“My aunt considered it a harmless diversion on winter evenings.” She sorted her cards with the composure of a woman examining a perfectly ordinary hand.
“And your brother?”
“Relieved of three shillings and a promissory note for a book he owed me.” She did not look up. “In January. He has not quite recovered.”
She felt rather than saw his expression shift and his brow arch upwards. “I see. So, I am to be impressed.”
“You are to be quiet,” she said pleasantly. “I am reading the table.”
He said nothing further, which was either compliance or amusement; she did not spare the attention to determine which.
She lost the first hand. And the second.
Neither loss troubled her. She was still reading: the merchant who twitched his left thumb when he held a strong card, the paired bucks whose glances at each other telegraphed everything and concealed nothing, the woman in the middle who gave away precisely nothing. Caroline had concluded that this woman was the second most dangerous player present.
The lean man in the black mask breathed so quietly she had to watch the slight rise and fall of his coat to confirm he was living and not some elaborate fixture of the establishment.
“You are losing,” her companion observed, in a tone entirely devoid of concern.
“I’m aware of that,” she said through clenched teeth.
The Duke seemed to think this was the perfect time to tease her. “I gave you that money in good faith.”
She collected the cards dealt to her third hand and fanned them with admirable patience. “You gave me that money and told me not to ask for an accounting of it. You cannot now provide one on your own initiative.”
Her words brought a pause. “That is remarkably sound logic from a woman currently down six shillings.”
“Seven,” she corrected. “And I suggest you attend to your own hand.”
He did as she bid, even as she caught the slight smirk on his face out of the corner of her eye.
So, she won the third round out of sheer spite.
Not by much, but just enough to recover her losses and a margin beyond. She kept her expression as tranquil as the studied neutrality of the middle-aged woman across the table and collected what was owed without comment.
She won the fourth, too, and something sharpened in her then: the same quality of click that had arrived when she’d answered the lecturer’s question at the Royal Institution, the satisfaction of a mind finding the shape of a problem and fitting itself to it.
The merchant’s thumb stilled. The bucks exchanged a glance that was, for the first time, less optimistic than suspicious. The woman in the middle gave her the briefest, most precise inclination of the head.
The lean man in the black mask said nothing and continued to breathe quietly.
The fifth round produced a larger return.
“Mm,” said Anthony.
Caroline arranged her winnings calmly, even though her blood was definitely bubbling underneath her skin from the excitement.
She was beginning to understand why many men got addicted to this.
“Was that an observation or a concession?” she asked, feeling cheeky.
“An acknowledgment,” he said simply, and she arched a brow without looking his way.
“Of what?”
He looked straight at her. “That you are exactly as troublesome as I suspected,” he said, and returned to his cards.
She was aware, in the peripheral, calibrated way she had become aware of him over these last few weeks, that his attention had shifted. The divided surveillance of a man monitoring a situation had given way to something more…