“And wear your absolute finest togs. Something with brass or gold thread.”
His eyebrows lifted in question.
“To get someone at St. Mary Magdalen to talk,” she explained, “you’re going to need the full weight of your pomp and title.” She remembered something else they would need. “And coin. Bring a pouch full of it.” She sat back in her chair. “That’s everything.”
A sudden smile lit up his face. The one that rendered him a touch too attractive. “Am I dismissed?”
He wasn’t wrong. She had, indeed, dismissed him, a marquess. It was likely a novel experience. One she was only too happy to provide. “You are.”
Smile slipped but a few notches, he stood and offered her a shallow bow. “Until tomorrow, Miss Marchand.”
She began to reply and stopped.What had he just called her?“How do you know my surname? I haven’t given it to you.”
“Your landlady is perhaps not as discreet as you would prefer.”
The blasted man was about to sweep from the room when she remembered something. “Clare?”
Hand on the door handle, he half turned. “Yes?”
“Your second condition? You never said.”
The sardonic glint returned to his eye. “I stipulate that you call me Jamie.”
“Highly irregular,” she said, as she must say something. She didn’t want to call him Jamie. It was too familiar, and familiarity only bred more familiarity.
“Indulge me,” emerged from his mouth on a low, velvet rumble that very nearly stole her breath away.
Luckily, she held on to both her breath and enough sense to say, “Therein lies the problem.”
“What problem is that?”
“Haven’t you been indulged all your life?”
He gave another of his lordly snorts by way of reply and vacated the room.
And she was alone. Well, not quite. She had Sir Bacon for company. However, the little canine had begun sniffing around one of the chair legs in a most suspicious manner. “Oh, no you don’t.”
She scooped up the terrier and rushed him through the boardinghouse, shouldering past a flummoxed Mrs. Hayhurst in the narrow corridor. Once outside, she deposited the dog on the ground and pointed. “Here.”
He shot her a skeptical glance before sniffing out a suitable piddling spot. Her eye caught on the magnificent dapple gray receding up the street with Clare sitting astride with total instinctive ease. Only a man with position, power, and privilege sat a horse that naturally. It struck her afresh how different in station he and she were, a consideration that struck close to the heart of what niggled at her about their arrangement.
In short, an imbalance of power existed between them that didn’t weigh in her favor. She wouldn’t be the one in control, no matter how she might snipe and pick at him. That unpredictability had her stomach twisted into a knot. In every job, she was the one in control. Even during her years with Nick, she’d been an equal.
But the marquess? She wouldn’t be able to control him.
By agreeing to take his money and to the terms he demanded, she’d ceded him all power. And if her intuition about the man was correct, he would use every bit of it. She would be at his pleasure.
Yet the man insisted on being called—not by his title as surely did every other lord in the land—by his given name. Nay, not even that, for he wasn’t insisting on being called James, but ratherJamie.
Even so, those considerations weren’t what had her stomach roiling with portent.
St. Mary Magdalen.
She’d vowed never to return.
And tomorrow she would.
Here it was, an example of her inability to maintain her self-determination when her path intersected with Clare’s. How many more ways would she lose control before their dealings reached their conclusion?
