In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,60

was.

And in that, a betrayal, just as Bragger had charged.

Lila struggled to open her eyes. “Hugh?” she asked, a question in her voice.

Shoving aside the needling of guilt, he focused on the lesson. “You know what”—who—“your target is?”

“I do,” she said, this time with an automaticity that left no doubt that she’d settled on a secret opponent to square off against. And for reasons he couldn’t understand, Hugh wanted the man’s name. He wanted to know who had hurt her. What exactly accounted for her having sought out one such as Hugh.

“You don’t intend to strike unless someone strikes first. Mendoza didn’t enter the fighting scene like any fancy gentleman just swapping punches. His was a defensive style. When people came at him”—Hugh danced left—“he’d sidestep.” He gestured with open palms at his chest. “Throw a punch.”

She hesitated a moment, but then surprisingly complied.

In one motion, Hugh spun out of her reach, ducked, and then lifted his left arm to block her blow. Sweat formed at his brow, and he lifted his forearm to wipe back the perspiration before it dripped and blinded him. “Because of all his sidestepping and ducking, he was considered a coward.”

“It seems more that he was a man intent on surviving.”

Hugh pointed a finger at her. “Precisely. That’s why his style is what you’re going to learn. Mendoza was small, shorter than most of his opponents. He was also far heavier. As such, he had to develop a strategy to compensate for his size.” He took her chin in his hand, angling her face up to his. “What you need to remember is that it’s the same thing, Lila,” he said. “Fighting and self-defense . . . You can’t disentwine them from one another.”

“You’re wrong.” Fire flared in her eyes. “It’s entirely possible. Furthermore, I don’t want to learn just one technique, I want to learn everything there is about . . . what you do.”

“You think I can teach you different skill sets that you might pull out of your reticule, depending on what circumstances arise. But that isn’t how fighting works. You think you can prepare, but you don’t know what manner of attack you’ll face—from the fighter opposite you in the ring, or the attack from behind. You don’t know when some bastard is going to come at you from the shadows with a dagger. Or if a friend will turn a pistol on you.”

“Is that what happened to you?” she asked softly.

He stiffened. He’d said too much.

“Aye,” he said. One key takeaway from living in Covent Garden was that even those one believed to be loyal could turn, and for reasons one could never fully anticipate or prepare for. “That’s what happened to me.” That, and some stories that would have sent her running off in horror, surely never to be seen ’round the rookeries again. For if she knew about him and what had really transpired in these parts, one certainty remained—she’d not be taking lessons from Hugh Savage like he was the fancy boy, Gentleman Jackson.

“And who taught you how to fight, Hugh?”

He’d taught himself. Every hook, jab, or feint had been learned squaring off against an opponent, with the ultimate prize at the end of each match his life.

They’d moved, however, into territories wholly off-limits. Hugh tensed his mouth. “No questions,” he reminded her. Striding into the middle of the arena, he motioned her over.

“I’d hardly call it a question about your past. Why, is it really any different from learning about Mr. Mendoza or Mr. Jackson?”

Aye, it was. Because formal pugilism approved by society was an altogether different thing from the death matches Hugh had taken part in. “It’s different,” he said cryptically in a bid to stave off more of her rambling.

Only, obstinate as always, she’d not be deterred. “Why? Because you were born in the rookeries? Because you have fought on the streets while they have academies in Mayfair?”

That insistence, that absolute naivete, confirmed not for the first time that she was a woman who’d been born a world away from these parts. And yet the derision he’d first greeted her with . . . did not come. Because whatever accounted for the darkness in her clear brown eyes marked her one as haunted as anyone else in Covent Garden.

He lowered his face close to hers. “Do you always ask this many questions?”

“Actually, I don’t.” Her gaze grew sad and shifted past his shoulder. “There was a time when I was garrulous and inquisitive, but