Chapter 73

She gulped a breath. For heaven's sake, what was she thinking about? She wasn't going to end today in a box because she wasn't going to fight this duel. Now Kendall Winterborne was close enough to see how she trembled-and not from cold-he would take pity on her. If he didn't, she'd tell him nicely. It would mean losing face in front of Gabe, but she could do that, couldn't she? She glanced across the grass to where he stood sticklike against the blood red sky. The light that lived across the street. How dearly she loved him. How she always had. With her heart, her soul and ...
"Do you know what the count is?"
When she was wafting in the thought of how expansive, how deep her love was, must Stillmore's low-throated voice cut swathes in the air? Must he stand there, right beside her, with his slanting brows dark as dusk although it was dawn?
Because she loved Gabe, she would tell Stillmore. Where was the shame in looking stupid? She'd only to glance at Gabe to know it was what he wanted.
"I-Your Grace, it's like this-"
"Don't you think you should load the damn thing? Or do you intend for this to be even more of a turkey shoot than it is already? Hmm?"
Maybe she would tell him?
She dragged her gaze back. Just because he spoke to her like that and had the tautest, the starkest, whitest, yet somehow most shuttered face, she'd ever seen, it didn't mean she shouldn't tell him. Now. Before another second ticked its inevitable way toward oblivion.
"Of course. Of course I do. And I know that's why we're here, but you see, the thing is-"
"Well, then ...Load." He reached into the box.
That scent, that scent she'd only vaguely noticed yesterday, mainly because it was smothered by brandy fumes, snaked down her throat. His cologne. And cold, unforgiving air. As for his eyes? Eyes were the windows of the soul. His were empty, as if he'd burned them looking into hell instead of the sun. And now he turned these cold eyes on her, riveting her to the agonized depths of his soul, flooding her with the strangest compassion, for a man whose sole, and maybe his soul, purpose in life right now was to kill her. Just when she most needed to tell him the truth, the words I am as tired as you are flitted like exhausted moths' wings across the tiny bit of light that illuminated her world.
She tore her gaze away, hoping to mask her unease, except it didn't mask it now that the bits and pieces in the box struck her vision like a cricket ball. The bits and pieces she must somehow identify and assemble in order to fire the gun. The bits and pieces that, mother of God, she couldn't name to save herself. My God, did it take so many bits to end a life?
She couldn't possibly do this. She must leave here now while her vision and the rest of her was still intact, but Stillmore didn't show any signs of backing off. His fingers lifted a lead ball clean from its green resting place in the box and held it to the feeble light kindling into flame at the far reaches of the sky. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Why shouldn't he? He'd done this a dozen times before. A dozen times she knew of. Meantime, her fingers trembled as if some cold-winged creature had just flitted through her veins.
Fortune hadn't smiled on her, but there was such a thing as fainting. Now was the time to do it. Stagger to the side, avoid the table. The spectacles didn't matter but she wouldn't like to break her nose after all. She surreptitiously inched her foot free of the mud.
"Do you know your cousin visited me yesterday?"
"Cousin?" She was so startled to hear Stillmore speak, in that low vibrato too, she grasped the ramrod instead of staggering to the side and falling to the ground. She fiddled with it too, trying to shove it in the barrel. "What cousin?"
"You have more than one, do you, boy?"
More than one what? He stood so close, the cutting edge of a piece of paper was all that separated their elbows. Shocking, diverting tactics if ever she saw them, to somehow make her very aware of the long, hard coolness of the ramrod against her palm, of things that held the whiff of impropriety. With Gabe standing not ten feet away, craning his neck and this man about to shoot her too? She raised her chin.
"I have many."
After all she'd said as much yesterday. Maybe there was still time to make him see just how many people depended on herself?
Stillmore pressed his thumb over the muzzle. "And do any of them know how to load a gun?"
"I --."
She set the ramrod back down in the box and fingered the bump she took to be the powder horn-slowly. Anything else would betray her fury. "Perfectly. It's very simple, actually."
"I'm glad you think so."
"What could be so hard, Your Grace?"
"Well?" He huffed out a breath. "Now you damn well ask-damn it."
His pistol clattered onto the table. Next to the starving way he stared at her hands, it was the most shocking diversionary tactic she'd ever seen. Either he hadn't eaten breakfast, periodically peered out from under whatever stone he happened to be sitting like a toad beneath and felt stirred-with eyes as wasted as his? Or this was how he won every duel? Although she was having trouble thinking, she couldn't let him put her off her mark. She upended the powder horn.
"In there with this, like so. In there with the ball. In and out with the ramrod." She grasped it. "Also like so."
He snaked his tongue over his lower lip. "I'm sure it is." His fingers clasped hers. "But do you mind putting that down? Now."
"Excuse me?"
"Then let me rephrase this. Must you bloody well make it look and sound like something else?"
"Me?"
"Damn well trying to divert me. Do you think I don't see what you're about here? How you're planning to undercut me? Well, let me tell you-"
"If you are both ready, might we move this along?" Viscount Framerton's sinuous command sneaked like mice across the field. She fought not to hang her jaw. Did he also think what she was doing looked and sounded like something else? Or did he simply want to hurry things along because the law might come along at any second? What had happened to her intentions to faint? She set the ramrod down.
"Look, Your Grace, there is something, something I must tell you now, before this goes any-"
"Then, back to back."