“Who chose those names?” she asked, desperate to avoid the strange sensations he was evoking in her.
A sad smile curved his lips. His brow crooked with a bittersweet memory. “My mother. She loved plays. She’d read them to us every night. I could recite Henry V to you by heart. Or Twelfth Night. Or the sonnets.”
“More and more in common, Your Grace,” she breathed. “My parents read them to me, too.”
His lips parted as if he was about to pursue this intimate history, but the curtains of the box swished open, and the duke stepped farther into the box.
“Are you to sit with us, then, Your Grace,” her uncle asked as he and Margaret strode in, “or shall you sit with your brothers?”
The duke bowed to Margaret, then contemplated her father, who was not a small man. “I do not see how we could all fit in your box,” he said.
“You are rather large,” Beatrice agreed.
The duke’s eyes bulged with surprise.
“You have a great many muscles underneath all of those clothes, have you not?” she said, gesturing with her fan at his person.
“Beatrice.” Her uncle groaned. “That is a shocking question from a young lady.”
“Is it, uncle?” she queried, her eyes merry. “I had no idea. I thought it was merely an anatomical inquiry regarding the physics of our seating arrangement.”
The duke’s lips twitched as he was barely suppressing a smile.
Her uncle shook his head. “Margaret and I shall greet Lord Christopher, then return. Beatrice, do not let your repartee insult the duke.”
“I find your niece refreshing,” Blackheath assured.
Her uncle gave a relieved sigh before he and Margaret turned and headed back into the hall.
For once, she did not mind the last ten minutes before the performance. She found their conversation to be most curious, and she wished to know more about him.
“To answer your question, I do have a vast many muscles, Lady Beatrice,” he informed. “The better for me to do my work. If I am in good condition, I need less sleep and I am able to stand for hours. And I often do stand for hours whilst I argue with old fools in the Lords.”
“So, you do not believe men to be bastions of superiority?”
He cocked his head to the side and frowned. “Surely you know I do not.”
She tsked with exaggerated woe. “And yet we cannot find ourselves allies.”
“So it seems,” he said, his voice intoxicating.
Silence stretched between them, and it was hard to know what to say. The air fairly crackled. Was he to be trusted?
She gestured to the empty chair near her, and, as invited, he sat. His long legs stretched out, and his polished boot nearly touched the hem of her gown.
Beatrice pulled at her gloves, looking away, quite aware that their conversation needed to attract no undue attention. “You are remiss, sir.”
“Am I?” he asked, blinking, apparently surprised by her sudden change in conversation.
She shook her head and wagged a finger at him. “You promise to give me a boxing lesson, and yet you have failed to do so.”
“Forgive me,” he allowed, looking contrite, even though it was slightly exaggerated—as much a performance as the actors would soon give upon the stage. “A most lamentable failure on my part, to disappoint a lady.” He placed a hand on his heart and inclined his head, which caused shadows to fall over the hard planes of his face. “I should have sent you a note explaining my absence. But I have been much taken up with important affairs of state and some of the charities that I run. I do hope you shall not cast me from your good graces forever.”
She smiled at him, then pressed her lips together. Studying her fan, she replied, “How could I not forgive a man so engaged in important work, so far above the ways of women?”
“Blast, Lady Beatrice, not again,” he insisted. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
She snapped her fan open and laughed behind it ever so slightly. She couldn’t help herself. He was so easy to enrage.