“Through marriageonly.”
Not that either man paid her any attention.
“Barely at that,” she said, anyway.
They continued carrying on without her.
“My brother’s wife’s sister,” Hartwell explained.
“Ahh.”
She, who despised tears, found a whole well of them pressing against her eyes.
Her kin fell in love, made love, and married—at least, in some variation of that order. All she was looking for was the identity of her mystery sweetheart. She was a debutante, but she wasn’tnaïve. It was nigh impossible to be when one had older sisters and female cousins to enlighten one on what happened between men and women in the bedchambers.
Or in Fleur’s case, against a bookshelf, in a peer’s library. In all her imagining she had never thought her first time would be against a rail shelf in a stranger’s household. Her regrets on that were minimal.
All Fleur wanted was to identify her ring and, thus, her mystery lover. The same way Hart had one of his goons fetch her from Lord Rutland’s and thwarted her from finding out the gentleman’s identity, he would do so again.
Fresh rage filled Fleur. Forget her reticule!
Hartwell stepped out the same time as her and thwarted her efforts.
“She won’t leave unless physical harm is done to her,” Hartwell said with a smile. if she hadn’t already herself stated as much. “As much as the idea holds appeal, I cannot bring myself to hurt a weaker creature.”
“Weaker?” A red haze fell over her vision. “I will show you weak.”
Taking her purse strings in both hands, she swung her bag better than any mallet and beat him about his broad shoulders.
Chapter 9
“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.”
Don Juan: Canto I, Stanza 133
~Lord Byron
The bloodthirsty, little hellion was determined to brain Hart to death.
In fact, if Fleur had access to a match, she would have burned Rundell’s and everyone inside, to the ground. As it was, her eyes flashed fire, her cheeks blazed red. The only actual thing missing from the lady were actual flames.
This time when he caught her bag mid-swing and disentangled it from her ruthless fingers, he had learned his lesson, and tossed her silly bag to the nearest associate.
It would be nothing to lift Fleur in a single hand and toss her out on her unconventionally big-bustled-hidden arse.
For a moment, he entertained doing just that.
Fleur gasped. “You bloody jackanapes.”
A still descended over the shop; a dangerous energy that crackled in the silence and fed off the fear of onlookers; every last man present knew to besmirch the Duke of Hartwell meant ruin and destruction.
The one woman glaring with radiant fury was the only person who failed to recognize the peril in crossing him, in public. Twice now.
“Go.”
The rumble of his warning sent Rundell and his staff running. They fled, with the head proprietor clever enough to set Fleur’s frilly weapon-of-choice on the shelf far away from the chit on his way out.
Those men fled because they had more than half a brain in their heads—unlike the she-devil in a standoff with Hart. For if she did, if she possessed an iota of intelligence, she’d have run screaming in the opposite direction of Hart. But then she was a McQuoid.