And yet.
Mrs. Breedlove’s eyes were hazel, which seemed a much too-soft, nearly dreamy color for a woman like her to have. There wasn’t a thing soft or dreamy about Mrs. Breedlove, at least not anymore.
Yes, they were alike.
He wondered about the first man to compliment her eyes, for surely someone had been the first. He was sincerely sorry if life had been unkind to her; doubtless, to wind up as Derring’s mistress, things had not gone the way she would have preferred. He had the sense that one took refuge from life in The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“Mrs. Breedlove, do you think I’m a man of whim?”
“No. Hence my concern. I suspect you are quite purposeful. But I’m not quite certain of your purpose here, at The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“Why, for the accommodations, of course. And for the pleasure of being required to sit reading comfortably in your sitting room while the Gardner sisters stare at me.”
“Then I shall be clear. On the off chance a scrap of heart remains in the iron confines of your chest, perhaps you ought to leave her alone.”
He took a sip of his tea, now cold, and a little too strong.
Had he been obvious? This seemed inconceivable.
Or had Delilah—?
“No, she hasn’t said a word,” Mrs. Breedlove said, in answer to his unspoken question.
He wasn’t going to obfuscate. He would not admit a thing. Nor would he deny.
He merely studied her.
“I think the very fact of your advice suggests you’ve not only been dented, Mrs. Breedlove. I believe you actually care very much about her.”
For a fleeting instant her cool features registered surprise and vulnerability. She did not like being sassed out.
He thought perhaps she was reassessing him.
He almost smiled. Clearly she thought astute men were anomalies.
Perhaps they were.
“Or I’m looking out for the best interests of all of us, and I’ve grown weary of cleaning this drafty box and the nature of smithereens is that one must pick them out of the carpet or curtainsforever.”
With an insouciant wave of her hand, she departed the room, leaving it somehow ten degrees colder than it had been.
“Lady Derring says that she and Mrs. Breedlove financed their boardinghouse with the proceeds of the sale of their jewelry to a pawnbroker called Reeves. We’ll need to verify this. It doesn’t yet definitively clear her of cigar smuggling. But my instincts say neither she nor her partner are involved. I had an opportunity to speak to Mrs. Breedlove this morning.”
Tristan was more and more certain that Delilah and Mrs. Breedlove were innocent of any wrongdoing. But more to the point, he hoped that they were.
Which meant he had taken a side. And he made an internal adjustment to remind himself that he was here to try to track down the source of those cigars. Not prove Delilah and Mrs. Breedlove’s innocence.
“Very well. We’ll verify it, sir. But why did they open a boardinghouse, of all things?”
“Because... their options for survival and thriving were limited. Most of their options involved relying on men, which they preferred not to do. Apparently men aren’t as wonderful as we think we are, or so they believe.”
Massey pressed his lips together, considering this.
He knew about Brinker. About how he’d been taken to the opposite side of London by Tristan’s men and grilled the entire way about his presence at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
That was how they’d ascertained that Brinker was a brute, not a smuggler. He’d in fact, when he was more lucid, conveyed his thanks to the famous Captain Hardy for stopping the smuggling in Kent, which was cutting into his own family’s business.
He was assured his horse would be returned to him in Kent. Which it would be. They were efficient, the blockade men. They also threatened to hand him his bollocks on a plate if Brinker ever returned to The Grand Palace on the Thames.
