LITMIR.BIZ

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was ridiculously easy,” he said, tossing his hat onto the bed, of all places. “Although I probably could have done without the butler and his wife, lined up with all the other staff in the hallway, welcoming me. Next time, if there is a next time, I might just as well use the front door knocker, and perhaps bring along a marching band.”

      “I had no idea...” Dany stopped, shook her head. “No, that’s really not true. I should have known. Does this happen all the time? People turning near-imbecilic at the mere prospect of seeing you?”

      “Since the chapbooks, you mean? More than enough of them, yes. And if our blackmailer has one of his informers on the earl’s staff, by tomorrow he’ll know he can’t risk returning here to carry on his knothole correspondence with the countess, so let’s make the most of this single night we do have.”

      “You really think someone on the staff is in the blackmailer’s employ? Really? And what are you doing?”

      Coop was moving about the bedchamber, using a brass snuffer to extinguish the candles. “To answer your first question, nothing is impossible. As to the second, we need this room in darkness before we push back the drapes.”

      Dany pulled a face. “Oh, I did that wrong, didn’t I? If he did think to deliver another threat, he clearly would have seen me outlined against the glass, wouldn’t he?”

      “In your defense, you’re rather new at this,” he said, snuffing the last candles, pitching the room into darkness save for the light from the fire. “Will you be staying here with me, or are you planning a midnight ride?”

      She glanced down at her outfit, belatedly realizing she had foregone a blouse in favor of haste, and she looked decidedly bare above the last button of her jacket. She imagined it would be impossible to blow out the fire, to turn the room completely dark. Besides, it was fairly obvious he’d already noticed her missing bit of wardrobe. And he couldn’t resist jabbing her about it, could he?

      Really, once people got to know the baron, perhaps they wouldn’t all be so loopy and silly when he was around. He was just a man, and a maddening one at that. Especially when his smile carried all the way to his eyes, as it was doing now.

      “Let’s be on with this, shall we? Or do you want to stand here being obnoxious until the blackmailer has been and gone?” she snapped, resisting clapping her hands to her chest only with the greatest of effort. She bared more to the world in her evening dresses, but there was something very different about showing that same skin above a severely cut riding habit.

      Or maybe just in exposing that skin to one Baron Townsend...

      “If he’s going to appear at all.”

      “I know. He hasn’t yet, and it has been five days—nights—since his threat. He’s bound to show up soon.”

      She watched as he positioned the fire screen so that it blocked some of the light from the fire, redirecting it toward the bed, before he walked to one of the long pair of windows and pushed back the drapery as he sat down on the window seat.

      “Tonight’s our last chance, if I’m correct about someone in this house being in his employ. Did you have your sister pen the note and put it in the knothole?”

      “I did, yes. She actually wrote Dear Blackmailer by way of salutation. She promised the five hundred pounds would be put into the knothole as soon as her letters were placed there for her retrieval. We also wrapped up our grandmother’s garnets and put them with the note.”

      Coop turned to look at her. “Why would she have done that?”

      “Because they’re ugly, I never liked them and I’m fairly certain they’re paste, thanks to our father’s forays into the gaming hells a few years ago.” She thought about what she’d said, because he was looking at her as if he’d never been anywhere near the inside of a woman’s head before and that his first foray there was proving more than a tad unsettling. “To show her good faith, that is.”

      Coop shifted his gaze to the mews and the line of trees. “So you decided to show your sister’s good faith by gifting the man with a down payment of paste garnets? Because you never liked them, anyway. You’re a rather frightening young woman, but I imagine you already know that.”

      “I probably am, I think I do and he might not notice. They’re very good paste,” Dany said, defending her brilliant idea. Poor hero. If she’d found it sometimes difficult to be Dany, she could only imagine how other people could be uncomfortable in her presence. She was beginning to actually pity him.

      “Well, then, that makes it all right, doesn’t it? I suppose I should thank you for obeying at least half of my instructions.”

      “Probably. I can be a sad failure at matters requiring cooperation. I say it’s because I have a mind of my own, although Mama insists I’m only good for driving others out of their minds,” she admitted truthfully. “Can you see well enough to know if someone approaches the tree? I couldn’t see much of anything the first two nights I tried to watch, but the moon is growing fuller now.”

      “Probably what the blackmailer has been waiting for. Enough light to see, but not a full moon, or he would chance being seen, as well. By the way, I’ve got Viscount Nailbourne stationed at one end of the alleyway and my friend Jeremiah Rigby at the other, prepared to act on my signal.”

      “What sort of signal?”

      “Nothing too elaborate. If we espy anything unusual, it would be a simple matter of cranking open one of these windows and giving a whistle,” he told her. “How else could I do it?”

      Pity him? Was she mad? It wasn’t her fault he’d chosen to compromise her with those two adorable cherubs, just so he could run tame in Oliver’s household.

      “Indeed, yes, how else? How silly of me to badger the hero with obvious questions. What a brilliant plan. I stand in awe, my lord, truly. Such a shame that those old windows have been painted shut for what’s probably decades.”

      “Damn.” The baron tried the handle, and it turned easily, the casement opening just as easily. He swiftly closed it again. Without looking at her, he said, “You’re worse than a menace. Go sit down.”

      Satisfied she’d gotten just a little of her own back, she walked over to the window seat and sat down beside him, twisting enough to be able to see through the narrow opening in the draperies.

      They were shoulder to shoulder, their cheeks nearly touching. She could feel Coop’s eyes on her.

      “Dany,” he said after a moment.

      “What?”

      “Over. There. At the other window. I said go sit down, not come sit down. And while you’re at it, you misbuttoned your jacket. Fix it, before somebody comes in and thinks I’m responsible for your dishevelment and you’ll have lost any hope of breaking our engagement without forcing me into a duel with either your father or your brother.”

      She practically flew from the window seat to take up her position at the other window, and immediately began to fiddle with her buttons in the dark. She hadn’t misbuttoned at all.

      One thing she could say for him—he gave as good as he got. Why, she could almost think, in other circumstances, they could have been the best of chums.

      “You could have simply asked me to move. And to think at least half the people in this house, my sister most especially, believes we’re in here being indecent. I was even beginning to pity you.”

      “Don’t bother. The more I’m around you, the more I’m pitying myself. Damn, somebody’s stepping out from the earl’s stables. He’d better not stay long, or the blackmailer will never show himself.”

      Dany pushed the drapery aside and squinted down into the mews. It might be dark, but there was no missing her maid’s rotund brother, even if he was mostly in shadow. “That’s only Sam,” she said. “He sleeps in the stables. Why is he looking around like that? Do you think he heard something

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