Lady Fleur’s shoulders shook, and she kept her laughter buried with her fingertips. That didn’t stop amusement from sending a spray of pink along cheekbones that climbed for days and causing the gold and green specks in her eyes to sparkle.
A fuse lit in him. He thought it was fury. But knew it was also something more.
He simultaneously wanted to dress her down and undress her.
He glared her into oblivion.
Or hetried.
“You are…serious, Hartwell?”
She asked at the exact same moment the gavel landed, and a buzz rolled over the crowd, in anticipation of the next item.
Another man would trust her guilelessness. Hart didn’t trust a woman of any birthright, name, or station. They were each exacting in their own way.
“Next item for bid,” Mr. Winterly announced.
“Very well,” Fleur said in a low voice, and he shot a glance to the top of her artfully arranged blonde-gold locks. “Let us say Ididinfiltrate your household—”
“Lot 25A, a first edition of Charles Maturin’sMelmoth the Wanderer”
“—Of which Ididnot,” she continued through the description.
“…It is a novel genius in its prose…”
“But let us say Idid, Hartwell…”
She had his full attention.
The coy curve to her heart-shaped lips said she knew it too.
The saucy chit.
He didn’t know whether to laugh, turn her over his knee, or take her to task for such insolence.
“Get on with it, Lady Fleur. You’re stringing me along so long, it’s a wonder you can even remember the point you’re trying to make.”
“Very well. It begs the question if I somehow gathered you were attending, who in your family, or on your staff and household, would be socareless?”
Hart thinned his eyes on the auctioneer’s podium.
She wanted to get under his skin. She had already succeeded. She was on his very last nerve. If he were the beast his peers professed him to be, he’d throw her over his shoulder and dump her outside Chilton’s.
“…Baron Chilton is confident the title will eventually be greeted with…”
Lady Fleur stretched up and cupped her hand about the side of her mouth. “Even worse, do you have frequent instances of disloyal staff, because ifthat’sthe case, then you should most definitely consider—”
“I do not have disloyal staff, you saucy minx,” he said, perfectly calm, but betrayed by the deep rumble of his baritone.
Mr. Winterly paused in his infernal description of a Gothic novel not worth the parchment it had been printed on and briefly glanced to the back, where Hart sat.
As Hart, for the first time in his life, had done the unthinkable—he’d caused a bloody scene.
Chapter 3
“Truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.”
Lord Byron