LITMIR.BIZ

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      You’ll always have a choice, Dany. That’s a promise.

      Two men. Saying two very different things. Yet both employing that same suddenly serious tone.

      What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Rigby was a man in love. Coop was...well, he wasn’t, that’s all. Why, they barely knew each other.

      She spied him as the trio turned the corner. He was standing beside his coach, propping up a light post, his arms folded, his feet crossed at the ankle. He looked like a man bored to flinders, and she felt a sudden mad desire to fling herself into his arms.

      Rigby and Clarice gifted him with cheery hellos before climbing into the coach, but Dany stopped right in front of him to say, “Brothel? That couldn’t have been your idea.”

      “True enough. Darby picked it. He wanted something salacious. Do you know what comes next?”

      “I do, or at least I think I do. We come back when the shop closes this evening, and then hopefully get the chance to follow Mrs. Yothers as she goes racing off to meet with her blackmailing employer.”

      Coop held out his hand to assist her into the coach. Once they were settled on the squabs and dutifully ignoring Clarice and Rigby, who were greeting each other as if parted for years (and why did she feel suddenly jealous?), he corrected her assumption.

      “Darby has all of that in hand. We are attending the theater, to see and be seen, as last night’s dinner table gossip will have spread to every corner of Mayfair by then, and it’s important we make an appearance. We can’t have the world thinking you’ve locked yourself in your bedchamber, hiding from the man who compromised you, now, can we?”

      Dany pointed to the cooing lovebirds on the facing seat. “Do we have to do that?”

      Surely he couldn’t hear that smidgen of hope in my voice.

      Coop smiled. “God, no. Nobody does that. Only the two of them. Unless, that is, you believe it necessary.”

      “I don’t think so, no,” Dany said with all the conviction she could muster, stealing another peek at her new friends, who apparently had remembered where they were and broken off their kiss. Either that, or they’d run out of air. “Do you really think it will work?”

      “That?” Coop asked rather incredulously, also pointing at his friends.

      “No, of course not. The viscount flushing out the blackmailer. That is what you want, isn’t it? Mrs. Yothers taking him information he can use to further line their pockets?”

      “You’ll pardon me for not always running fast enough to catch up with your mind as it skips ahead like a flat stone skimmed across a pond. But that is the plan, yes.”

      “You should have spoken with me before you launched it, you know. Or did you consider the possibility that Mrs. Yothers is not involved with the blackmailer, and is only a silly gossip, so that our engagement may be completely overlooked as the world turns as one on the viscount?”

      Coop muttered something under his breath.

      “Pardon me? I don’t believe I quite caught that,” Dany said, feeling rather smug.

      “I said, men shouldn’t think when they drink. I believe we did consider that possibility, but not seriously. I suppose we’d better hope Mrs. Yothers is guilty, shouldn’t we?”

      “Yes, we most certainly should. You men should also confine yourselves to war, and leave intrigue to the ladies. We’re much better at it. A brothel. I suppose that’s better than saying he murdered his valet, or some such thing.”

      “That also was considered, but Darby pointed out that then he’d be forced to polish his own boots, which he deemed totally unacceptable for a man of his stature.”

      Dany looked at Coop in astonishment but quickly noticed the twinkle in his eyes—those marvelous green eyes, more priceless than any emerald—and the two of them fell against each other in shared laughter.

      It was as if they’d known each other forever. And wasn’t that wonderful? They had bumped up against the edge of ridiculous and, oh, what a marvelous collision it was.

      Dany could believe they were simply two people who had met and liked each other, and could possibly be passing beyond mere liking and on to something else, something perhaps even rare and magical. For this moment, these few fleeting moments, it could be believed that their lives were perfect.

      Save for the blackmailer, the chapbooks, Mari’s letters and her soon-to-return husband, a totally ridiculous engagement and the constantly ticking clock hanging over all their heads...

       CHAPTER TWELVE

      COOP BELIEVED HE had never so enjoyed an evening at the theater, and he had yet to more than occasionally glance toward the stage. There could be dancing elephants in pink tulle skirts twirling on the boards for all he knew, or cared.

      Watching Dany’s reactions to all that was transpiring around them was so much more entertaining. She was by turn amused, dismayed, curious, as excited as any child, and just the once, had waggled her fingers (the hand with the emerald riding atop the glove) at a rude dowager across the way who had aimed her lorgnette at their box, until the woman looked away in shame.

      Not that most every eye hadn’t been directed at them at one time or another once they’d entered the box and taken up the chairs in the front row. There was nothing like the ton to speed news across all of Mayfair with the velocity of a volley of loosed arrows.

      At the moment, Dany was leaning slightly forward, her toes tapping, as the corps de ballet—Coop believed they were meant to be angels—performed on the stage. After all, there were wings involved, although most Covent Garden dancers were, as a group, farther from innocent angels than most any group Coop could think of. Darby, it was rumored, had bedded all of them.

      Darby had probably launched that rumor.

      In any event, this evening Dany and he were the guests of the Duke and Duchess of Cranbrook, who insisted on the more informal Uncle Basil and Aunt Vivien, which was what Coop, Darby, Rigby and of course Gabe had called them in their youth, when they were frequent guests at Cranbrook Chase and Basil was still thrice removed from the dukedom, intent only on staying as distant from responsibility as a generous allowance permitted.

      But one by one, Basil’s older brothers, each just on the eve of their sixtieth birthdays, had, or so it was told to Coop by Gabe, unexpectedly opened their eyes wide, said something on the order of “Erp?” and mere seconds thereafter shuffled off this mortal coil for “a better place.”

      Eventually, the trio of erps left Basil the dukedom and, as he was approaching his sixtieth birthday in November, the notion that he was next. He had fallen into a sad decline, refusing to leave his rooms at the ducal estate. Boosting the man from his doldrums had fallen to Gabe, which meant Coop, Darby and Rigby were immediately called upon for their assistance.

      Them, and the parrots.

      Basil had gone from a man hiding from his own fate to a happy fellow who, if he was going to have to die, would make the most of his remaining time. He now spent that time doing what he pleased, when it pleased him, and chasing a giggling Vivien around the bedroom. He did a lot of the latter, and not always in the bedroom.

      Not that there was anyone, Gabe included, who was about to point out that, since Clarice was living under their roof; they just might be setting a bad example for Miss Goodfellow and her ardent Rigby when it came to public displays of affection.

      As if Clary and her Jerry gave a fig for conventions. Clarice was Rigby’s first love, and love had fairly slammed him in the face like the broad end of a shovel, convention be damned. Their wedding, slated for Christmas at Cranbrook, couldn’t come too soon.

      Just as Gabe’s marriage to his Thea, especially as he was heir to the dukedom, had only been put

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