“No.”
“No?” he echoed.
She shook her head.
“I see.”
Fleur doubted as much, given hesoundedlost.
“Do youread Debrett’s?” she asked.
“I don’t need to.”
Fleur paused to consider his response. “On account you already know it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I suspected as much.”
She had gone too far. This time, he didn’t smile.
She preferred the safer smile. Who wouldn’t when faced with such a grim set to such hard lips?
It was then that Fleur discovered the Duke of Hartwell had vastly competing personality traits: charming and witty, and dangerously frosty. There was no in-between, and it was jarring enough to cause a neck complaint.
Her. It leftFleurthrown.
He kept staring at her.
That threw her too.
Only a moment. Fleur recovered nicely. “Oh, you would like me to finish.”
“I had begun to give up,” he said, smiling.
Banter was back, as was the crick he was giving her.
“I believe we are at Oxford, Lady Fleur.”
Fleur looked about.
“In your telling,” Hartwell clarified.
“Oh, yes. That makes more sense.”
“I am beginning to believe nothing is making sense today,” he muttered.
Hartwell could be speaking of any number of things: a McQuoid and Tremaine meeting for the first time since the jilting. That it should occur between, of all the McQuoids, him and Fleur, who had yet to make her debut, and at Baron Chilton’s auction, no less. Or the moments of shared levity they had found.
Fleur opted not to seek clarification. “Mr. Phillips grew his collection to includeseriousworks. What began as a pastime became an obsession. It is known he spends per annumfour thousand to five thousand pounds, and acquires forty to fifty each week, and it does not take much math to confirm his accessions are anywhere from two thousand to twenty-six hundred.”
“And you know all this how, Lady Fleur?”
“On account, I sought the names of the gentlemen I would be bidding against. I was unaware you would be here.” She paused and gave him a pointed look.
He ignored it. “You are bidding?”
“Yes.”
