Subtle overtures and regard for propriety would fall by the wayside in this war.
It took a scoundrel to trump another scoundrel.
James would not lose. Ivy would be his no matter how many strategical battles, for her, and against her, he would have to fight.
* * *
Ivy sensed brewing trouble in the air, and the stormy expression on the duke’s face when he strode past her to rejoin his friend only confirmed her fear.
“What’s put him in such a bad temper?” Mary whispered over the drawing propped on her lap.
“I haven’t any notion,” Ivy replied.
“Do you think Uncle James could have heard from my father?” Walker asked as Ivy put aside her sketchbook.
“I’m sure he would tell you if he had,” she said. “What do you say we end afternoon lessons with a game? Please, anything but a sack race. And nothing to do with beheadings.”
“How about hide-and-seek?” Mary cried, and Walker clapped with such enthusiasm that Ivy was forced to conceal her chagrin. There went the remainder of the day, but the children deserved a diversion from their worries. “Fine. But inside the house. I’m not climbing any hills or trees. Wash up first and we shall meet in the entrance hall in twenty minutes.”
* * *
The house provided two hundred or so hiding places where a normal governess wouldn’t think to look. But Ivy hadn’t been the eldest of four sisters for nothing. After she counted down against a marble column, she opened her eyes and spotted her charges careening toward the corridor of the west wing. Several doors slammed as she set off at a leisurely pace.
She passed through the ballroom with no success, and from there to the gold drawing room, so glorious in the waning light that she almost forgot her purpose.
At last, in a darkened anteroom to the music chamber, she closed in on her prey.
A muffled sound rose from the depths of a huge armchair that faced a tapestried alcove. She trod softly across the carpet and swung around to confront the culprits in the chair before they could flee.
“Aha! I’ve caught you fair and square and you’re not getting away from me again!”
James looked up in dark amusement, slouched in the depths of the armchair as if he’d been half-asleep. From his bare left hand dangled one glove. His other hand, encased in the black leather of another, lifted to rest at her side, the pressure it exerted deceptively light. “And why would I want to flee from anyone as fetching as you? Especially when you’ve gone to so much trouble to find me.”
Her shocked brain failed to cobble together a coherent response. She managed to straighten an inch before he reacted. The glove dropped to the floor. The heel of his left hand slid down her spine. The next thing she knew, she lost her balance and landed with her chin buried in his cravat and her hip trapped between his groin and upraised knees.
For a moment neither of them moved. But she wasn’t as light as air. She’d fallen hard and at an off-kilter angle. The chair tipped backward.
She gasped.
“Oh, God,” she heard James mutter before they toppled over in a tangle on the floor. Something hard hit the floor. The back of the chair or what sounded like a large pumpkin.
He made an indecipherable noise. Mortified at their undignified descent, she hoisted herself up to examine the man she had imprisoned. It seemed that strange paroxysms gripped his strong frame. Had he been dealt a blow to the head?
“Are you conscious, Your Grace?”
Alarmed by his failure to answer, she crawled over his torso to determine whether he was merely winded from the weight of her, or in the throes of a serious affliction. His face lay hidden in the crook of his arm . . . all the better to smother the snorts of silent laughter he evidently could not control.
“You find it amusing to frighten me?” she asked, forgetting her place and gripping a handful of his cravat to—well, she had to force herself to refrain from strangling the rogue.
“Yes.” He turned his head, his eyes warm with triumph. “You lose. I knew you wouldn’t last a week. It was worth a cracked noggin to win.”
She reared back. “What the devil are you talking about?”
He tapped her chin with his gloved fingers. “This is a forbidden act under the terms of our recent agreement.”
She stared down into his sinfully handsome face. “You don’t think for a moment that I came in here looking for you?”
“No?”
“No. No. I was playing hide-and-seek with the children.”
He grinned. His hand stole down her arm, black leather on bare skin. “You can use any excuse you want, darling. My door is always open.”
“Then let me get up and shut it.”