How to Marry an Earl (A Cinderella Society 1)

“Good.”

“But this is dangerous business. I need you to be careful. Don’t think to leave me out in the cold while you try to handle this alone.”

“I wouldn’t.” She squirmed. She would. She absolutely would.

“I made you a promise, not to leave you out of your own life, as you put it.”

“Yes.”

“I need the same promise from you.”

It was only fair. She didn’t like it, but it was just. She met his eyes, that sea-grey. “I promise.”

“Thank you. This man has already proven that he will do anything, including hurt you, to keep his secret.”

She frowned. “Do you know, it occurs to me that we are assuming it is a man.”

He blinked. “Are you suggesting a woman is behind these plots?”

“It’s possible.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“Because a woman couldn’t have the shrewdness to do this?”

“No,” he said, wryly. “Because it would make me an idiot who only investigated half of the possible culprits.”

“She’s smiling again,”Priya sighed.

“It must be the ague,” Tamsin put in. Meg only smiled at Persephone sympathetically and made herself comfortable in a well-worn chair in the corner of the room.

They had descended on the hermitage to keep her company and keep each other safe. Conall had posted John, who still refused to take tea, and another footman in the rose garden while he went about some other bit of investigation, something about doing his own chumming of the waters. It was noon, the sun was high, there were armed men patrolling outside her window and several fierce women at her side. She was safe as houses.

And it was deeply comforting to be back in the hermitage, even if some of her artifacts were still in pieces. One of the shelves had yet to be affixed back to the wall where it had been torn away. But it was still hers, down to the painting of Cleopatra on the far wall and the baskets of flints she’d been finding in the fields since she was seven years old. She could breathe here, could think properly.

Conall had balked at telling Tamsin and Meg the truth, but Priya agreed it was safest. Tamsin would start poking about if she realized something was afoot and she could easily make things inadvertently dangerous for herself. She was already asking pointed questions. Persephone wasn’t convinced that any traitor who was willing to put her in his sights would also not be willing to turn his ire on her closest friends, should he think it an advantage. Her grandmother, however, remained blissfully unaware. An elderly lady wearing marzipan fruit in her hair and waving a pistol on the front lawn was surely to no one’s advantage. Although a fine back-up plan, should it be required.

She would feel better when this forgery drew out the traitor.

“We’ll find him,” Priya said. Persephone must have made some sound.

“And we’ll clear Henry’s name,” Tamsin agreed. “I always liked Henry. He never tried to talk me out of climbing trees when we were little.”

Persephone smiled at that, and her resolve hardened. They would bring this affair to an end. She would not wait like trout in the pond for the fisherman’s hook. “Conall did not say where he was going?” she asked Priya again.

Priya shook her head, also frustrated. “You know how he is. Infuriating.”

“You don’t need Conall,” Tamsin scoffed. “You have us.”

“But maybe Conall needs us,” Persephone said softly. She turned her attention back to the clay in front of her since there was nothing else to do. She had decided on a scarab beetle, large enough to fit in the palm of her hand. It formed the lid of a small dish, both fired in the small kiln locked away in the secret room. She used blue paint, though it rankled not to use crushed lapis lazuli as would have been proper. Gilt shone on the lines of the body, contouring the legs and the partitioned curve of its back. She could picture something similar sitting in Cleopatra’s boudoir, for lotus root sweets, or powdered kohl to line her eyes.

It was simple soothing work, so familiar under her hands that her mind wandered.

To last night.

She could scarcely believe that she, plain and slightly odd Persephone Blackwell, had done such things. In a ballroom. With an earl.

She could still feel his mouth on her neck, his hands on her thighs, pushing gently at her knees, sliding into the heat of her.