LITMIR.BIZ

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no, thank you,” she said. “My lord, I must detain you no longer. You’ve been so kind, so chivalrous.”

      “It was my pleasure, I assure you.” He moved on to inspect her desk. “I had expected another dull afternoon of listening to Swanton being emotional.”

      He picked up one of the alarmingly sharp pencils and stuck it into the end of his index finger. It made a tiny indentation. Probably not lethal, unless one stabbed ferociously, which he felt certain she was capable of doing. He examined her meticulously sharpened pens. As he put each object back, he was aware of her breathing erratically, in little huffs.

      “Are you feeling overwarm, Miss Noirot?” he said. “Shall I open a window? Or will that only let in more of the day’s heat?”

      She made a small strangled sound and said, “If you must pry, my lord—and I realize that noblemen must do as they please—can you not at least put my belongings back in the same order in which you found them?”

      He stepped back from the desk and folded his hands behind his back. Not because he was abashed but because he was so sorely tempted to disarrange everything, including, most especially, her.

      He looked down at the pencil and the pen, then at the ledgers once more. “Er, no. That is, I could try, but it mightn’t turn out as we hope. That’s the reason Uttridge intervenes, you see. I grow bored very quickly, and things go awry.” That wasn’t entirely untrue. Once he’d fully mastered a thing, he grew bored.

      “Your dress is immaculate,” she said.

      He glanced down at himself. “Odd, isn’t it? Don’t know how I do it. Well, there’s Polcaire, of course, my valet. Couldn’t do it without him.”

      He contemplated his waistcoat for a moment. It was one of his favorites, and he was fairly sure he looked well in it. Some perspicacious genie must have whispered in his ear this day.

      No, that was Polcaire.

      Polcaire: But milord cannot wear the maroon waistcoat to this occasion.

      Lisburne: Swanton is the occasion, which means all the girls will look at him. No one cares what I look like.

      Polcaire: One never knows whom one will meet, milord.

      Which proved that Polcaire was not only a genius among valets, but an oracle, too.

      Lisburne looked up from his waistcoat at Miss Noirot.

      The palest pink washed over her cheekbones like a little tide, coming and going. It was delicious.

      “Shall I risk trying to get it all straight again?” he said. “My work may not be up to your standards—and I have a strong suspicion that you’re going to leap up from the chair, and …” He thought. “Stab me with the penknife?”

      He was aware of her forcing herself to be calm. It wasn’t easy to discern. Her face ought to be in a dictionary, under inscrutable. Though she was a redhead, her complexion was strangely parsimonious about blushing. Still, whatever other faults he had, he wasn’t unobservant, especially of women. In her case, he was paying hawklike attention. The way she relaxed her pose wasn’t unconscious at all. He watched her arrange her features and bring her shoulders down.

      “The thought crossed my mind,” she said. “But corpses are the very devil to get rid of, especially aristocratic ones. People notice when noblemen disappear.”

      The door having been left partly open, he became aware of the approaching footsteps an instant after he saw her posture grow more alert.

      Following a quick tap and Miss Noirot’s “Entrez,” one of the young females who’d thronged the showroom entered.

      “Oh, madame, I am so sorry to interrupt you,” the girl said, or at least, that was what he made of her excessively mangled French, before she gave up on a bad job and went on in English, “But it’s Lady Clara Fairfax and … another lady.”

      “Another lady?”

      Miss Noirot’s face lit, and she bounded up from the chair, momentarily forgetting the injured ankle. She winced and swore softly in French, but her eyes sparkled and her face glowed. “Send them up to the consulting room, and bring them refreshments. I’ll be there in a moment.”

      The girl went out.

      “Up to the consulting room?” he said. “Are you meaning to mount stairs in your condition?”

      “Lady Clara has brought Lady Gladys Fairfax,” she said. “Did you not see her?”

      “Of course I saw Gladys. One can no more fail to notice her than one could overlook a toppling building or a forty-day flood. I pointed her out to you.”

      “I meant her dress,” she said.

      “I looked away immediately, but not soon enough. It was a catastrophe, as usual.”

      What Gladys lacked in good nature she made up in bad taste.

      “It was,” Miss Noirot said, her tell-nothing face radiant with an excitement as incomprehensible as it was breathtaking. “She needs me. I would get up those stairs if I had to crawl.”

      Blast.

      And this afternoon had been going so well, too.

      Leave it to Gladys to barge in like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.

      “What nonsense you talk,” Lisburne said. “You can’t crawl up the stairs. You’ll wrinkle your dress.”

      He crossed to Miss Noirot and offered his arm before she could attempt to stagger to the door.

      “I’d carry you in,” he said, “but if she spots us, it’ll only make Gladys sarcastic. More sarcastic. And she’ll make your afternoon disagreeable enough as it is. Are you sure you want to see her? Couldn’t you send one of those multitudes of girls?”

      “Fob her off on an inferior?” She took his arm. “Clearly you have a great deal to learn about business, my lord.”

      “And you’ve a great deal to learn about Gladys. But there’s no helping it, I see. Some people have to learn the hard way.”

      He got her up to the next floor, but retreated when he saw the open door and heard Gladys’s voice. It had reached the peevish stage already.

      He had a nightmarish recollection of the first time he’d seen her, waiting at the house after his father’s funeral. A spotty, surly, sharp-tongued fifteen-year-old girl who oughtn’t to have been let out of the schoolroom. And her father! The famous military hero, who’d tried to bully a grieving widow into betrothing her son to that obnoxious child. Lord Boulsworth had acted as though Father had been one of his officers, struck down in combat, over whose regiment Boulsworth must assume command—as though other people’s wives and sons and daughters existed merely to march to his orders. Lisburne had encountered her a few times since his return to London. Apart from a remarkably clear complexion, he’d seen no signs of Gladys’s improving with maturity. On the contrary, she seemed to have grown more like her father.

      “Sorry to play the coward and cut and run,” he said, “but I’ll do you no favors by hanging about. Clara’s well enough, of course. Gladys is another article. Let’s simply say that she and I won’t be exchanging pleasantries. Seeing me will only put her in a worse humor, if you can imagine that, and I’d rather not make your job any more difficult.”

       Forty-five minutes later

      Are you blind?” Lady Gladys said. “Only look at me! I can’t have my breasts spilling out of my dress. People will think I’m desperate for attention.”

      She glared at the three women studying her, her color deepening to a red unfortunately like a drunkard’s nose.

      She sounded furious, but Leonie discerned the misery in her eyes. Her ladyship was difficult: imperious, rude, impatient, uncooperative, and quick to imagine insult.

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