by Ayles, Abby
He took the cards and shuffled slowly, showing her how to hold them and how to use the wrists.
“If you get good enough, you can trick people with shuffling,” he explained. “You can deal them bad cards and give yourself good ones. But you don’t need to worry about that right now.”
“What if someone at the table is doing that?” Regina asked.
She felt a little distracted by all the things she hadn’t noticed about Harrison before. Or, to put it more accurately, the things she hadn’t let herself notice:
The way that he smelled, heavy and masculine—the way it made her breath catch but also made her want to curl up against his side and breathe him in;
The darkness of his hair, and the way it curled slightly now that it was just the two of them alone together and he didn’t have to tame it down;
The intensity and warmth in his eyes, the way they seemed to bore into her;
The skill of his hands, and how large they were, dwarfing hers…
So many things she hadn’t consciously thought about. So many things she had dismissed, now all rushing to the forefront. She could remember noticing them before, and the rush of warmth inside of her, but she hadn’t thought about it. Perhaps she hadn’t let herself think about it.
Now she was thoroughly sunk. She wanted nothing more than to cross the distance between them and kiss him.
Harrison seemed as usual, however. There was no change in him. He treated her the same way that he always did, with casual warmth and teasing. He was obviously overall unaffected by what they’d done.
That hurt, a little, actually. Were all men like that? Could they all become overwhelmed in the moment and then act as though nothing had changed once it was over?
Still, nothing really had changed, had it? They were still the same. She was simply his pupil at cards. He was helping her to dig her family out of a precarious position. Nothing more.
Regina shook herself. This was ridiculous. She was proving herself to be the silly little girl that she’d always feared she was. She had no time to think about things like this. She had to focus on the cards.
“Lord Pettifer, for one, might be capable of that,” Harrison said.
Regina realized that he was answering her question and that she had missed the good first half of his answer.
“But none of them would dare in a game such as Loo,” Harrison went on.
“Do you know that for certain?” Regina wouldn’t put it past Lord Pettifer to pull a stunt like that.
Harrison seemed to read her expression, because he gave a small chuckle. “Even the likes of Pettifer wouldn’t dare. Loo is such a dangerous and popular game because of how much is up to chance. Your skill comes from how you’re able to play the others around you.”
“I thought it was about the cards.”
“It is, I suppose, but if you truly want to be good at Loo, or any other game where it’s about chance, you have to make the cards secondary. The cards serve the purpose of using the players.”
“That’s what you were trying to get me to understand when you brought your friends over last night,” Regina said. “You wanted me to figure out that I should look at how they were playing and use that instead of relying entirely on my cards.”
“Exactly.” Harrison nodded. “I was hoping that you’d figure it out on your own, and you did.”
He reached out and gently tucked her hair behind her ear, smiling proudly at her. Then his face grew more serious. “I haven’t played Pettifer directly. I’ve heard plenty about him, of course. And I saw him play against your father. So I do have a very good idea. But I don’t know his methods as well as I’d like.”
“Then it will be all on me,” Regina said, voicing her thoughts aloud. “I’ll have to figure him out as we play.”
She winced a little at the thought. Would she be able to fool him? A man who had made his living ruining others through cards? Could she keep up?
“No, none of that, now,” Harrison said. He frowned. “You have to stop beating yourself up on the inside. Don’t think I can’t tell when you’re doing it, you get this most put out look on your face. I’d say it’s adorable but I think you’d take offense.”
“I’m not—” Regina let out a huff of frustration. “It’s perfectly reasonable of me to be nervous about my abilities, isn’t it? I’m just a girl. I’m not even particularly sociable.”
“You’re intelligent and a quick learner,” Harrison replied. “That’s all you need to be. I’ll help you figure out the rest. And you’re a better liar than you think you are. You just need some coaching.”
“That’s so odd,” Regina replied, putting on a thoughtful face, “Because I could have sworn someone who looked an awful lot like you telling me last night that my emotions could be read all over my face.”
“Well, yes, that’s true, but hiding is the part that I’ll teach you. You’ve got the part where you go along with things down pat. In case you forgot the part where you didn’t panic because my friends were rude teases and put you in an awful position.
“Lying isn’t just hiding. That’s the part you have to work on and I find that delightful, because that’s what most people think it is.”
Harrison started dealing out cards as he spoke, slowly, to show her how it was done. “You’ll have to take a turn dealing so you should learn, even if you’re not going to be using it to cheat. If you deal poorly, they’ll pick up on it and see you as a weak player.
“But as I was saying, about the lying. Most people think that lying is just hiding the truth. They don’t understand the other half of it, which is going along with things. It’s redirection. Distraction.”
Regina thought about that. “So I couldn’t hide my emotions very well. But I was able to go along with it when we ended up having to pretend that we were a couple. And I could—hold my own, I suppose that you could say—with the others?”
“Yes, precisely.” Harrison handed her a hand of cards. “You were able to engage them and keep up with them. Although we had to improvise and pretend that we were a couple, none of them suspected the full truth. And that’s important.”
“Because if you can just hide your emotions, people will know something is up even if they don’t know what it is, or they won’t want to engage with you because you’ll be distant. I still want Lord Pettifer to engage with me.”
“Precisely.” Harrison smiled at her in a way she was beginning to realize meant he was proud of her. “He has to want to play you. You have to engage him and make him intrigued. He has to wonder who you are, and be convinced that he can beat you.”
A thought occurred to Regina. Lord Pettifer had once made an advance towards Bridget. What man in England hadn’t, she thought, but perhaps…
“Perhaps I should seduce him?” Regina asked. “Not truly, of course.”
The very idea of kissing Lord Pettifer made her sick to her stomach.
“But perhaps, he is rather attracted to Bridget, after all. I am told I look the most like her, in that we both resemble our mother most closely. Maybe, if I were to play up the flirtation a little, that would intrigue him more? I would remind him of someone, but with my mask on he wouldn’t know for certain who I was. It would appeal to him, I think, to be presented with a puzzle.
“Who knows, he might even believe that I am Bridget. That would certainly appeal to him. My sister appeals to everyone. And I wouldn’t confirm it, of course, I wouldn’t confirm anything about my identity but he could wonder. I could let him form his own theory and think that theory is true.”
Harrison’s brows drew together and his jaw clenched. He was unhappy, Regina realized.
“Did I say something wrong?” She asked.
Harrison shook his head. “No.” He looked at her and his face gentled. “Oh, no, Puck, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He ran his thumb over the line of her cheekbone, soothing her. Regina leaned into the touch, almost unconsciously. She liked it when he touched her, perhaps
too much.
“It is a clever idea, I have to admit,” he said, speaking quietly. “But I must also confess that I rather hate the idea of you appealing to him in any way.”
“It’s not me,” Regina protested. “It’s Bridget. Everyone wants Bridget. I would simply make it seem like I’m her.”
“But it would still be you,” Harrison countered. “You would be the one that he was looking at in that way, and he doesn’t deserve it. Not a man like him.
“He doesn’t deserve to look at Bridget or any other of your sisters that way either, of course. But I won’t have you putting yourself in a position of vulnerability, even for a moment. If he thinks he has an invitation and then—in his rage after he loses…”
Harrison shook his head and Regina felt a sudden chill at what he was suggesting. What Lord Pettifer might try to demand from her as a way to humiliate and hurt her and sustain his own pride after she beat him.
“I would never want that to happen to you,” Harrison said, his voice low and strained. “Part of my duty here is to keep you safe.”
“What if he tries to do something like that, whether I seemingly encourage it or not?” Regina had never heard of anyone close to her experiencing such an act. But she had heard stories of others outside of her circle.
It wasn’t something that people liked to talk about. The options were generally limited for the woman. Sometimes she was forced to marry her attacker.
Regina couldn’t even begin to imagine being touched by a man in such a way. But she knew how much she generally disliked talking to people or having them touch her. She thought about how safe she felt with Harrison—and how easily it could go the opposite way with another man.
If she considered her discomfort in conversing or dancing at a ball and then multiplied it times ten… that began to give her a rough estimate.
She shuddered.
Harrison reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently. He had been doing that lately and Regina knew that it was wrong of her to allow it but she could not stop herself. It made her feel grounded and safe to have him touching her like that.
So often during all of this she felt as though she would float away. Or, even, that she was in some kind of awful dream and she was going to wake up if only she could remember how. When Harrison took one of her small hands in his it reminded her that this was real.
“I’ll be there,” he reminded her. “Pettifer’s an ass, if you’ll pardon the rough language. But he’s also a coward. Why else would he strip men of their fortune through cards? Why else would he go out of his way to do people harm?
“He feels small. He’s a small man of little family and consequence. His lineage has been disgraced time and again.”
“Your family was disgraced,” Regina pointed out.
“Yes, and yet you don’t see me taking other men down for it. He has felt deeply the blows from his peers. People will always find the wrong things to say about you.
“Instead of rising above it, he has decided to amass as much wealth and land as he can until they can’t ignore him any longer. They will have to speak highly of him, because he will be so powerful they won’t be able to afford not to.”
“And he is doing it by hurting others that he feels look down on him because of his family’s past scandals and his own reckless behavior,” Regina added, showing that she understood. “But that will only make them hate him more.”
“I do not think that he wants to be loved,” Harrison mused. “I think that he merely wishes to be feared.”
“Then I shall have to knock him down a peg or two, shall I not?” Regina replied. “Show him that even a small mousy girl isn’t afraid to take him on.”
“My darling, when will you believe me when I say nobody will think you mousy once this is all over?” Harrison asked.
A strange feeling formed in Regina’s chest, weighing her down. It was hard not to believe Harrison when he said such encouraging things to her. He called her ‘darling’ while she was tucked against his side and it was so easy to believe that he truly meant it. That she was darling to him.
Regina shoved such thoughts aside. She’d been doing a lot of that lately.
Harrison seemed to like her and she appreciated that. He even saw fit to touch her, to show her pleasure so that she could find it for herself with a husband later on. She was grateful to him for it. But she must never let herself become confused.
This was all so that Harrison could be happy with Bridget. That was why he was doing this for her. Anything else must be a bonus to him, a diversion, something to entertain him.
It wasn’t self-pity to say such things. It was merely the truth. She had to remember that.
“Now, enough about that odious man,” Harrison said. His tone was light but he kept his arm around her. It was as if Lord Pettifer himself was somewhere about the room and Harrison felt he had to keep her close. “Let us turn to the cards.”
Yes. The cards. That was what this was about.
If only she could concentrate on them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The rest of the afternoon was spent in dealing with the matter of cards. By the end of it, Regina felt that she better understood how the game worked. She still wasn’t nearly as good at it as Harrison was.
“It will come through practice, never fear,” Harrison said.
How he could tell that she was dangerously close to crying in frustration, Regina didn’t know. He seemed to read her better than anyone. In some ways he read her even better than Bridget did, and Bridget had raised her.
“We have less time than we think we do,” Regina replied. She did her best to keep her frustration in check and not let it bleed into her voice or face. “How am I supposed to become all of the things I must in order to defeat him?”
“All of the things you are supposed to become?” Harrison asked. He sounded genuinely confused.
Regina nodded. “Confident, and a good liar, and engaging, and witty, and an excellent card player, and an excellent judge of character, and sophisticated, and mysterious, and—and all of these things that I’m not. I’ll have to become a chameleon at this rate.”
Harrison looked at her for a moment, lips slightly parted as if he were about to speak. He blinked slowly, taking her in. Then he said, “Regina, you don’t have to become anything.”
“Of course I do,” she scoffed. “I have to become a good card player, for one thing.” She picked up a card and waved it in the air before letting it fall back onto the table. She partially wanted to set this entire deck of cards on fire.
“All right, I do admit, you will have to continue to gain confidence in that particular field,” Harrison allowed. “But Regina, you don’t have to be anything that you’re not.
“You’re already witty. And you’re already sophisticated. Even if you don’t see it in yourself. It’s all in there. I promise that, and I’m many things including possibly a horrible person but I’m not a liar.”
“You’re not a horrible person, either,” Regina said automatically. She wondered what would make him think such a thing about himself.
“We’ll get back to that,” Harrison said dismissively. “The point here is that I’m not a liar. Therefore, you can trust me when I say that you already have all that you need. I’m merely letting you find a way to bring it out.
“I think it a great tragedy that you have four such accomplished sisters. Not that I think they are bad people. You know full well my admiration for your eldest sister. But they shine so brightly. They dazzle. And I think that has left you without the room you deserved to grow into your own.
“You are just as witty, and talented, and engaging, and sophisticated, as any of your sisters. But you’re the youngest and I think—I think that you allowed them to hold the spotlight without even realizing that was what you were doing
“I think you’ve sold yourself terribly short. You have all that you need to walk into that card room and take that bastard—I’m sorry, pardon m
y language—for all that he’s worth. You just don’t know it yet. That’s all.”
Regina felt as though the room had become too hot and too small. And it wasn’t in a pleasant way, like when she and Harrison were playing cards and she could feel every inch of her skin aflame, reminding her of how close he was and how alive they both were.
Instead it reminded her of when she was in a ballroom and it felt like there were too many people around her. All of them crowding around her and being loud. It stifled her and even frightened her.
She felt frightened now. Almost as though she couldn’t get in any air, couldn’t breathe properly.
She stood up abruptly, turning away from Harrison and breaking his hold around her. Literally, as his arm fell away from her shoulders. Perhaps metaphorically as well.
“I won’t have you filling my head with pretty stories,” she replied to him. She kept her back to him.
She felt like a silly child, on the verge of tears. She didn’t want Harrison to see her in that way. She didn’t want anyone to see her in that way anymore, she realized. She wanted to be taken seriously as an adult.
But how could she do that when she was about to burst into tears? And over something utterly ridiculous.
“They’re not pretty stories—” Harrison began.
“I understand that you want to butter me up. That it will benefit me to go in there filled with confidence. But I will not be lied to. I want to go into that room knowing the truth about what I can and cannot accomplish and that means knowing the truth about myself.”
She kept her back to him but she no longer felt like crying. That was good.
“I haven’t spent my life being told that I’m one way to believe a man when he uses honeyed words to tell me I’m another. I know that I’m young. I know I might slip up and be childish.
“But I’m not unintelligent. I’m certainly not naïve. I understand who I am and how I am. And sophisticated, witty, those things—those things I certainly am not.
“Do you not think that, if I were, I would have shown some sign of them before now? That somebody, somewhere, would have seen them?
