Chapter 74

As Viscount Framerton's bloodless lips parted, everything retreated away from her like a tide-grass, crows, mist, as if she were rehearsing a play, holding the cold pistol, being told where to stand. A mistake. She must pull away.
"I said, back to back." As if she hadn't heard the first time, Viscount Framerton grabbed her shoulder.
She swallowed a gasp-maybe it was a gulp-as Kendall Winterborne took up position and his shoulder blades brushed hers. In all the time she had known Gabe, held hands with him, kissed him too, Gabe had never caused her heart to skid across so many beats she expected to see it skitter across the grass as if the latter were a plate- glass lake and her heart a skimming stone. And she was nailed there, right to the earl's shoulder blades.
What scorched to her toes was so intensely abnormal, she nearly dropped her pistol. Now was the time to say who she was. If she loved Gabe, she'd do this instead of having any awareness whatsoever of the earl's back against hers though. Surely? And she did love Gabe. She'd promised him that money.
Then there was the debt which she didn't love. If only she had stayed with her nose pressed to Madame Renare's window instead of making that fateful journey inside. A moth to an impossible inferno. It wasn't even as if she'd felt good about any of it afterward. In fact, she'd felt so bad she'd gone back. Not to return the fan and bag she'd bought either. Why had she gone back when she'd then spent a fortune on more bags, more fans, even more stockings she'd been unable to say no to? And dresses? Shawls? What the blazes was wrong with her that she couldn't say no?
"One." Framerton's deathly knell juddered through her. One?
She couldn't find her feet. Not just for the press of Earl Stillmore's shoulder blades either. No. The hard outline of his buttocks was something else. He was an unashamedly driving, look-at-me male. Unless he knew her body was shaped differently? Did it mean he wasn't going to shoot her? She could stay in the tournament? Win the ten thousand pounds? If he knew she was a woman, he was surely going to say ...
"For God's bloody sake, you're damn well meant to move," Stillmore snarled. "Stop bloody arsing, will you?"
In all of her intimate brush with the Starkadder Sisterhood, she had never been told to stop doing such a thing, especially not by a man whose buttocks seemed glued to hers so she couldn't move free. She felt him turn his head. "Don't damn well add miscounting to cheating, do you hear?"
"Miscounting? Me? When you-you--"
"Fram, start the count again. As for you, try to do what he says this time if it's not beyond you."
Despite the fact the pistol felt like ice in her hand, she gritted her teeth. "Do you somehow think it's my fault I'm not? Look, Your Grace, I really do have something-"
"One."
Whether it was her fault or not, the shock she got at hearing the word yet again and the difficulty of forcing her feet to move, meant she took a giant step forward, almost sliding on her said arse on the wet grass. Gabe's boots were too large and thin as milk dribble on the soles. But so long as Kendall Winterborne didn't think this was another trick on her part to delay the action, it would be all right.
"Two."
Another step. She could barely keep hold of herself as she took it. But, count her blessings, her senses weren't being accosted by the feel of him. The man ... good God ... who might kill her.
"Three."
A drag of air into her tortured lungs. All she had to do was get off one round. How hard was that? Her finger tightened on the trigger. What if she killed the earl? Was he so black-hearted he deserved to die?
And all because he'd undermined her when she'd meant to say, actually I'm a woman. You can't shoot me. Or had she undermined herself, precisely because she was a woman?
"Four."
For God's sake, was it five paces or six? Seven even? She could not remember for the mist snaking into her nostrils. And she needed to remember. As surely as her name was Dora Malachi whom everyone called Aurora Splendora, she needed to remember. She would be shot in the back otherwise. Then ... then she'd be dead.
"Five ... Six ... "
But there was no sharp retort, no searing agony, no impact of a bullet tearing cloth and flesh, so obviously, obviously, when it came to how many paces, it wasn't, five, or six. It couldn't be. It must be ...
"Seven."
The word wasn't even out when she seized a breath and swung on her heel, managing just to keep her balance in the dew. Her fingers squeezed the trigger. She should have aimed, but it wasn't as if she could see, so it made no difference. The crack ricocheted through her head, reverberating around every cavity in her eardrums. Crows rose like a screeching blanket from the ground. It was nothing to the noise Kendall Winterborne, the Earl of Stillmore, made as he hopped on one foot.
"Jesus bloody Christ. Jesus suffering bloody Christ."
Nothing to the way he limped about, blackening the air with curses as she stood trying to look knowledgeable either. The buzz in her ears swelled. Starkadder and his silver watch fob chain she never got to polish, she hadn't hit him, had she? How on earth she had managed to get that shot off, she had no idea. How it had blasted him in the foot either. But she had blasted him. Oh God, oh God, oh God. She had fired. He hadn't. It meant one thing.
Even the somewhat large, staggered first pace she'd taken had not substantially increased the distance between them. For that she'd have had to bolt. So now ... now he didn't just stop hopping, he stopped dead center in the space opposite, the space he'd occupied just before she'd shot off her pistol, the smoking pistol that slithered from her palm, making a funny thudding noise as it struck the soft grass.
He raised his arm. Raised one eyebrow too. Her gaze widened in an involuntary spasm, so she saw the drizzle-sprayed mist, and his eyes primed on her like flintlocks above the shining barrel of the gun. The one now leveled at her breast, so carefully aimed, he could not miss.
A shudder shook her as his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed. His finger fastened slowly on the trigger.
Then he drew it slowly, deliberately toward his chest.