LITMIR.BIZ

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he goes. Perhaps that explains why he’s always surrounded by a particular sort of woman.”

      “And what sort of man makes vile speculations about a woman he’s only just met?” she whipped back. “Are you insulting, or threatening me, Mr. Stone?”

      “Perhaps you should tell me, Miss Pickford?”

      For a suspended moment he wondered if she planned to dig in her heels, or flee. The back of his neck itched like sunburn; he was ashamed of how he was baiting her. Yet he couldn’t allow what might be the only lead in eleven months of fruitless investigation to vanish because the lead was a lovely liar struggling to hide her vulnerability.

      Slowly a hint of color crept back over her cheeks. The dark eyes searched his, and Dev’s own pulse quickened when her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. “Both,” she whispered, and before he recovered from her unexpected honesty she vanished into the crowd.

      This time, Devlin let her go.

      Chapter Three

      Theodora pushed her way through the crush of people strolling the Broadway. The energy that had fueled her encounter with Mr. Stone leaked away with each step until her feet barely lifted from the ground. A dozen yards from the Grand Union Hotel she stopped underneath the base of one of the elm trees shading the Broadway, needing a moment to collect herself. After several calming breaths, the spinning sensation receded; she fixed her gaze upon a fancy-goods storefront full of ladies’ gloves while she thought about her reaction to the stranger.

      How had this Mr. Stone known she was acting? His eyes, a mesmerizing blend of gray, slate blue and…and ice, had pierced every one of her painstakingly formulated masks. At the moment she should be prostrate with vertigo, her reaction to a bone-searing insecurity spawned early in her childhood. She kept this weakness relentlessly hidden from everyone but Mrs. Chudd, the widowed neighbor she’d hired at Grandfather’s insistence to be her companion “while you work this mad scheme out of your system.” Until the previous year, most of the attacks had disappeared altogether. Then Grandfather was arrested and spent a week in jail—for passing counterfeit money. The money Edgar Fane had paid him. The police and several Secret Service operatives had treated an innocent Charles Langston like a common criminal, but they hadn’t even charged Edgar Fane, the lying, cheating snake.

      Thea wasn’t sure who she despised more, Edgar Fane or the sanctimonious Secret Service operatives with their closed minds and weak spines.

      Edgar Fane was a villain. Thea had dedicated her life to proving his guilt, regardless of debilitating spells of vertigo. She owed that life to Grandfather, but would never enjoy it until she found a way to restore the twinkle in his eye and his wilted faith in God. For Thea, waiting for the Almighty to pursue vengeance was no longer an option.

      Dizzy spells, however, might prove to be something of a conundrum. Certainly her first few brushes with Mr. Fane triggered the symptoms, probably because he’d ignored her. It was also turning out to be far more difficult than she imagined, projecting an attraction for a man she planned to skewer with the pitchfork of justice.

      Devlin Stone claimed to know Edgar Fane. Per haps…?

      Perhaps she could jump off a cliff, as well. It might be less hazardous than pursuing Devlin Stone, who made her pulse flutter and caused a most unusual sensation in the region of her heart. Apparently Mr. Stone triggered a multitude of strange feelings, but not a single swirl of vertigo.

      And he might be the only person able to help her.

      Thea’s hands clenched the Chinese fan. Mr. Stone’s threat to expose her to her imaginary fiancé Neville could be discounted, but the threat itself would have to be dealt with. She’d learned Edgar Fane planned to leave Saratoga in three weeks. Less than a month…

      Another swirl of dizziness batted her, a warning she would do well to heed.

      So don’t think about him, or Devlin Stone’s unsubtle threats, Theodora. Think about how to persuade him to share everything he knows about Edgar Fane. Think about Charles Langston, and retribution. Think about flinging evidence at the Secret Service and humiliating them as they had humiliated her Grandfather and ruined his life.

      But instead her mind reached back to the instant Mr. Stone had touched her. Strength, vitality and authority wrapped around Thea as securely as his fingers enclosed her arm. The impulse to confess everything had overwhelmed her senses, a terrifying prospect. Worse than the dreaded vertigo, she had been tempted to cling to a stranger, because…because unlike her reaction to Edgar Fane and despite all common sense, she had been drawn to Mr. Stone like penny nails to a powerful magnet.

      There. She’d admitted the truth, to her conscience at least.

      The whirling inside her head abruptly diminished.

      She supposed she ought to be grateful. Regardless of Devlin Stone’s too-perceptive gaze, apparently he only muddled her senses. If thoughts of him lessened the vertigo, she’d recite his name a hundred times a day.

      Cautiously Thea straightened and headed for the hotel.

      An hour later, dressed for her afternoon at the races, she left Mrs. Chudd reading a book and sipping fresh limeade. A spare woman with iron-gray hair, Mrs. Chudd was exactly the sort of chaperone Thea required: indifferent, and incurious. After confiding to her about the spells of vertigo, the woman had nodded once, then remarked that she wasn’t a wet nurse but if called upon would do her duty. Today, her “Mind you use your parasol else you’ll turn red as one of those Indians,” constituted Mrs. Chudd’s only gesture at chaperonage. At least this was Saratoga Springs, where guests discarded societal strictures like a too-tight corset.

      After leaving a note of apology for the desk clerk to have delivered to Mrs. Van Eyck, Thea joined a dozen other guests in queue for one of the hotel wagons headed for the track. She felt awkward; there were those who disapproved of the entire horse-racing culture, denouncing the sport for its corruption and greed. Until she arrived at Saratoga, Thea had never paid attention one way or the other, though she remarked to someone at her dinner table how thrilling it would be to watch the powerful creatures thunder down the track at amazing speeds.

      Today, however, was a hunting expedition, not a pleasure excursion. The tenor of her thoughts stirred up fresh guilt. After three weeks Thea could mostly block the insistent tug by remembering how her grandfather looked behind bars the only time she visited him in that foul hole of a cell. Voice cracking, fine tremors racking his stooped form, Charles begged her not to return. Because she saw that her presence hurt him beyond measure, Thea gave her promise.

      Promises made to loved ones must be kept.

      No matter how despicable her actions now, she would never break her word like her father with all his picture-postcard promises to come home, or abandon anyone at birth like her mother did Thea. Richard Langston and Hetty Pickford—what a legacy. Yet never once had her grandfather condemned their only child for the behavior of her parents.

      Impatient with herself, Theodora glanced down at her blue-and-white costume, self-consciously running a finger over the perky red braid trimming the skirt and basque while she turned her mind to the afternoon ahead. A tingle of anticipation shot through her at the prospect of matching wits with Devlin Stone again.

      She’d thought long and hard while she changed into her present costume. For some reason Mr. Stone had singled her out of a crowd of thousands of available, far more beautiful females. Based upon Thea’s admittedly scant personal knowledge of romantic liaisons, all that was necessary to assure a gentleman’s continued pursuit would be to indicate her willingness to be pursued. Very well, then. With a bit of pluck and a whole bucketful of luck, through encouraging Mr. Stone’s interest in her, in turn she hoped to procure enough insight into Edgar Fane’s habits to at last secure an entrée into the scoundrel’s inner circle of friends. She refused to crawl home in shame and defeat.

      Her tactics troubled Thea. If she ever blew the dust off her Bible and strove to establish a better communication with the Lord, she would doubtless spend many years on her knees, begging forgiveness for the sordidness

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