Vixen in Velvet (The Dressmakers 3)

“No, and it’s extremely inconsiderate of you not to, when I’ve taken such great pains to make myself attractive to you. Why must I always be the one to make advances? Why can’t you make a little more effort?”

“I’m busy!” she said. “I don’t have time to roam London, seducing innocent gentlemen. I have a shop to run and ladies to make beautiful.”

“You wait,” he said. “Two weeks, madame. Then we’ll see what you can do when you’re not busy.”

Damn me damn me damn me.

Leonie wanted to knock her forehead against the nearest lamppost.

She had lost control completely. In about three seconds. All he had to do was touch her, and she went up in flames. And the first thing to burn away was her brain.

It was a wonder she’d had the wit to stop when she had. That, she supposed, was only because of the surprise of finding a muscular male limb between her legs.

The next time, though, she wouldn’t be startled, and like all the Noirots and DeLuceys before her, she’d go merrily to ruin—which wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t sure she’d go, far less merrily, to heartbreak, too.

He was getting under her skin. He was making her want.

She—the sensible Noirot sister, the one with both feet planted firmly on the ground—had somehow let him turn her into a moony idiot.

“What have you done with the umbrella?” he said.

She’d had it kicked out of her hand and she’d forgotten all about it, between the argument and being so desperately eager to get her hands—both hands—on him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t care. At this point, do you think it’ll make us less wet?”

“I was merely curious. I’ve lost my hat, too. That is to say, I know where it is, but I’ll be hanged before I’ll retrieve it.”

She looked up at him through the haze of a steady drizzle. His hair glistened. Though it had plastered itself to his skin and neck, this only enhanced the effect of the obviously natural curls.

And why not? Roman gods weren’t like mortal men. Even sopping wet, they’d magically make themselves unbearably beautiful.

She looked away. They’d neared the carriage road. She saw his curricle waiting, its hood now raised. Vines stood at the horses’ heads, stoically indifferent to rain as well as capricious masters.

“We’ll have to continue your driving lesson another day,” Lord Lisburne said. “While it’s unlikely you’ll take cold in this warm weather, it can’t be comfortable to lug about so much wet clothing. Like carrying a basket of wet laundry, I imagine.”

“Something you’ve had a good deal of experience with, I’m sure.”

“And you’re dirty,” he said. He let his gaze range over her, and she was amazed that steam didn’t rise from her skin.

Irate, she gave him the same study. This was the first time she’d ever seen him looking less than perfect. Yet he contrived not to look imperfect at all. His neckcloth was a mud-spotted wet rag, his coat a larger wet, drooping rag, and his trousers clung to the muscles of his legs like silk stockings, leaving nothing of those muscled limbs to the imagination—including the upper area that had been in excessively close contact with her most private part.

She was wet and dirty. He was glamorously disheveled.

She wished she still had the umbrella, so that she could hit him with it.

“Very dirty,” he said, his voice dropping. “I’m strongly tempted to take you home and give you a bath.”

Her toes curled inside her wet half-boots.

Her mind raced ahead, to the end of July.

A fortnight with him. Alone. The things he could do to her.

“It’s my business to be tempting,” she said. “Just as you must always seem completely confident of what you do, I must always appear irresistible in some way, even when disarranged. However, I shall have to make do with bathing myself this day, my lord. I need to get back to work.”

Without question it had been worth seeing her mouth fall open and her eyes glaze over in the too-brief instant before Madame collected herself. Yet by the time they’d climbed into the carriage Lisburne wished he hadn’t mentioned bathing her. Now he couldn’t get the idea out of his head, and it was deuced inconvenient to pretend to be perfectly at his ease while he was battling to keep the brain in his skull in charge of the little one lower down.

She was wet and dirty and adorably bedraggled and cross.

Being soaked through, her garments clung where normally they puffed out, thereby revealing more of her natural shape than was ordinarily visible.

It was not a sight calculated to rouse the male intellect to perform even basic thinking tasks.

Being closely confined with her behind the carriage apron and under the hood didn’t make the exercise any easier.

Still, keeping his feelings to himself and presenting a smooth exterior was more or less second nature. True, she’d knocked him on his beam ends for a moment or two, but the circumstances had been exceptionally trying.

By the time he’d taken up the ribbons and given the horses leave to start, Lisburne was his urbane self again. On the outside, in any event.

He made light conversation and flirted in the usual way, and she responded in kind with no visible effort—as though nothing had happened and the earth hadn’t trembled on its axis and he hadn’t got turned upside down and inside out and made an inexcusably crass error, the sort of mistake overheated schoolboys made, not worldly men of seven and twenty.

In a way, when they reached the shop, he was relieved. He needed time to put himself in proper order again.

Yet as he watched her step through the door, he was strongly tempted to lunge at her and drag her back again.

He returned to the carriage and drove home.

Friday

As a consequence of trying to distract himself at parties until five o’clock in the morning and then still not sleeping well, Lisburne was late coming down to breakfast. Swanton, for once, had preceded him. He had not, by the evidence, made any progress with his meal, however. Though his plate sat in front of him on the table, the contents were congealing while, dragging his hands through his hair, he stared at Foxe’s Morning Spectacle.

“What’s Gladys done now?” Lisburne said, moving to the sideboard. “It must be extreme, to shock even you.”

“It isn’t your cousin,” Swanton said, hollow-voiced. “It’s me.”

“You?” Lisburne hauled his mind to order. “Now what have you done?”

“Oh, it isn’t what I’ve done. It’s what I’ve not done, the scurvy, insinuating scandalmongers.” Swanton laid the paper on the table and pointed.

Lisburne leaned over him and read:

We do not know where or how these ridiculous rumors start, but we are informed on very good authority that there exists no basis whatsoever for stories currently flying through Fashionable Society that a certain nobleman of poetical inclinations has been named in a breach of promise suit. As those who understand such matters will readily agree, nine out of ten such suits are merely attempts at extortion or quests for notoriety. Undoubtedly, this is the case with his lordship. Those familiar with the gentleman’s affairs have assured us that the rumors are completely unfounded, and these same parties confess thorough mystification as to the origin of this strange story.

“No

thing like beating everybody over the head with denials,” Swanton said. “Nothing like making every gossip in the ton decide, ‘Methinks thou doth protest too much.’ ”

Lisburne pushed the paper aside and returned to the sideboard, though he’d lost his appetite. “One of your petitioners is merely gambling that you’ll settle quietly to protect your reputation,” he said.

“I’m not going to settle,” Swanton said. “I’ve not led anybody astray, and I won’t have anybody think I have—which is what they’ll think if word gets out of a settlement. And you know it’ll get out. There will be no such thing as ‘settling quietly.’ If Foxe got hold of this, he can get hold of anything.”

That one of the women who’d applied to Swanton for money had gone so far as to contact Foxe’s Morning Spectacle was surprising. Normally, the kinds of creatures who attempted such frauds gave up at the first rebuff, and crawled back under whatever rock they’d crawled out from. They had no legal standing. Swanton hadn’t been in the country for five years and more. A curt letter from one’s secretary ought to suffice.

“We can only wait to see whether one of your imaginary brides-to-be writes a second time,” Lisburne said. “Then we’ll let Rowntree deal with it. Once we bring in the solicitor, she’ll have to give up. He’ll remind her of the law of scandalum magnatum.” The law imposed fines and imprisonment on anybody who made scandalous statements—true or not—about a peer of the realm. “That’ll encourage her to find another dupe.”

“You can’t fine rumor,” Swanton said. “You can’t put rumor in prison.”

“She wants money,” Lisburne said. “One doesn’t give money to rumor, either. If she wants it, she’ll have to come forward. We have the advantage, cousin. Put her out of your mind.”

Saturday morning’s Spectacle brought yet another denial. This time it wasn’t true that “a well-regarded poet of the upper ranks” had seduced “a respectable young Englishwoman” in Paris a year ago, “the consequences usually attending such occasions having been confided, we are told, to the care of an orphanage maintained by holy sisters.”