Several of his internal organs changed places at the sound of his name without the honorific. He glanced away from where she was gradually baring the alabaster-smooth skin of her arm. “A question.” Yes, that would be the way to put her off balance. “If I win, I’ll ask you a question and you must answer. If you win, you can ask one of me.”
She drew the glove off and dropped it in her lap. “I might lie, you know.”
“I know that very well.”
She tugged at the second glove. “And you don’t even know what game I’m proposing.”
“More than that; I know you have no qualms about cheating.” He shrugged. “Let’s play.”
“It’s not even much of a game for wagering. But so you’ll see.” The glove slipped off and fell with a whispered slap of leather against the other in her lap. Her bare hands stole forward to sweep the ace and the two and the three off her side of the table, out of his sight. She did something with the cards, a tiny frown at one corner of her mouth. Then back they came, facedown, set before him in a row. “Tell me which is the ace, and you may ask your question.”
“None of them. You switched it out while I couldn’t see.”
Again, that smile so sudden it seemed as though pleasure had caught her unawares. “No. But I like your thinking so I’ll give you another chance. Guess again.”
“I hope you know I’d never make this wager with money, any more than I’d play roulette.” Nevertheless he tapped his first and second fingers on the middle card.
Her hand came forward but instead of turning over his card she flipped the one on its left. Two of diamonds. “Now, Mr. Blackshear.” Her eyes reflected the candlelight with a peculiar intensity. “If I offered you the chance to change your pick, would you do it?”
“Will,” said his lips and his teeth and his tongue without sanction from his brain.
The space between her brows pleated, hard.
“I’m giving you my Christian name.” He cleared his throat. “And permission, of course, to use it.” His face felt suddenly warm. “And I don’t care to switch, thank you. I’ll stay with the middle card.”
“Then you don’t understand odds as well as you think.” His name apparently made no impression at all.
“What precisely do you think I misunderstand?” Really, she needn’t be so pert. “Two cards remain. Each has one chance in two of being the ace. All else being equal, I prefer to trust my original impulse.”
“Oh, good Lord. Please don’t tell me you give any weight to impulse in gambling.” You’d think he’d just said he based all his play on numbers given to him by Gypsy fortune-tellers. She leaned forward, forearms on the table, whole person suffused with officious purpose. “Your calculation of the odds is incorrect. Your original choice has one chance in three; the other card has two in three. You’re a fool if you don’t switch.”
Had she gone mad? “There are two cards. One is the ace. How on earth do you calculate the odds as anything other than even?”
“Because there were three cards to begin with. Your chance was one in three. That doesn’t change just because we have a look at one of the other cards.” Her upper body inclined lower, closer to the tabletop. “Think, Blackshear.” He could see the agitated rise and fall of her bosom. Her features were fierce with concentration, willing him to understand. “You said you would never risk money in this wager. Surely that’s because you didn’t like the odds.”
“Not to begin with, no.”
“In other words, with odds of one in three, you knew your pick was likely to be wrong.” Her attention had heat and weight; he could feel it like a pair of warm hands pressed to his face and dragged down his front. “Odds tell you the ace was more likely to be one of the two cards you didn’t pick. Will you dispute that?”
Well, no. He couldn’t, really. Her tirade was beginning to assume a faint aura of logic.
“Then forget everything else and remember only that: your first pick is probably wrong. So why in God’s name wouldn’t you switch from it, given the chance?” She wore that alluring flush of a woman both mastered and powered by passion, and he would bet all of his eleven hundred sixty pounds that no mere lover had ever inspired such ardor as she felt for her numbers and her odds.
And to her question, he could make no good answer. Or no, maybe he could. He set his elbow on the table, chin in his palm, and with his free hand, turned up the middle card.
Ace of spades. He looked from the card to her, allowing himself the smallest arch of one eyebrow.
Oh, but he’d stepped in the hornet’s nest now. She stared at him, throat working silently, mouth a straight shut line, bosom keeping its dainty rhythm.
Without question he’d come home as warped as Jack Fuller’s leg. What else could account for the lightness in his heart as he awaited the next fusillade of abuse from a woman who was anything but warm and patient? She had none of those qualities that could remind a man of what was worthwhile in himself or the world. She could never provide the children that would attach him to life.
But devil take children. Devil take the world. Devil take himself and whatever worthwhile remained in him. Those things must bide their time out in the hallway, on the other side of the shut door. For these few minutes she and her fiery attention were all the world, all the life he required.
GOOD GOD. He was hopeless. Either he truly didn’t grasp the concept, or he placed a higher value on his contrary games than on the solemn truths she’d labored so to impart.
Lydia flattened her hands on the table, fingers spread for maximum stability, and took a deep calming breath. “Yes, one out of three times your choice will prove correct.” The calming breath had predictably brought his gaze to her bosom, where it now lingered. “That’s exactly what one-in-three odds means. Over time you’d do better to switch. And please have the courtesy to look at my face when I’m speaking. You may review my bosom during the silences, if a bosom is indeed such a novelty to you as to require scrutiny.”
His eyes came back to hers and his mouth spread into a smile of pure crooked delight. “Please tell me you speak this way to Prince Square-jaw.”
“To whom?” But there could be no doubt of who he meant.
“Your flash man with his big square chin. Tell me you dictate when he may and may not look at each part of you. It makes a most agreeable picture for me.”
She’d encouraged him too much, with her flirting. She must reel him back to business now. “His name, let me remind you, is Mr. Roanoke. My transactions with him are not your concern. I’d be obliged if you would return your attention to the lesson at hand.”
“The lesson, yes.” He frowned down at the cards as though seeing them for the first time. “I believe I’ve won the game, Miss Slaughter. Are you ready to answer a question?”
“Yes. Ask.”
A smile flared over his features but when he raised his chin to address her he’d scrubbed away all traces of playful triumph. He eyed her without tilting his head, or pursing his lips, or bringing a considering hand to his chin. He knew exactly what he wanted to ask. Perhaps he’d known for some time.
“What happened three years since?” In a perfectly conversational tone of voice he launched the words.
Her hands, still spread atop the table, slid back until she could hook her thumbs under the edge and take a grip. He remembered. You’re three years too late to do business with my heart, she’d said, or some such flippant remark, and he’d plucked it out of air and put it in a pocket and kept it ever since.
He watched her, waiting. He knew he couldn’t read her. He must take what answer she gave.
Lydia dropped her gaze from his. One of her fingers found a scar of some sort on the tabletop. A dark indentation, perhaps where some lout had dropped a cigar and, too drunk to notice the loss, had let it lie until it burned this shallow channel just wide enough and long enough to fit the end joint of her last finger. “A number of things went wrong that year, culminating in the loss of my parents.”
“Both at once?”
That was a second question. She’d only agreed to one. But she could answer this, and still keep a great deal back.
She nodded. “They were traveling. There was an accident.” Even these incomplete truths felt like handfuls of flesh scooped from her by some creature with claws.
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t want his sympathy. “I’ve lost both parents as well. Not at once, but it’s a fearsome blow no matter how it comes. I know.”
Do you, really? Did you lose them with their hearts broken from the shame you’d brought on the family? Did you lose them after you’d thrown away everything else? If he dared to speak further on the subject she might say something injudicious.
But he didn’t. He took up the three cards and shuffled them one behind the other. “Now I presume you’ll want to repeat this exercise two or three dozen times to prove your contention as to odds?”
“Yes.” She lifted her attention away from that scarred place on the table, and let her hands relax their grip. “Yes, that’s exactly what I wish to do.”
THE TRIAL of repetition proved her correct. Of course. Thirty-six times they repeated the exercise, and in twenty-two instances Will picked the wrong card. Really, it was as simple as that. The card she showed him would never be the ace; the ace must be either the card he’d picked or the remaining card he hadn’t. Ergo, it all came down to whether he’d picked correctly to begin with, and with odds of one in three, most often he did not.
“Do you begin to see?” Something had changed in her, over the past half hour or however long they’d been in here. Alongside that prideful, purposeful intensity was something new. Some almost-vulnerable desire—he knew better than to call it need—to share what was meaningful to her, and to see it grasped and properly prized by someone else.
Had he effected that change? With his question, had he pried open a weak joint in her armor through which he might reach her now?
Time enough to dwell on that later. “You’ve convinced me.” He closed up the pocket-book where he’d kept count of his right and wrong guesses, and stowed it back in his pocket. “Or rather, the results have convinced me. I grasp the essential principle now, for all that my intuitive sense of logic first revolted against it.”
“Intuition is no more to be relied upon than impulse.” She swept up the three cards and fed them back into the deck one by one. “If you will give up consulting such things, and trust strictly to what you know of odds and chance, you’ll have an advantage over most of the men against whom you play. I hope tonight’s lesson may have begun to persuade you of that.”
“Are we finished, then?” His voice rang hollow with forced lightness. Until this instant he hadn’t realized just how ill-prepared he was to forsake this circumscribed world in which one’s worth depended on nothing but the ability to master odds.
That his voice had betrayed him was evident from her response. Her lips pushed together in a slight symptom of effort while her eyes flicked back and forth across his face. As though his sentiments were actually written out there in paragraphs. “I think we ought to be,” she said at last. She put down the deck on his side of the table. “I recommend we return to the company five minutes apart, and return to different rooms. I’ll go after you, and appear in the ballroom. You may choose any other room you like.”
“Very good.” He pocketed the cards and rose. “Shall I count on another such midnight session the next time we’re both here?”
She nodded, studying the way her fingers laced with each other on the table’s smooth top. She didn’t speak.
Will pushed his chair in. She didn’t glance up. Her brow sank with severity as she worked her fingers harder together. Reviewing and regretting, perhaps, every familiarity she’d allowed tonight. Patching that weak place in her armor. Totting up the inches of distance she’d ceded, that she might take that much back again.
Nothing he could do but leave her to it. He bowed and made his way across the carpet.
“Mr. Blackshear,” she said just as his hand fell on the knob. “Will.”
He turned. She’d made a tight double fist of her hands and stared at it as though some oracular wisdom were clutched on a slip of paper inside. Her cheeks, if he did not mistake, had gone faintly pink.
“I believe you’ve heard my given name. I don’t know whether you will remember.”
“Lydia.” It tumbled off his tongue like a commonplace, like the answer to a most mundane riddle, because that was the way to put her at ease.
She nodded, looking already as though she would retract the overture if she could.
So he left without giving her the chance. And all the way to the supper-room he rolled her name round his mouth like rare wine, and if his foot touched one single stair on the way down, that was more than he could tell.
Chapter Eight
PRINCE SQUARE-JAW. Really.
With the first two fingers of her left hand Lydia tipped Edward’s chin up and back. With her right hand she applied the straight razor. The tiny rough beginnings of a beard ticked against the blade and gave way, up the column of his throat, up the underside of his jaw, to the clean right angle of his chin. She swished the razor in her water bowl and wiped it deftly on a towel, one side and then the other.
He’d closed his eyes while she was brushing on the soap and still sat that way, head tilted, outspread hands resting on his trouser-thighs, as calm and relaxed and accustomed to this as … well, as a prince. Perhaps a square-jawed one. She applied the blade again, clearing another path of smooth skin among the lathered stubble.
In the mirror she saw her own shape behind him, prim and workmanlike, the prince’s diligent valet. Often she did this naked, or in some interesting state of dress. Today she wore her plainest high-necked nightgown, and a flannel dressing-gown belted tight. She had a lesson to prepare, and no time to squander on a dissipated romp.
“By the by,” he said as the blade came off his chin and arced through sunlight to the water bowl. “I’m afraid I must ask you to give up the diversion of taking over my cards sometimes at Beecham’s.”
“I beg your pardon?” Her hand froze where it was, just above the bowl.
“Only the proprietors have a certain image they’d like to keep up.” He didn’t open his eyes. “To have a lady playing with the gentlemen is a bit too reminiscent of one of the lower hells, or so it was put to me. I’m sorry, love. I know that was one of your pet amusements.”
Don’t call me love. She plunged the blade into the water. Really, what he called her was the least of her concerns.
She’d known her time at the table might end. She ought to have been better prepared. “I hadn’t realized I offended anyone.” Four hundred and ten pounds sat in the drawer of that table by the window, and four hundred and ten pounds were not nearly enough.
“Nor I, else I should have said something before. But now we’re both the wiser.”
Indeed. The razor beat a bitter chime against the china bowl, striking resolve into her marrow. If one path was blocked to her, she’d just have to find another. She touched the blade to the towel again, and spoke lightly. “There are gaming hells where ladies play?”
“I shouldn’t call them ladies.” His half-smooth, half-stubbled throat rippled with a chuckle. “Desperate creatures, and the proprietors know it. Think nothing of raking in a woman’s last farthing and allowing her to play on for graver stakes.”
“Those sound like dreadful places, altogether.” One more stroke up the length of his throat. “Do you mean you must play against the house itself? Not against each other, as at Beecham’s?”
“To be sure. The fellow who deals the cards, or spins the wheel, is in the establishment’s employ. No chance of him forgiving a loss.”
No chance of getting a turn with the deck, either, and ordering the cards to her liking. She swished the blade in water and watched in the mirror as it cleared a swath of his jaw. “I don’t know why anyone would wish to play under those c
onditions. To never be the banker puts you at a disadvantage in games like vingt-et-un, for example, where ties are awarded to the banker.”
“Oh, but the rules differ.” Ah. Now they came to it. “I think there are houses where a tie simply counts for a tie, no money passing either way. And some houses place constraints on the banker’s play.”
“Constraints?” Mildly she repeated the word, while her attention sharpened to an edge that might put the razor to shame.
“There are houses where the players may stick at fifteen but the banker must keep drawing cards until he reaches seventeen. And then he must stick once he’s reached it. And often you see the first card dealt faceup.”
She’d held the blade away from his face while he spoke, and a sudden jagged glitter of light told her her hand was shaking. She doused it, razor and all, in the basin, shaping that chaotic agitation into a few fierce flicks of the wrist. “The banker’s first card shows?” she said, because she must say something.
“The player’s first card as well. So I don’t suppose there’s really any advantage.”
Fool of a man, there was every advantage. The visible cards alone! Late in the deck they would make a tremendous difference in her knowledge of what cards remained. Even early in a shuffle, the banker’s first card could tell her things. If he showed an ace, she would know his prospects were good, and she could wager accordingly. Add to this the unutterably elegant constraint of the banker’s continuing to draw until he reached seventeen …
Something overhead caught her eye: a dozen spots of sunlight dancing to the rhythm of her razor in the washbasin. She let her hand go still and watched the spots slow and subside, each sliding into its proper place like a number in a solved equation. She might devise some calculations. The variables were too many for her to know exactly how to play every hand, but with pencil and paper and hours of rigorous, satisfying work she might—
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