He swallowed and cleared his throat. “This isn’t what I expected when you said you’d go to war with me.”
“Let me guess.” She fingered her glove carefully, and he noticed that she was worrying at a tiny hole in the tip. “You thought I would simper if you smiled at me. You supposed that when I said I would prove what you were doing to everyone, that I planned to engage in a bumbling, graceless investigation into your surface activities.”
“I—no. Of course not.” But Robert felt his cheeks heat. Because that was precisely what he had thought.
She bit her lip, the picture of shyness. But her words were the opposite of shy. “Now,” she whispered, “you’re surprised to find that I overmatch you.”
“I am?” he echoed, looking at her. “You do?”
Her eyes were fixed over his shoulder, no hint in her posture of what she said so quietly.
“Of course I overmatch you,” she said. She spoke as if the matter were beyond question. “You’re a well-educated duke—one of the most powerful men in England. Your staff likely numbers in the hundreds across your many estates. If needed, you could draw on resources in the tens of thousands of pounds.”
The corner of her mouth lifted now, dispelling the illusion of a simple, quiet girl. A dimple emerged on her cheek. She glanced up at him—once—and he almost couldn’t breathe.
This, this was the woman who had threatened him.
“You have all those things,” she said. “But then, I have one thing you do not.”
He leaned in, not wanting to miss a word.
“I,” she said, “have a sense of tactics.”
He had just that one glimmer of a smile from her, a small moment when he caught his breath—and then it all disappeared. Her face smoothed; she looked down once more, and Miss Pursling looked utterly plain.
Another man might have been surprised into compliance. But Robert couldn’t imagine backing down now—not when she ducked her head and stared at the floor. No; he wanted to bring her out again.
“You haven’t done anything,” he said.
Her expression didn’t change.
“I’m winning,” he announced. “You can’t bore me into a surrender.”
“You probably think battles are won with cannons and brave speeches and fearless charges.” She smoothed her skirts as she spoke. “They’re not. Wars are won by dint of having adequate shoe leather. They’re won by boys who make shells in munitions factories, by supply trains shielded from enemy eyes. Wars are won by careful attendance to boring detail. If you wait to see the cavalry charge, Your Grace, you’ll have already lost.”
He blinked. “You’re trying to make me back down. It won’t work.”
“That’s the beauty of strategy. Everything I do contains a double threat. If you don’t back down from spoken words, you reveal your character. Everything you say, everything you do, every charming smile and sweet protestation—the most you can hope for is to change the manner of my victory. The fact of it, though, is a foregone conclusion.”
She looked so small sitting in her chair, so fragile. It was only when he shut his eyes and erased that jarring image of a diffident spinster that he could comprehend the evidence of his ears. Miss Pursling wouldn’t even look him in the eyes. But her voice seemed indomitable.
“So,” he said, “you think that I’m charming. You didn’t list that among my assets before.”
“Of course you’re charming.” She didn’t look up. “I’m charmed. I’m charmed to my teeth.”
There was a note in her voice that sounded so bitter that it almost tasted sweet.
“You’re a force of nature, Your Grace,” she said. “But so am I. So am I.”
She hadn’t said that she was charming…and, in point of fact, she wasn’t. Not in the usual sense. But there was something utterly compelling about her. He had no idea who she was any longer. He’d thought at first that she was a high-spirited, clever woman. He’d wondered next if she were a wallflower. But at the moment, she seemed beyond any category, larger and far more complex than anyone he’d encountered thus far.
“If you want me to back down,” he said softly, “you shouldn’t be so interesting.”
Her lips compressed.
But before she could answer, a noise sounded on the other side of the room. Robert turned his head in time to see a woman—Miss Charingford, the daughter of the house, and if he recalled correctly, the friend that Miss Pursling had brought with her the other day—standing so abruptly that her seat overturned.
“Come now, Lydia,” the man who had been sitting next to her said. “You can’t really mean—”
“I do,” Miss Charingford snapped. So saying, she took a glass of punch from the table next to her. Before anyone could intervene, she dashed it into the fellow’s face. Red dripped down his nose, his chin, staining his cravat. Gasps arose around them.
“You can’t do this!” he said, standing from his chair.
The man was George Stevens. Robert had spoken with him twice now, enough to remember that he had charge over the militia. An important man, as things were judged in these parts.
“I can’t?” Miss Charingford snapped. “Just watch.”
She snatched a second glass of punch from her neighbor’s fingers and threw this one in his face as well. “You see? Apparently, I can.”
So saying, she put her nose in the air and stormed out the door.
Robert turned back to Miss Pursling.
“Is she—”
But Miss Pursling was no longer there. She was already halfway across the room. She hadn’t apologized to him or made her excuses. She had simply left, dashing after her friend. The door closed on her moments later.
He’d been amazed that her posture, the expression on her face, had remained so smooth throughout their conversation. But she had been hiding from him, too. She’d gestured him to the chair that would allow him to talk with her while she could still keep one eye on her friend. He had thought she had looked away from him to feign shyness. Instead, she’d been watching Stevens.
Everything I do contains a double threat. That had been no braggadocio, there. She’d been fending off his attempts at conversation with half her attention, lecturing him on strategy, and pretending to be a shy lump for anyone who was watching. And while she’d done that, she’d also been tracking her friend’s escalating drama from across the room.