“Mr. Collier? Eight thousand, seventy-five pounds,” Rose read, her voice trilling a high C on the pianoforte.
“The point of this task is to keep from bringing the house down around us, my lady,” he growled.
“Er, sorry,” she whispered, taking the next note. “Earl Stockton: three thousand, twenty-two. Viscount Winchester: twenty-five hundred. Maudsley—” She glanced at him. “He’s an earl with highly questionable ethics—” She dropped her gaze and her eyes widened. “Fifteen thousand.” She waved the stack she held in the air. “How many are there?”
Mr. Whitmore snatched them from her and stuffed them back in the safe. “Several more, and I would advise you to keep what you are seeing to yourself. Men don’t care for their private business being bandied about. Not for sums of these amounts. Many have gone to great lengths to keep such information buried.”
She scowled at the back of his head. “I take it these men are funding the masquerade.”
He closed the safe, pushed the painting in place, then faced her with a grin that could only be described as wolfish, gleaming teeth flashing past firm lips. The tool pack disappeared in his breast pocket.
She itched to strip that mask away, shake him.Kiss him—
Erg. Such lascivious inklings toward a virtual stranger showed she was truly bound for Bedlam. She was a widow. A woman in her thirties! A woman who longed for…passion—
Dear heavens, she’d lost her mind.
“We need to get out of here,” her companion said with a sudden urgency. “Shufflebottom will no doubt return and will be determined to learn who was enjoying his private hospitality.”
“Private hospitality,” she sputtered.Oh, right, the drinks.“You have a point.”
“You must leave the ball,” he said.
“What? No!”
“Fine. He will hunt you down, you know.”
The mystery man took her hand within his warm, bare one, stunning her—he hadn’t yet replaced his gloves. She was tugged unceremoniously around the desk. “Do you have a way home?”
“I came with my sister and her husband. Why?”
“All right. I shall return you to them. But you must leave. If your costume was not so distinguishable”—he brought his hand up, clutching a handful of her hair—“this certainly will be.”
He dropped her hair and dragged her to the door, then came to a sudden stop. “Good God. Your shoes.”
Blast, she’d nearly forgotten. She yanked her hand from his and found them behind the door, where they must have been pushed when Shufflebottom burst in. Slipping into them proved impossible, and she nearly toppled over.
With a muttered oath she’d never heard before, he was down on one knee, taking her ankle and sliding her foot into place and tying the strings. The palm of his hand seared her skin through her stocking—silk, wool could not be borne. It seemed to rest there for an interminable, dizzying amount of time.
It must have been her imagination, because just as abruptly he was again on his feet and untwisting the locked door. She didn’t even recall him managing her other shoe. He glanced over his shoulder at her with such a gleam in his eye, it had her checking her mask was securely in place. He cracked the door and peered out. “If we run into anyone, be prepared.”
“Prepared?”
He shot her another of those quick grins that twisted her insides into knots.Ah, another kiss.“One last thing.”
“What?”
Quick as a surge of wind, Jane’s mobcap was stripped away and thrown over her head with a powerful thrust. Yet it floated like a cloud, landing softly in the center of the room. “Now, we’re ready.”
To her greatest and most shocking disappointment, they didn’t run into a single soul on the way back to the ballroom. Mr. Whitmore pushed open the door she’d previously escaped through. If the room had been crowded before, it was impossible to navigate now. The crowd looked to have doubled.
“We shall work a path to the door by way of the dance floor,” he said. “If you don’t see your sister by the time we make it across, I shall see you home myself.”
Seconds later, she was swung into a waltz amongst the packed parquet. She would never locate Gabriella in this throng. And then she did at the exact moment Gabriella spotted her. The air went out of Rose’s body.
“What is it?” her partner demanded softly.
Her gaze flew to his.
