“Nothing’s wrong with Alice, is there?”
“No. Alice is the same as usual. Alice is Alice.”
“May I sit, George?”
He noticed she was still standing.
“Phee, you know you don’t have to wait for an invitation from me. I’m such a rude fool, I’d likely leave you standing forever.”
She smiled and said teasingly, “Yes, Lord Danforth,” as she made an elaborate curtsy.
He liked to see her smile. It did lift him, take him out of himself a bit. “My only desire is that you should take your ease in my presence, Lady Phoebe.”
He bowed deeply with a flourish and his wig came off his head. He clutched at his bald pate a split-second too late.
Well, it didn’t matter. If he had known Phoebe was coming, he would have already taken off the wig. But he usually wore his dark wig on a Friday at home, since it was his afternoon for his mistress and even though Lady Starling wasn’t coming today, he had kept it on since, after all, it was still Friday whether his mistress came or not.
But Phoebe saw him without the wig more often than she saw him with it. He had known her since she was born, after all. He still remembered meeting her as a baby for the first time, leaning over her basket.
She had been the bald one then, and he had sported a full head of dark-brown curls. How he missed those curls. Because by the time he was eighteen and had become the Baron Danforth in the wake of his father’s death, his curls had already started to thin. And now, eight years later, he was completely bald. She on the other hand had the same thick, long, dark-blonde tresses—albeit now pinned up—that she had started growing after shedding her wisps of baby hair.
He had taken to wearing a wig when he was twenty-two. But he never wore one when he played chess in his study. Or when he wrote his speeches for the House of Lords or worked on one of his etymological monographs. He thought better without a wig, some notion of air getting to his brain.
He picked the wig up off the floor and put it on his desk. He’d take it to his valet Morton after Lady Phoebe left.
She had assumed her seat in her usual chair.
“Shall I ring for some tea or sherry, Bumblephee? Surely some biscuits?”
She rocked back and forth a little. “I’d rather you didn’t. In fact, I’d rather no one else know that I’m here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Yes. Mother thinks I went to Lady Huxley’s whist party early with your sister. I didn’t lie, exactly. I just misled her.”
Odder and odder. Phoebe was exceptionally transparent. It was one of his few advantages when playing chess against her. He always knew when she was three or fewer moves away from a planned check. He could sense her excitement no matter how hard she tried to hide it.
How strange she should mislead her mother. Why couldn’t Phoebe just have said she was coming for a game? Even though her mother frowned on their chess matches, her father would have allowed it.
Well, no matter. The opportunity to get an extra game with his most dangerous opponent? It more than made up for the fact that his mistress was out of town. If George Danforth had been a demonstrative man, he would have rubbed his hands together in glee.
But he wasn’t. Instead, he put the chess table in place and began to arrange the pieces on the board.
“What’s this wager then?”
“If you win, you can have my copy of the first edition of Cawdrey’sTable Alphabeticallthat Great-Uncle Seth left me.”
“I can?” He had coveted that book for years. “What if you win?”
She studied the pattern of the carpet. “You will bed me.”
There was a silence. George could hear a far distant clanging in the alley behind the town house. Some coal for the kitchen being delivered, perhaps. Or ice.
“I will what?”
“Bed me.” She raised her head and met his eyes. “You will take me to your bed. Now. This afternoon. Immediately after the game.”
He collapsed into his own wing chair.
