By firelight, her hair was a palette of myriad colors. Gold, russet, garnet… If asked, Sycamore would have said her hair was firelight-colored, while her hands wrapped around the crystal glass put him in mind of purring cats and sleepy cuddles.
“I am skilled with a blade,” Sycamore said, not allowing himself to imbue that statement with even a hint of prurience.
“Will you teach me how to throw a knife?”
Of all the things she might have asked of Sycamore, that hadn’t even been remotely on the list.
“Why, my lady?” Women took up the bow and arrow for diversion. They might on rare occasion participate in a shoot, particularly on their own family’s land. A few intrepid women followed the hounds, usually in the second or third flight.
But knife throwing?
“You ask me why.” She set her drink aside. “Because a knife doesn’t have to be kept dry at all times and loaded with shot prior to each use. Because a knife can be carried in a reticule or pocket or sheathed to the body. A knife is silent and can be used again if the first throw misses—or if it doesn’t.”
Sycamore had only two sisters, and neither of them had much use for their Dorning menfolk. His mother had been a perpetually disappointed and disappointing virago, and by design, his lovers were more interested in pleasure than the man providing it.
He did not, in other words, have experience fathoming the labyrinth of the adult female mind to any useful depth.
“I understand the allure of knives,” he said, “but why do you want to acquire skill with them?”
She picked up her drink and took another visual inventory of Sycamore’s private parlor. “I am not in the habit of explaining myself. Will you teach me or not?”
Her ladyship was very good at the subtle set down, but not quite good enough. “You are asking not only for instruction, but for my utmost discretion.”
“I am.”
She was a widowed marchioness of substantial means and considerable self-possession, and she wanted to learn—in secret—how to make a knife throw count.
“You can’t learn to throw in a night,” Sycamore said. “Not in a week of nights.” Though practice would result in progress—a lot of practice.
“Then we’d best get started, hadn’t we?”
Would she be all business in bed too? No kissing, no touching her hair, God forbid anybody broke a sweat? For her sake, he hoped not.
“If I spend thankless hours teaching you the basics of how to handle a blade, what do you offer me in return?”
She turned a frankly curious gaze on him. “What do you want, Mr. Dorning?”
Sycamore wanted his brother Ash to take the same interest in The Coventry Club that he had before matrimony had turned him into a doting dimwit.
He wanted Casriel to get his lordly arse—and wife and kiddies—up to Town to vote his damned seat like a good little peer.
He wanted brother Oak to extricate himself from the embrace of rural Hampshire—and the embrace of marital bliss—and come to London to do some lecturing at the Royal Academy.
Of course, a romp or twenty with the marchioness would have been lovely too, but romping undertaken in return for services rendered wasn’t romping.
“Can you buy out Jonathan Tresham’s interest in the Coventry?” Sycamore asked.
“One wondered what the arrangement was. Yes, I can, but no, I will not. I am a quick study, Mr. Dorning, and determined to master the skill.”
And she was very good at keeping her emotions to herself, as any successful gambler must be.
Sycamore crossed an ankle over a knee. “You are doubtless a paragon in many regards, my lady. I am not a paragon, though I am a gentleman. I will show you the rudiments of the art as a favor between friends.”
She wrinkled her nose, probably because Sycamore had referred to himself as her friend. “How good are you?”
Sycamore smiled and sat forward as if to impart a confidence. In the next instant, the blade he carried in his left boot was silently quivering in the middle of the cork target across the room.
“I am that good.”
Her ladyship studied the blade until it was still. “You didn’t even look.” The marchioness, however, swiveled her gaze to Sycamore. She studied him, no longer visually dismissing him, evading his eyes, or turning a wary regard on him.
“My dear marchioness, looking rather destroys the element of surprise, which is half the beauty of a well thrown knife.”
She crossed the room and withdrew the blade. “Teach me to do this, and you can demand almost anything of me in return.”
Almost. A prudent woman. “You hate to be in anybody’s debt, don’t you?” Sycamore had made her a loan once before, at a rural house party, and she had paid it back to the penny within days of the house party’s conclusion. The sum had gone to paying off her step-son’s gambling debts, and what consideration she had extracted from the hapless lad was a secret between her and his young lordship.
She passed Sycamore his knife and watched as he returned it to the sheath in his boot. “I loathe being in debt to anybody, particularly a man. Women have little enough power, and a woman in debt is a woman all but asking to be exploited.”
Sycamore understood an independent nature, but not the bitterness behind her ladyship’s words. He also understood pride, however, and to become her ladyship’s instructor, he would have to surrender some scintilla of his own pride.
He had a bit to spare, after all. “Here is the favor I will accept in return for teaching you what you seek to know: Once a week, we will meet at the Coventry to practice throwing, and then you will dine with me on the premises.”
“Supper?” With a single word, she conjured a reference to all manner of hedonistic excesses.
“Food, wine, conversation. I can inflict some of my laughable French on you, you can tell me who is walking out with whom.”
The wariness had returned to her gaze, muted by curiosity. “You are serious?”
“I do not dissemble, even when my family dearly wishes I would.” Her ladyship still looked doubtful, so Sycamore resigned himself to explaining his situation to her.
“My brother Ash is my business partner, or he used to be. Now he’s too besotted with the wedded state to do more than keep an impatient eye on me at the club, not an eye on the club, mind you, an eye on me. When we talk it’s Della says, Della hopes, and my dear Della tells me. I love my sister by marriage—I love the entire herd of them—but Lady Della has entirely made off with my dearest brother.”
Sycamore rose to pace rather than sit passively before her ladyship’s scrutiny. “I cannot gossip with anybody about club business, or with nobody but Tresham, and with him it’s Theodosia believes, my darling Theo would say, and more of same. Casriel is the worst of the lot. He’s awash in daughters, which adds entire rhapsodic chapters to his litany.”
Sycamore paused before the corkboard, which would soon have to be replaced, because the center was too pitted from multiple throws hitting the same mark.
“I spend almost every night,” he said, “amid the witty and wealthy, and while I can flirt, make small talk, and flatter until my eyelashes fall off, that’s not the same as a good meal with a pleasant companion.”