Last Night's Scandal (The Dressmakers 5)

“You, sir,” she said, in the cold, clipped accents her stepfather used to crush upstarts and ignoramuses. “You have insulted these ladies. You will apologize.”

He paused in the act of picking up another chair. He set it down and stared at her. “What?”

The onlookers’ grumbling and muttering subsided.

“Apologize,” she said.

He laughed. “To them battle-axes?” He jerked a dirty thumb at her companions. “Are you daft?”

“Then choose your weapon,” she said.

“What?”

“Choose,” she said. “Pistols or swords.”

He looked about the room. “Is this a joke? Because I won’t be made a fool of.”

She stripped off her gloves, walked up to him, and slapped him with one of them. “Coward,” she said.

A collective gasp.

She stepped back a pace while surreptitiously taking note of her surroundings: escape routes, obstacles, and possible weapons.

“Your behavior is despicable,” she said. “You are contemptible.”

“Why you—”

He lunged at her. She grabbed a coffeepot from the table at her right and swung it against his head.

Then matters grew lively, indeed.

While the storm raged, Lisle had had to take shelter at an inn in Enfield, more than a mile down the road.

By the time he rode into the courtyard of the Falcon Inn, the sun was well up. He expected the inn yard to be bustling with stranded travelers eager to be on their way. What he found was a lot of people milling about near the door to the dining room, all of them straining, apparently, to see what was going on inside.

He dismounted, leaving Nichols to deal with the horses, and started toward the door.

“What is it?” he heard somebody say.

“Squire’s son, drunk again, and raging about something,” someone answered.

“Nothing new in that.”

“This time a redheaded female’s raking him over the coals.”

Lisle hurried into the dining room in time to hear Olivia insult somebody. He thrust through the crowd, but he wasn’t quick enough. He saw—and heard—her slap an obviously drunk young man with her glove.

Thanks to a gawking onlooker getting in the way, Lisle hadn’t time to tackle the drunkard before the man went for her. Olivia hit him with a coffeepot, and he went down. A servant carrying a tray tripped over him and knocked over a guest in the process. Some people ran to the doors, and a few climbed onto chairs and tables, but the majority crowded close to the center of the fray.

While Lisle was clearing a path to Olivia, he caught sight of Bailey. Unlike everyone else, the maid kept her head, calmly gathering the two old ladies and shooing them toward the courtyard.

Olivia’s voice called his attention back.

“You are a disgrace to your entire benighted sex,” he heard her say in the icy tones she must have learned from Rathbourne.

The dazed drunkard lay where he’d fallen, blinking up at her.

Now was the time for her to make herself scarce.

But no.

“A gentleman takes his lumps and learns from them,” she raged on. “But you—picking on women. You ought to be ashamed, you great, drunken bully. It’s a pity there’s no one about man enough to give you a proper thrashing.”

“You tell ’im, miss!” someone shouted from the safety of the back of the room.

“Always throwin’ his weight around.”

“No one touches him ’cuz he’s squire’s son.”

They were eager for a brawl. Normally, Lisle would enjoy joining in. He’d take great pleasure in giving this jackass a thrashing he wouldn’t forget.

But brawls were unpredictable things, and Olivia in one of her temper fits was unpredictable, too. He couldn’t trust her not to get killed.

He tapped her on the shoulder. She threw an impatient glance back at him—a furious flash of blue—before reverting to her tirade.

Lisle couldn’t be sure—given the state she was in—that she’d even recognized him. And given the state she was in, there was only one thing to do.

He came up close behind her, looped his arm over her right shoulder and across and down under her left arm, thrust his hip into the small of her back to take her off balance, and dragged her away. She struggled, but the awkward angle of her body left her no leverage at all. She could only stumble back whither he towed her, cursing him all the while.

“I’m not done with him, devil take you! I’m not going! Let me go!”

“Stifle it,” he said. “We have to get out of here before the village constable comes and people find out who you are and you end up in the newspapers again.”

“Lisle?”

“Who else?”

An instant’s silence, then, “No!” she shrieked. “Take your hands off me! I’m not done with him, the great, drunken thickhead!” She tried to kick backward, but he kept his legs out of danger as he pulled her over the cobblestones toward the coach.

“If you don’t settle down, I vow, I’ll knock you unconscious, tie and gag you, and take you straight to Derbyshire,” he said.

“Oooh, you’re so big and strong. I’m so afraid.”

“Or maybe I’ll leave you trussed by the side of the road.”

The innkeeper, who’d followed them out, ran ahead to open the coach door before the footman could do it. Lisle pushed her up the step. She st

umbled into the vehicle, and her maid caught her. He slammed the door shut.

“Away,” he told the coachman. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He watched the carriage rattle out of the courtyard.

“Thank ’ee, sir,” said the innkeeper. “Best to have the ladies out of the way in a case like this. Out of sight, out of mind, I always say.”

Lisle thrust a bag of coins into his hand. “Sorry about the mess,” he said.

He quickly found his horse and Nichols. A few minutes later, he was upon the Old North Road once again.

She was going to kill him.

Unless he killed her first.

Ware, Hertfordshire

Twenty-one miles from London

Declaring themselves famished, the ladies Cooper and Withcote disembarked and hurried into the Saracen’s Head for breakfast.

Olivia sent Bailey in with them, but remained in the carriage, trying to collect herself. She needed a cool head to think, to deal with Lisle.

Between the exhaustion and the annoyance of realizing she’d miscalculated, cool thinking was difficult. It hadn’t helped to hear the two ladies, dear as they were, prattling on. They’d seen Lisle throw somebody out of his way, and that was the most thrilling thing they’d seen in years. They wouldn’t stop talking about it and speculating in their usual bawdy way about his muscles and stamina and such.

Their comments brought back the warm pressure of his powerful arm across her body. She could practically feel it still, as though he’d left an imprint, curse him.

Never mind. He was a man being excessively manly, and it was thrilling, but she’d recover.

And being Lisle, naturally, he had to be aggravating and turn up more quickly than she’d expected.

She’d known he’d follow. He saw himself as her big brother, and he was protective by nature. Furthermore, like every other male, he believed he was infinitely more rational and capable than any woman. No man could trust a woman to take charge of anything except a household and children—and among the upper orders, women were barely trusted with those departments.

Even her mother, who was not at all blind to her faults, would know Olivia was more than qualified to undertake both a long journey and the restoration of a property. Not that she’d intended to do it alone—but she could.