramrod instead of staggering to the side and falling to the ground. She fiddled with it too, trying to shove it in the barrel. “What cousin?”

“You have more than one, do you, boy?”

More than one what? He stood so close, the cutting edge of a piece of paper was all that separated their elbows. Shocking,

diverting tactics if ever she saw them, to somehow make her very aware of the long, hard coolness of the ramrod against her palm, of things that held the whiff of impropriety. With Gabe standing not ten feet away, craning his neck and this man about to shoot her too? She raised her chin.

“I have many.”

After all she’d said as much yesterday. Maybe there was still time to make him see just how many people depended on herself?

Stillmore pressed his thumb over the muzzle. “And do any of them know how to load a gun?”

“I--”

She set the ramrod back down in the box and fingered the bump she took to be the powder horn—slowly. Anything else would betray her fury. “Perfectly. It’s very simple, actually.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“What could be so hard, Your Grace?”

“Well?” He huffed out a breath. “Now you damn well ask—damn it.”

His pistol clattered onto the table. Next to the starving way he stared at her hands, it was the most shocking diversionary tactic she’d ever seen. Either he hadn’t eaten breakfast, periodically peered out from under whatever stone he happened to be sitting like a toad beneath and felt stirred—with eyes as wasted as his? Or this was how he won every duel? Although she was having trouble thinking, she couldn’t let him put her off her mark. She upended the powder horn.

“In there with this, like so. In there with the ball. In and out with the ramrod.” She grasped it. “Also like so.”

He snaked his tongue over his lower lip. “I’m sure it is.” His fingers clasped hers. “But do you mind putting that down? Now.”

“Excuse me?”

“Then let me rephrase this. Must you bloody well make it look and sound like something else?”

“Me?”

“Damn well trying to divert me. Do you think I don’t see what you’re about here? How you’re planning to undercut me? Well, let me tell you—“

“If you are both ready, might we move this along?” Viscount Framerton’s sinuous command sneaked like mice across the field. She fought not to hang her jaw. Did he also think what she was doing looked and sounded like something else? Or did he simply want to hurry things along because the law might come along at any second? What had happened to her intentions to faint? She set the ramrod down.

“Look, Your Grace, there is something, something I must tell you now, before this goes any—”

“Then, back to back.”

As Viscount Framerton’s bloodless lips parted, everything retreated away from her like a tide—grass, crows, mist, as if she were rehearsing a play, holding the cold pistol, being told where to stand. A mistake. She must pull away.

“I said, back to back.” As if she hadn’t heard the first time, Viscount Framerton grabbed her shoulder.

She swallowed a gasp—maybe it was a gulp—as Kendall Winterborne took up position and his shoulder blades brushed hers. In all the time she had known Gabe, held hands with him, kissed him too, Gabe had never caused her heart to skid across so many beats she expected to see it skitter across the grass as if the latter were a plate- glass lake and her heart a skimming stone. And she was nailed there, right to the earl’s shoulder blades.

What scorched to her toes was so intensely abnormal, she nearly dropped her pistol. Now was the time to say who she was. If she loved Gabe, she’d do this instead of having any awareness whatsoever of the earl’s back against hers though. Surely? And she did love Gabe. She’d promised him that money.

Then there was the debt which she didn’t love. If only she had stayed with her nose pressed to Madame Renare’s window instead of making that fateful journey inside. A moth to an impossible inferno. It wasn’t even as if she’d felt good about any of it afterward. In fact, she’d felt so bad she’d gone back. Not to return the fan and bag she’d bought either. Why had she gone back when she’d then spent a fortune on more bags, more fans, even more stockings she’d been unable to say no to? And dresses? Shawls? What the blazes was wrong with her that she couldn’t say no?

“One.” Framerton’s deathly knell juddered through her.

One?

She couldn’t find her feet. Not just for the press of Earl Stillmore’s shoulder blades either. No. The hard outline of his buttocks was something else. He was an unashamedly driving, look-at-me male. Unless he knew her body was shaped differently? Did it mean he wasn’t going to shoot her? She could stay in the tournament? Win the ten thousand pounds? If he knew she was a woman, he was surely going to say …

“For God’s bloody sake, you’re damn well meant to move,” Stillmore snarled. “Stop bloody arsing, will you?”

In all of her intimate brush with the Starkadder Sisterhood, she had never been told to stop doing such a thing, especially not by a man whose buttocks seemed glued to hers so she couldn’t move free. She felt him turn his head. “Don’t damn well add miscounting to cheating, do you hear?”

“Miscounting? Me? When you—you--”

“Fram, start the count again. As for you, try to do what he says this time if it’s not beyond you.”

Despite the fact the pistol felt like ice in her hand, she gritted her teeth. “Do you somehow think it’s my fault I’m not? Look, Your Grace, I really do have something—”

“One.”

Whether it was her fault or not, the shock she got at hearing the word yet again and the difficulty of forcing her feet to move, meant she took a giant step forward, almost sliding on her said arse on the wet grass. Gabe’s boots were too large and thin as milk dribble on the soles. But so long as Kendall Winterborne didn’t think this was

another trick on her part to delay the action, it would be all right.

“Two.”

Another step. She could barely keep hold of herself as she took it. But, count her blessings, her senses weren’t being accosted by the feel of him. The man … good God … who might kill her.

“Three.”

A drag of air into her tortured lungs. All she had to do was get off one round. How hard was that? Her finger tightened on the trigger. What if she killed the earl? Was he so black-hearted he deserved to die?

And all because he’d undermined her when she’d meant to say, actually I’m a woman. You can’t shoot me. Or had she undermined herself, precisely because she was a woman?

“Four.”

For God’s sake, was it five paces or six? Seven even? She could not remember for the mist snaking into her nostrils. And she needed to remember. As surely as her name was Dora Malachi whom everyone called Aurora Splendora, she needed to remember. She would be shot in the back otherwise. Then … then she’d be dead.

“Five … Six … ”

But there was no sharp retort, no searing agony, no impact of a bullet tearing cloth and flesh, so obviously, obviously, when it came to how many paces, it wasn’t, five, or six. It couldn’t be. It must

be …

“Seven.”

The word wasn’t even out when she seized a breath and swung on her heel, managing just to keep her balance in the dew. Her fingers squeezed the trigger. She should have aimed, but it wasn’t as if she could see, so it made no difference. The crack ricocheted through her head, reverberating around every cavity in her eardrums. Crows rose like a screeching blanket from the ground. It was nothing to the noise Kendall Winterborne, the Earl of Stillmore, made as he hopped on one foot.

“Jesus bloody Christ. Jesus suffering bloody Christ.”

Nothing to the way he limped about, blackening the air with curses as she stood trying to look knowledgeable either. The buzz in her ears swelled. Starkadder and his silver watch fob chain she never got to polish, she hadn’t hit him, had she? How on earth she had managed to get that shot off, she had no idea. How it had blasted him in the foot either. But she had blasted him. Oh God, oh God, oh God. She had fired. He hadn’t. It meant one thing.

Even the somewhat large, staggered first pace she’d taken had not substantially increased the distance between them. For that she’d have had to bolt. So now … now he didn’t just stop hopping, he stopped dead center in the space opposite, the space he’d occupied just before she’d shot off her pistol, the smoking pistol that slithered from her palm, making a funny thudding noise as it struck the soft grass.

He raised his arm. Raised one eyebrow too. Her gaze widened in an involuntary spasm, so she saw the drizzle-sprayed mist, and his eyes primed on her like flintlocks above the shining barrel of the gun. The one now leveled at her breast, so carefully aimed, he could not miss.

A shudder shook her as his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed. His finger fastened slowly on the trigger.

Then he drew it slowly, deliberately toward his chest.

***

Kendall slid his gaze along the barrel of a gun, beaded with drops of rain. Christ Almighty, what the hell was going on here? He actually didn’t want to think what might be. Not since electric currents had passed down the backs of his legs after his buttocks had brushed … what exactly? As for the business with the gun, his mouth had hung open as it had not in years.

He had never found other men attractive. Ever. Twice now, in the space of two days, he had found himself unnerved by this one. Babs could not have left him in such a bad way.

Unless?

He tightened his finger on the trigger and focused his gaze on the exact spot he was going to hit, the spot he had the right to hit.

Damn it all to hell. Never mind facing a murder charge for a boot-wrecking nincompoop, what if this wasn’t a boy?

He tilted his chin. A woman at a man’s chess tournament though? She’d be arrested for fraud.

No.

He cocked his eyebrow. He had a clear shot, and he must take it. Now.

This damned jackanapes had made him look a complete fool, and not content with that, had proceeded to almost shoot off his toe. Indeed, the shot could have taken off anything.

A woman might very well fire off a shot like that, though. A complete bamboozler that might take a better shot down by chance. Yesterday’s visitor and this cousin had the same hair coloring, the same disconcerting habit of talking as if he was an idiot. They required patience to deal with too. Then there was the matter of the scent.

One more sadness at the bottom of a glass.

He had never shot a woman. What kind of man would?

Oh, for God’s sake, if the shirt outlined soft, swelling breasts, he’d stop, stop right now, stride from this field, and let this go.

It didn’t. What other choice did he have?

He narrowed his gaze, fully cocked the pistol, and taking a deep breath, squeezed the trigger.