With brutal and funny astuteness, she’d suggested that a duke chess piece would only be able to move in a straight line. But itwasalways the swiftest, most powerful way to move. Lifeoughtto be conducted within defined contours. And honor dictated that he could take note of the charms of this opera singer and not feel compelled to veer outside those lines.
Because that’s where a woman like Mariana existed: quite beyond the bounds of his world.
But he understood now that her earlier implication that he was cold had landed painfully raw because of his suspicion that it was a quality of character he could do nothing about. As if “cold” was merely his personal climate, like Siberia.
He began to suspect that it was a condition he’d merely been needlessly suffering.
And that the cold was not a climate, but a season.
Somewhat darkly amused, he dipped his quill, and drew a long, careful, vertical, curving line. Then next to it, an inch or so away, a matching one. As deliberately as though he were drawing a battle map of enemy territory. The shape of her beautiful body, the way he saw it as she approached each day.
Chapter Nine
Dot surprised everyone that evening with a show of initiative: earlier that day, when she’d been out to buy the newspaper, she’d purchased for three pennies of the household money twenty silk handkerchiefs from “a nice gentleman on the street! It must have been providence, like you said, Mrs. Durand!”
She beamed at them proudly and brandished them in the sitting room at the top of the stairs.
Delilah and Angelique eyed them warily.
It was, of course, entirely possible that a man had been taken by Dot’s big blue eyes and general air of don’t-mind-me-I’m-up-in-the-clouds and offered her a bargain out of the goodness of his heart. But given that a good plain linen handkerchief usually cost four shillings at least, and that pickpockets usually did a brisk business reselling stolen handkerchiefs after they’d picked out the owner’s embroidered initials, the conclusion was that she’d brought contraband goods into the house. Providence, in this case, was likely a pickpocket.
Captain Hardy had spent the first half of his life running smugglers to ground. Delilah was gladher husband wasn’t around to witness this. And now they would have to explain the matter to Dot without crushing her initiative.
Poor Dot, who had begun her life as the worst lady’s maid in the world to a duchess, albeit an evil one, was now buying stolen goods near the docks.
The handkerchiefs pulsed wickedly and temptingly before their eyes. It was no good. They simply remained enchanted with their idea of giving them away.
“I’m so torn,” Delilah whispered to Angelique that night. “What does it mean that I’m both horrified and amused that we might be giving our guests back their own handkerchiefs?”
Angelique was quiet.
“We shouldn’t like them to go to waste,” she said carefully.
Delilah bit back a smile. “Moral decline is a slow but slippery slope, Angelique.”
“At least we’ll have each other for company on our slide down.”
Delilah stifled a laugh. “We can hardly sell themback, or find their rightful owners. Perhaps we’ll accidentallyreturnthem to their rightful owners.”
“Perhaps it was providence that a stack of stolen handkerchiefs appeared today.”
“Just like the appearance of Miss Wylde.”
They laughed with just thetiniestbit of muffled hysteria. They knew their ambitions for their program slightly overflowed their abilities to get it all done in a month.
“I wonder what the duke would say. Is it honorable to take something just because we want it?”
And they were both quiet. They’d both done exactly that at least once. The fact that they had both acquired husbands who had shown up at The Grand Palace on the Thames at different times was proof of that. However, it had hardly come easily to either of them.
Certainly not as easily as these handkerchiefs.
“We’ll give them a good laundering first, shall we?” Delilah said finally. “And... perhaps we won’t tell Captain Hardy. No need for him to, ah, suffer over it, too.”
Mr. Delacorte had promised Mariana that he’d safely delivered her message right into the neatly manicured hand of Mr. Giannini. “Pleasant bloke!” he’d said, cheerfully.
Bless his heart, he was willing to believe most people were pleasant. Which, she knew, had more to do with Delacorte than with other people.
“He can be,” she agreed with a sigh. But Giancarlo hadn’t appeared at The Grand Palace on the Thames with her money yet.
