Concentrated.
The Duke was notperformingwatchfulness; he was now simply watching. She felt it as clearly as she had felt the warmth of his fingers at the sides of her face when he’d set her mask in place.
She played the sixth round, and she won again.
It was somewhere in the seventh that the masked man noticed her.
His attention was not in the slimy, sliding inventory of the doorman; no, this was different, much morethorough. Heleaned forward, and she felt it the way one feels a change in the direction of the wind.
When she looked up from her cards, the black-masked man was oriented toward her.
“Skillful,” he said in a way that made it clear that the word was not addressed to the table.
Caroline looked at her cards. “Thank you,” she said pleasantly, and did not look up.
“You’ve a very composed tell. Or rather, you haven’t got one.” Her opponent paused. “That is considerably rarer than people imagine.”
“You flatter me, sir.” She kept her tone level as she played her hand.
“I assure you I do not.” His voice was smooth, clearly accustomed to rooms such as this one. “Another round, perhaps? The stakes become more engaging at the deeper table.”
“I am quite content here,” she said, still pleasantly, and picked up her winnings.
The compliment was a genuine one, she suspected. That did not mean she intended to provide further encouragement; she was too sensible for that, and the gaming hell was too removed fromany world in which she wished to conduct her reputation, even anonymously.
She felt, then, the hand.
It arrived at her waist withaudacity. It did not grip, nor grope. It was simply there, steady, and certain. The weight of it settled through the fabric of her dress.
It was the Duke’s hand. She knew that he was touching her without looking down.
She glanced in his direction instead.
The Duke was glaring at the man in the black mask with an unbreakable intensity. With a warning.
The masked man held the look for perhaps three seconds, arrived at some private conclusion, and returned his attention to his cards without further remark.
Caroline looked at Anthony, and he removed his hand from her waist before playing his next card.
She turned back to the table and said nothing. The warmth of where his hand had been was quite specifically present. She was very much aware of it.
Once the round concluded, the Duke nodded to the dealer, then said, “We should go,” and it was not phrased as a suggestion.
Caroline had seventeen shillings more than she’d arrived with, and the merchant had given up entirely. She would have liked to press her luck and stay a bit longer at this table.
“Now?” she asked.
“Now.” He was already reaching for her winnings, gathering them with the efficient, unsentimental speed of a man who had made a decision and found the logistics of it secondary. “Come with me.”
She did not argue, because something in the set of his jaw communicated that arguing would require a lot of energy, and she preferred to direct hers toward finding out what precisely had prompted this hasty exit.
She rose. He guided her from the table with a hand at the small of her back, lighter than the hand at her waist had been, the navigational variety rather than the declarative. The Duke steered them into the narrower space between tables and toward the room’s far edge.
“What,” she said, keeping her voice low and even, “are we doing?”
“Leaving that table.” His answer was flat, with no other information forthcoming.
That ruffled her feathers somewhat. “I had gathered that much.”