Vixen in Velvet (The Dressmakers 3)

She could easily picture it. Wolves and tigers were beautiful and graceful, too. She’d known from the start he wasn’t harmless. Those Roman gods never were.

He’d picked her up, not once but three times now, as easily as if she’d been a kitten. His kitten. To play with, she reminded herself. To him it was a game. And he was too damned good at it.

“This is excellent,” he said when the carriage was in motion. “We’ve created a diversion.”

“Is that why you came?” she said. “To create a diversion?”

“Certainly not. I came because the girls at your shop said you’d be here, and I had to know what you were up to.”

“I wanted to treat myself to the sight of my newest client in a becoming carriage dress,” Leonie said. “I was too late to see her entrance, but I overheard some men speaking in a complimentary way about it.”

“I’m not entirely surprised,” he said. “Her father would never tolerate slovenly horsemanship.”

“Lady Gladys is so clever,” she said. “I had only to drop a hint—and she created an entirely new strategy.”

Out of the corner of her eye she caught the sharp glance he sent her.

“I’ve heard that Lord Boulsworth was a brilliant strategist,” she said. “She said he treated her like a regiment. That accounts for some of the traits people find so obnoxious. She’s a young woman who’s been trained more or less in military fashion. Now she’s finding the bits that work to her advantage. She’s thinking like an officer.”

“What bits? Reciting obscene verse at Almack’s?”

“Hardly obscene,” she said. “You seem to be hysterical.”

“I nearly fainted when I read it in the Spectacle,” he said.

“Do try to consider this in a rational manner,” she said. “If her ladyship had behaved in any way improperly, she would have been ejected. His lordship her father may be a great hero and, I’m told, a most intimidating one, but Almack’s patronesses fear nobody. They once refused the Duke of Wellington admittance because he arrived too late.”

“Miss Noirot, do you know what Lysistrata is about?”

“Of course,” Leonie said. She knew nothing about horses, but the rest of her education had been as good as and in some cases better than many ladies’ schooling. She knew something about the Peloponnesian Wars and rather a good deal about Aristophanes’s play. “But she must have used the premise in a clever way, because a number of the older ladies, especially the married ones, were amused. As you know, in respectable society it’s no good winning over the men if you can’t get some women on your side.”

“She seems to have got away with it,” he said. “If it’s a strategy, though, it’s a risky one.”

“Conventional methods don’t work for her, because she isn’t like other young ladies,” she said. “She wasn’t taught to be missish or defer to men or keep her opinions to herself. She’s had a degree of freedom other girls haven’t. Because no one taught her to walk gracefully, she walks like a man. All this makes her seem unfeminine. On the other hand, she drives like a man, too. Wearing a handsome carriage dress, with her pretty cousin by her side, she must make a rather exciting picture.”

“Exciting, like attacking cavalry?”

“Here she comes. Let’s see.”

As Lady Clara’s carriage approached, the situation became happily clear.

Several gentlemen on horseback escorted the vehicle, and Mr. Bates, one of Lady Clara’s admirers, was talking animatedly to Lady Gladys. She looked amused. Thanks to that and the splendid green carriage dress Marcelline had designed for her, her ladyship’s not-beautiful face wore a becoming glow.

Keeping her own face schooled to give nothing away, Leonie watched Lord Lisburne’s profile.

He didn’t give much away, either. One tiny flicker of surprise before his handsome countenance became as smooth as a marble statue’s.

As Lady Gladys drew nearer, he saluted her, and she returned the acknowledgment.

When she passed, he was the only one who didn’t turn his head to watch her departure. He seemed to concentrate on a small gap in the vehicle parade. This looked very small indeed to Leonie, yet a moment later he’d entered it. In no time, the greater part of the crowd was behind them, all straining for a glimpse of Lady Gladys Fairfax.

“You’re going to lose our wager,” Leonie said.

He laughed. “You’re leaping to conclusions. Yes, I saw the entourage of gentlemen. Yes, I saw Bates talking to Gladys. But all the men know Clara has a soft spot for her prickly cousin, and they’re trying to curry favor with Clara. For all the good that will do. She keeps them about for show or, more likely, defense. Safety in numbers. No one is favored. No one’s encouraged, either. They all hover about her, living in hope, poor fools.”

Leonie didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.

Inside, though, the Leonies were looking at each other and saying, What? How did he know?

Except for Leonie and her sisters, no one, even those closest to Lady Clara, had an inkling of the game her ladyship played. Young ladies were not allowed to sow their wild oats, as young men were, but she was determined to enjoy as much freedom as she could for as long as she could. As the Member of Parliament had said, women had no rights. This was the one time in Lady Clara’s life when she had any real power over men, and she meant to make the most of it.

Somehow, though he spent little time with his Fairfax cousins, Lord Lisburne had caught on.

Somewhere on his family tree, a DeLucey must have skulked.

“To my thinking, if Mr. Bates was conversing so amiably with Lady Gladys, she’s made rapid progress,” Leonie said. “He wasn’t wearing the pained smile.”

“I don’t care about them,” Lord Lisburne said. “The road’s clearing ahead of us, and you’re going to have a driving lesson.”

They had been traveling along the stretch of park road running parallel to Park Lane. Now the marquess halted the carriage under a stand of trees near the reservoir. His groom jumped down and took charge of the horses, and Lord Lisburne stepped down from the carriage and walked round to the other side. He waved to the astonished Leonie to move over. Excitement warred with anxiety as she moved into his seat.

It was still warm with the heat of his body.

Lady Gladys disappeared from Leonie’s mind.

He settled into the passenger seat, then proceeded to give her charge of the whip and the reins. This was a complicated business. One must hold the reins in both hands and they must go around the fingers in a certain way and one must hold the whip as well and one’s hands must be just so. This process left no room in her mind for anything but him and what to do with her hands.

“The seat’s tailored to me, so it’s a bit high for you,” he said. “But we’re going only a short distance. In any case, it’s good to learn how to drive any vehicle.”

“About as useful as learning to steer a yacht,” she said. “It’s not as though I’ll be having my own carriage, or joining the Four-In-Hand Club.”

“You never know,” he said. “You might be out driving with a gentleman someday, and he might faint from the heat or excessive drinking the night before or the unbearable happiness of being near you.”

“Yours is a lively imagination,” she said.

“When it comes to you, yes,” he said. “I often imagine other fellows being with you and meeting with illness or injury. Right now, for instance, I’m picturing one of my friends toppling out of his seat beside you and falling on his head in the road. Such thoughts brighten the endless hours while I await my fortnight with you.”

Her imagination came vividly awake at that moment, and the images it created sent jittery sensations up and down her spine. “I thought you were going to teach me to drive,” she said.

“You need to learn to drive and flirt at the same time,” he said.

He went on to basic principles of starting and stopping, the delicate pressure one ought to apply, the importance of keeping the horses’ heads straight, the proper use of the whip, and about ten thousand other details.

Luckily, Leonie had a head for details. Too, she’d seen other ladies drive. If they could do it, so could she. What she couldn’t do at present was shut away her feelings toward him, or erase the memory of that kiss. And now it was worse because she had gratitude to contend with as well.

“No, elbows a little closer to your hips, madame. Wrists a little bent. Yes, like that. Well, then, enough theory. All right, Vines, I think we’re ready.”

The groom stepped away from the horses and returned to his place at the back of the vehicle. At this point, Leonie realized that the only thing controlling the immense, not-very-tame-looking creatures was her hold on a few strips of leather.

Her heart sped to triple time.

“Call them to order,” Lord Lisburne said. “Pull them together. You want them at a complete stop before they start. Good. They’ll start when you say, ‘Walk on.’ Tell them in the same way you’d tell one of the shopgirls to straighten the mannequin’s bonnet. Calm, clear, firm. Confident, in short, because you know what you’re about.”

Heart thudding, Leonie checked her posture and her hands once more, then said, “Walk on.”

And they did. Slowly and calmly as though they didn’t know a complete neophyte held the ribbons.

A thrill went through her, and her chest heaved. It was all she could do not to cry. For all her life she’d wanted to do this: to be near horses, to drive or ride. But there had been too much else to learn and do. She and her sisters had been trained to be ladies, because aristocratic blood ran in their veins. Unlike ladies, though, they’d had to learn a trade as well. And before Cousin Emma had put her foot down, there had been intervals of living with Mama and Papa, and learning to live by one’s wits, on the streets of what seemed like a hundred different towns, in England and abroad.

She bit her lip and made herself concentrate, preserving outward calm, keeping her hands the way he showed her, not leaning forward, not pulling. She was distantly aware of riders and vehicles coming and going, but they might as well have been in Madagascar. Her mind was overwhelmingly occupied with her hands and the horses and the road ahead and Lord Lisburne’s low voice, quietly correcting.

“I wonder how you keep from grabbing the reins from me,” she said.

“I can’t grab the reins because I’m required to appear to have absolute confidence in whatever I do,” he said. “The animals need us to be calm as well. These are very good cattle, but even the best-trained beasts can react badly to surprises. What we don’t want is a large, powerful animal with a not over-large brain getting the idea it needs to run away.”

“Then I’d better not do anything stupid.”