Dukes Prefer Blondes (The Dressmakers 4)

She inched her hands upward to tangle in his hair, so thick and black and beautiful, like a raven’s wing.

Raven.

She heard the groan, deep in his throat. He pulled her closer still.

A moment later, she felt him tense.

Then she heard it. So quiet the room was, the tap sounded like thunder. She tried to push the sound to the back of her mind, but it wouldn’t stay there. She felt him withdraw, though he didn’t let go.

A knock. And another, sharper one.

Then came Tilsley’s voice, pitched to be audible through the closed door.

“The tea being ready, madam and sir, only wishing not to interrupt at inopportune junctures and breaking a train of—­erm—­thought.”

Mr. Radford lifted his head and looked at her for a moment as though he didn’t recognize her. Then he took his hands away and stepped back so casually. She stood, meanwhile, her world upended, and broken bits of the life she used to know scattered about her like a child’s discarded toys.

It was only thanks to years of training that she didn’t cry out or stagger or even look about her like one stupefied, which she was. All these things happened inside.

She’d never been kissed before. Whatever she’d thought those things were, they weren’t kisses. She’d never known desire before. Whatever she’d felt before was merely the thrill of being naughty—­and not very naughty at that.

She’d thought she was sophisticated. She was the greenest of greenhorns.

Standing on shaky legs no one could see, she looked up at him, into grey eyes like an approaching storm. Years of training kept her composed on the outside while inside her heart was stumbling about in her rib cage, and all she could think was I’ve made a very bad mistake. And the next thought was I don’t care.

“Yes, yes, come in, Tilsley,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

The door opened a crack.

“Permission, sir,” came the voice behind it. “Having received instructions on two separate occasions regarding the same subject, to wit, not bursting in on those intervals of Mr. Westcott or Mr. Radford being with clients. Them pointing out the degree of urgency to be considered, for instance, the premises not to be equated with Newgate. And as to that, the gentlemen offering the kindly reminder how it’s not like anybody’s waiting on the scaffold with the rope round his neck and I’m running in with a royal pardon.”

Mr. Radford bit his lip. “A good boy, but talkative.”

He walked, perfectly steady—­while her knees were hanging on by a thread—­to the door and opened it fully.

Tilsley, his face scarlet, stumbled slightly over the threshold, but managed not to drop the large tea tray he carried.

He placed it carefully on the table nearest the fire. He livened up the fire with more coals and a deft application of poker. He did not look at her or Mr. Radford once.

After urging them to let him know if anything else was wanted, and promising to stay within easy calling distance, Tilsley went out, closing the door behind him.

A moment’s silence followed, while the candlelight and firelight glimmered over the book-­filled shelves and the walls and tables and chairs, and made shadows on Mr. Radford’s face. And while she thought, What am I going to do? What am I going to do with him?

Then, “I’m not going to ask if you’re done being hysterical,” he said. “It would be plain to the meanest intelligence that you’ve stored up years of that article, and it’s bound to break out at intervals. I’m not going to apologize for kissing you. I’m not going to make excuses for doing so. The facts are simple and obvious. You were in a passion. Lady Clara Fairfax in a passion is very exciting. I’m a man. I succumbed to a normal and natural masculine urge.” He met her wondering gaze. “And I will not promise never to do it again. If you choose to continue plaguing me, you will have to take your chances. My self-­control is above the average, but I am not an automaton, and my mechanism is not clockwork.”

“Firstly,” she began. Her voice was unsteady and hoarse.

He held up his hand. “I’m going to unfasten your cloak and you will try with all your might to resist impulses to scream at me or do me an injury or demand a discussion.”

I’m not plaguing you, she’d been about to say. But that was a lie.

She’d plagued him from the start. And it was all very well to tell herself she wanted to see this thing through and help a girl who was trying so hard to make a decent life. But Clara wasn’t needed. She only wanted to be needed. She was merely tagging along, the way she’d tagged along after her brothers until Mama put a stop to it.

This is what comes of letting her do as she likes, Mama had raged when, days after the Vauxhall contretemps, she’d discovered the chipped tooth. This is what comes of letting the boys indulge her. She will spoil all her looks, and never learn how to behave, and then where will she be when she’s of age to wed? She’ll be a hoyden and a bluestocking and nobody will want her.

Clara had never told anybody how she’d chipped the tooth.

She wasn’t sorry for what she’d done and she didn’t care about the tooth. At least she’d done something.

And it was a good thing she’d done it, because she’d been permitted to do almost nothing to any purpose ever since.

She refused to be sorry now for wanting to be needed. She was two and twenty, and her life, it turned out, was a great, big froth of pretty nothing. She was desperate.

She put up her chin, though she still did not seem to have full control of her muscles and wanted very much to sit down. “You may unfasten my cloak, and I will try not to molest you, but I cannot make any promises in that regard, unless you can do the job without speaking.”

His mouth quirked, very slightly, upward.

The mouth he’d had on hers only a moment ago.

She strangled a sigh.

He advanced, undid the cloak fastenings, slid the garment from her shoulders, and draped it over a chair.

“Firstly?” he said.

“Never mind,” she said. She needed a new tactic, but the kiss had fogged her brain and the light wasn’t coming through yet. She needed to think, to find a way not to be sent home and told to leave him alone.

She tried to find a clue in what he’d said, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate. All she knew was, this was the only man in the world who’d follow a kiss like that with a speech like that.

She walked as steadily as she could to one of the chairs by the table holding the tea tray. “One thing I do know how to do is preside over tea.”

“Your shoes are wet through,” he said. “You ought to take them off.”

She looked at her half-­boots. The ribbons threaded through long sets of tiny eyelets, a dozen or more pairs of them per boot. These were not conveniently placed down the front or even the outer side, but along the inside.

She looked up at him. “I know how, in theory. In practice, I should have to be a contortionist.” Not to mention she was on fire at the mere thought of exposing her stockinged feet to his view. “I’ll put my feet on the fender while I drink my tea. Not that I ever take cold, but I know you’ve got it into your head I’ll expire of a little exposure to damp. It seems I’m not the only one in this room afflicted with hysteria. I may be a lady, and useless in many categories, but I’m not delicate.”

She sat and concentrated on the tea tray. A fine-­quality black tea. No tea cakes or sandwiches but fresh bread and butter, cut and arranged neatly. Fresh, rich milk, too, a discreet sniff told her.

He took the other chair. “I thought you said your maid was to meet you here.”

“Maybe she ran into Mr. Westcott and they were overcome with passion and commenced an affaire d’amour. That will be interesting. She’ll arrive with her hair in wanton disarray and her clothes buttoned incorrectly.”

He smiled, and her hear

t squeezed.

It was only a ghost of a smile, here and gone in a heartbeat, but it changed his face, and she glimpsed, too briefly, a man just out of her reach.

She performed the hostess task she could have done blindfolded in the middle of an artillery bombardment.

He took a lump of sugar and no milk and made two-­thirds of the bread and butter disappear with smooth efficiency.

She’d never thought of him eating. She’d never thought of him hungry. She wasn’t sure she’d thought of him as human, except when she recalled the boy at Vauxhall.

And a moment ago, when he’d touched her. When he’d kissed her.

Passionately.

Or so it had seemed. How could she be sure?

She’d wanted passion. She’d rejected the man supposedly meant for her because she knew he didn’t feel it for her nor she for him. She still wasn’t sure what passion was. She’d only had a chance to experience its possibility.

She drank her tea, but eating was beyond her ability to feign normality. She told him to finish the bread and butter, and he did. And for some reason, her heart ached, watching him.

“It seems I was famished,” he said when he was done. “But it was a long night with our young criminal. He held out until the last possible minute, ­terrified of hanging but more terrified of what Freame—­or, more likely, one of Freame’s favorite assassins—­would do to him if he tattled. Then there was the judge to deal with. He’s been wanting to hang Daniel Prior this age. Persuading him not to took more time than was convenient. Time is an article we haven’t much of in this situation. But Bow Street is ready to move in. And so we go out tomorrow morning, not long after daybreak, to collect Toby Coppy and, with any luck, a clutch of criminals.”

He paused, and she waited for the speech listing the reasons she would not be allowed to participate.