Vixen in Velvet (The Dressmakers 3)

Her trouble was, she was tired, and the night had been difficult and discouraging, and she hadn’t eaten, and so yes, she was . . . emotional.

She knew all that. She’d pulled herself together.

Then he’d walked through the door, carrying sandwiches he’d made for her with his own aristocratic hands.

At that moment, she gave up fighting and fell in love with him.

“I hope you’re meaning to join me,” she said as crisply as she could. “You can’t possibly expect me to eat all that.”

“I intended for you to invite me,” he said. “I’m famished. Unlike Swanton, I’m crudely lacking in delicate sensibilities and unable to live on feelings.” He transferred the plates and glasses and bottle to the table from the tray, leaned the tray against the nearest wall, and set about serving.

He took Marcelline’s chair, not quite opposite, but not beside Leonie, either.

“Eat,” he said. “I slaved over this meal.”

“You’re obsessed with food,” she said.

“You work too hard to skip meals,” he said. “You need your strength. The girls need your strength. I need your strength. We’ve a mystery to solve, and we need to do it quickly.” He raised his wineglass. “But not tonight. Tonight we calm our turbulent spirits and sustain our bodies with food and drink. Tomorrow we go on the hunt.”

“We,” she said.

“We both have a problem,” he said. “It’s in our best interests to solve it together. I’ll never solve it with Swanton. I need your brain. The one that narrowed our choices to two. That one. I love that brain.”

Her heart skipped. Twice. She raised her glass. “To justice, then,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Tonight, just us.”

Disturbingly enough, it was only the two of them. Disturbing because Lisburne could feel her sisters’ absence. He wasn’t a fanciful man. This feeling had nothing to do with sensing anybody’s spirit in the house. It was the little signs about the sitting room: an open notebook whose handwriting was feminine, but not hers . . . a sketchbook that must belong to the Duchess of Clevedon . . . three chairs at the table . . . odds and ends betokening other personalities. The room itself had been arranged for three people.

This sense of somebody missing troubled him, but while they ate, he kept the talk to easy channels. Fenwick was a good choice. Leonie was teaching him, Lisburne learned, and the boy was a quick learner. His speech had already improved, she said, and he had learned the alphabet as well as how to write his name. He could recognize a fair number of words, especially on printed materials. He’d advanced remarkably, though she’d been able to work with him at odd times and only for a few weeks. But when he was tired or excited, she said, the Cockney consonants and vowels and slang crept back, and yes, it was difficult to discern his language’s relationship to English.

“Have you any idea what possessed your sister to pluck him from the streets and bring him home?” he said.

“Sophy decided that so much criminal intelligence would be far too dangerous let loose in the streets, and much more useful to us,” she said.

“I’ve only ever seen him open doors for customers,” he said as he refilled their glasses.

“He has a strong affinity for horses and an extensive knowledge of carriages,” she said. “He makes friends with all the grooms and coachmen and hackney drivers. We gain a great deal of useful information that way. His former associates and other connections have helped us more than once already with certain problems. And our ladies seem to like him. Some have made a pet of him. But no, as you seem to be wondering, we don’t make it a habit to rescue boys from the streets. We chose to put our efforts into women.”

More than two years’ effort . . . which a pair of aristocrats had undone in minutes.

He needed to make it right. Which meant he needed to get his head clear first. He needed to think.

They’d finished eating, and he hadn’t any excuse for lingering. It was past time he left.

He rose, meaning to make his adieus, but he put it off, again. Because she seemed so utterly alone, sitting at the table meant for three. He could so easily picture the three heads—brunette, blonde, and red—bent together to share confidences, complaints, jokes.

And so he looked about him and said, “Please tell me you’ve someone living with you besides the servants.”

“Selina Jeffreys has moved in, at Clevedon’s insistence,” she said. “You haven’t seen her because she’ll have gone to bed hours ago.”

“I should have thought Matron would be more suitable,” he said. “An older woman.”

“As a chaperon?” She lifted an eyebrow. “I’m not a lady. Shopkeepers don’t require chaperons.”

“Perhaps not, but most women have a man about the place, for safety, if nothing else.”

“My sisters and I are not most women,” she said. “You sound like Clevedon. He wants me to move to Clevedon House. Can you imagine?”

He could. It would be the proper, not to say wise, thing to do.

It would be deuced inconvenient.

“I should have a footman dogging my steps every time I left the house, as Marcelline does,” she said. “I don’t know how she tolerates it. But then, she’s been ill, and not entirely herself lately. In any case, I know it’s only a lure to get me away from here. He wants us to stop working at the shop. He has other plans for us. I’m not . . . ready.”

Lisburne thought, and it took some thinking, because women in his world didn’t work, and he found it difficult to perceive her as a woman not of his world. Whoever had had charge of her upbringing had brought her up as ladies were brought up. She was a lady. It was there in her speech, her manner, her walk. It wasn’t acting. There was no mask to slip.

Yet she wasn’t a lady.

He walked about the room, admiring the collection of prints hanging on the walls. A dozen beautifully colored French fashion plates. And, surprisingly, a set of Robert Cruikshank’s satirical prints. Each dealt with fashion excesses and absurdities.

“You’d be bored, I suppose,” he said. “With nothing to do. When you didn’t grow up in that way, it must seem an empty life. Oh, this is brilliant.” He paused in front of a print titled A Dandy Fainting or—an Exquisite in Fits. Cruikshank had set the scene in an opera box. The images were hilarious, the speech balloons equally so. Lisburne couldn’t help laughing.

She rose and moved to stand beside him. “I think the gentlemen are so sweet.”

“ ‘Mind you don’t soil the dear’s linnen,’ ” he read. “Says another, ‘I dread the consequence! That last Air of Signeur Nonballences—has thrown him in such raptures’— Ha ha! I see myself. And Swanton, of course.”

“You are exquisite, beyond a doubt,” she said. “We may blame Polcaire, yet the result is the same. The print pokes fun and makes them seem precious and effeminate. But it exaggerates greatly for comic effect. The reality is rather different. So many of the dandies I’ve encountered are manly men—quite as virile as Lord Swanton, certainly.”

He looked at her. She was looking at the print and smiling.

Her spirits had risen, clearly. He’d done the right thing in making her take food and drink. They’d cleared the plate of sandwiches and emptied the wine bottle.

Now he must do the intelligent thing and go home.

“It would seem I’ve done my job,” he said. “You no longer bear the smallest resemblance to the poor, fainting dandy. Still, you must get some sleep, else you won’t be much good to me tomorrow—and you ought to expect me first thing.”

“Noonish, you mean,” she said.

“Thereabouts, yes.” He looked about the room for his hat.

“You can leave the tray and dirty dishes and cutlery for the maid to deal with,” she said. “I’m aware that gentlemen assemble their own sandwiches on special occasions. How

ever, I strongly doubt your aristocratic nerves can withstand the shock of clearing away and washing up.”

“Hat,” he said. “Only looking for my hat. Now I recall. Downstairs. Left it on the table near the door.”

“I’d better let you out,” she said. “If Fenwick was actually sleeping when we arrived, I’d rather not wake him again.”

“Obviously you’re not a lady,” he said. “No lady would trouble herself with a servant’s lack of sleep.”

Stop putting it off, he told himself.

He walked to the door and opened it. She went past him, ribbons and lace trembling, silk whispering.

He followed her down the stairs, relieved to see she was steadier on her feet now and more like her usual self.

At the door, he found his hat. He said, “I meant this to be a perfect evening. I’m sorry it was the opposite.”