“Perhaps I have a future as a seamstress,” she mused aloud.
To his credit, Max did not choke with laughter. “Perhaps you can apprentice Frances.”
“She is too smart for that,” Bryony admitted.
She returned her gaze to the numbers before her, but her runaway thoughts were now on Max’s sister.
That Frances did not wish for her brother or any man to run her life was something Bryony very much understood. Yet a woman in Frances’s position had few options. It would be difficult to divine an acceptable way out.
Fortunately, Bryony had a gift for difficult calculations.
Chapter 16
Three days later, Max still caught himself gazing across his perfectly organized office at the hideous pillow up on his shelf. It looked like she’d fed a cat spools of colored thread and affixed the resulting hairballs to fine linen.
Never had he seen anything more misshapen in his life.
But Bryony had made it for him, so it held not only a dedicated place in his office, but also in his heart.
Even if he could never tell her so himself.
He slid his gaze to the far side of his desk. She had sent him a letter just that morning. A letter he had been studiously ignoring, and simultaneously obsessing over.
She had met his sister and wanted him to meet hers. The note was an invitation to the St. Giles School for Girls. Some sort of activity they were planning for two o’clock this afternoon.
It was currently a quarter past two.
He could blame his absence on being too busy at the club. It wouldn’t open for a few more hours, but there was always more to be done than time in which to do it. She would not be surprised by such an excuse at all.
Nor would she believe him.
Max glared at the invitation. He had been adamant about not getting too close. Not crossing the line. Ever since that afternoon in front of Gunter’s Tea Shop, he had sworn off public encounters altogether. With Bryony, anyway.
But this was not public. It was a private boarding school. In the middle of a rookery. A world away from the fashionable and the wealthy.
As much as he was trying to keep from entangling himself further by dreaming of a life they could never share... He would love to meet Bryony’s sisters.
Max had known her elder brother Heath for many years. Despite being heir to a barony, he had never once put on airs or attempted to put Max in his place.
The other sisters sounded even more unusual, particularly for their class. Now that he knew Bryony’s full name, he’d done some investigating of his own. Her oldest sister had caused an enormous scandal by choosing to become an opera singer. And the middle one had apparently opened a high-quality school in the lowest-class part of town.
A rookery was about as neutral a location as Max was likely to get.
Thus decided, he pushed away the pile of accounts he’d been failing to tally and headed outside to flag a hack. In no time at all, the carriage wheels were clomping past Seven Dials and coming up on the old abbey that now held the St. Giles School for Girls.
After paying the driver, Max alighted from the carriage and cautiously approached the front door.
His knock was answered not by Bryony or a butler, but by a twelve-year-old moppet with ginger plaits, a wrinkled pinafore, and a scowl to rival Vigo’s when he guarded the Cloven Hoof.
Max cleared his throat, unsure of the next move.
She gazed up at him sullenly.
He met her stare with his own.
At last, she gave an exaggerated sigh. “Calling card?”
Max clenched his empty fingers.
