Mrs. Fenwick had looked, and the looking had aged her another year in a minute. "Put it away. Put it away before I hate a name I cannot afford to hate."
Isolde had put it in the chatelaine instead. Away was not the same as unanswered.
In the weeks that followed she had moved carefully. She asked Croft to verify the hand and the form. She asked Harriet whether a woman could confront a duke without becoming a joke. Harriet had said, "Only if she brings witnesses, paper, and a face that does not apologize for existing." She had practiced the question in her mirror until it no longer shook. She had not practiced forgiveness. She did not intend to need it on the first night.
Now the duke dealt another hand of piquet with the lazy competence of long practice. He had been winning. He always won, or appeared to. When Lord Harwick finally pushed back his chair and muttered something about the hour, Lucien looked up with a smirk that did not quite reach kindness.
"Perhaps gentlemen should know when they are beaten," he said.
Isolde's voice cut across the table before the murmurs could settle.
"Perhaps dukes should know when they are predictable."
The gold-gowned lady's fan snapped shut. The blue-grey lady made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a prayer. Lucien's smirk faltered, then reformed, thinner.
He studied Isolde as if she had walked out of a painting and forgotten she was paint. "Do you play?"
"Not badly."
"That is not an answer."
"Then deal."
Gasps rose behind her like steam from a kettle. A woman did not say such things in Whitcombe House. A woman did not stand at a gentleman's table without a male relative's permission and bid a duke to deal as if he were a footman with a deck. Isolde felt her aunt's gloved hand brush her elbow—warning, not restraint—and she did not move.
Lucien's blue eyes narrowed. Interest, now. Danger, too. "What will you wager?"