Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran Page A

beside his bare foot lay a newspaper—the same one she had forgotten on the bookcase last night. She could see the headline from here, the fat black print: BERTRAM’S BI—
    The rest of the headline was obscured beneath a pistol.
    She stared at the gun for a long, stupid moment. It was real. She was not imagining it. And it lay all too near to his hand.
    She took a step backward. The duke sat as still as a statue. He did not even appear to be breathing.
    He’s dead. He shot himself. But she saw no blood. And surely a corpse would have toppled over already.
    But if he wasn’t dead . . . then he was alive, and armed .
    She retreated another step, dreading the moment when the groan of the floorboards would betray her. She dared not remove her eyes from him. With one hand cast behind her she made a desperate, groping fumble for the doorknob.
    How was it that he did not move? Perhaps he was dead?
    The doorknob came into her hand.
    His head lifted.
    She froze.
    He stared at her without comprehension. The angle of the light played some trick on his eyes, so they lookedlit from behind, impossibly blue. The light glinted off the stubble on his cheeks; it made him blaze. He looked like a creature made of light and fire and the blue, blue electricity that crackled in his eyes.
    She turned to flee—and glimpsed what she had not, before: the missing bookcase. It held tidy rows of books, neatly shelved.
    A choked sound slipped from her—panicked denial, anger at herself, and at him for having put the books away, for having done the one thing that would now prevent her from doing the wisest thing, the only wise thing, given the circumstances: flying through the doorway, turning the key, and locking him inside with that pistol.
    The bookcase forbade it. The bookcase sent a message, unintended yet clear: a man who shelved his books on his housekeeper’s insistence was not a man who meant to kill his staff.
    He meant to kill only himself.
    She forced herself to face him. He still stared fixedly into space, but his hand was playing over the pistol, stroking it. What an awful, meditative rhythm his fingers struck up. “You mustn’t do this,” she whispered.
    He did not seem to hear her.
    She could not bring herself to approach him. All she could do was speak. “Please, Your Grace. Whatever it is that troubles you”—such a lie; she knew exactly his cause for grief, and it was her fault, she realized, her fault for having abandoned the newspaper where he would find it, where his eyes would fall on that headline, that last dash of salt into an already mortal wound—“it isn’t worth your life.”
    She might have been talking to a stone for thenotice he took of her. But the quality of his gaze seemed to change. To focus on something invisible to her eyes, somewhere in the air in front of him. His face tightened, seemed to harden. For a moment she wondered if he would speak—if he would rave now to the ether, and complete his lunatic resemblance.
    But he said nothing. And she began to wish he would speak, for the silence was dreadful, deep and unnatural and dire, like the hush after a sudden fatal accident. The very house seemed to hold its breath.
    She saw deep shadows beneath his eyes, almost like bruises. He looked like a man in the grip of a fever, burning up from within.
    “Your Grace,” she said again.
    This standoff could continue forever. Either she would surrender to cowardice and go, or take hold of her courage and . . . approach.
    She did not know which she would do until her feet were carrying her forward.
    Shaking, she knelt down before him. She put her face in front of his, but he did not focus on her. He was in a trance of some kind. Only his fingers kept moving, stroking the pistol.
    Every instinct in her, every shred of self-interest, fixated on the gun’s presence so close to her—and on his hand, which might so easily trip the trigger.
    “Your Grace,” she said. “He is not worth your life.” The