But the ball was going to drag on forhours.
Hours of socializing.
Hours of dancing.
Hours of sipping bland lemonade.
“Does anyone know where I can get a King Cobra?” she asked.
Bridget gave her a look of mild concern. “Lenora had to leave early for her last dress fitting, and no, I don’t.”
“Drats. Where’s a venomous serpent when you need one?”
“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Annabel announced as she rose from her chair, having finished her coffee and pastry. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my room getting ready.”
“Gettingready? The ball doesn’t start for another ten hours!”
“Precisely,” she grimaced. “I hope that’s enough time.”
Off she flitted, leaving Eloise to shake her head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand her.”
“I’m fairly certain the feeling is mutual.” Bridget’s gaze slid to the doorway, and her entire face lit up. “Graham! Come to have breakfast with us?”
Eloise’s brother-in-law, a man of blessedly few words, didn’t use any of them as he entered the drawing room and kissed his glowing wife on the top of her head before resting his hands protectively on her shoulders.
“That’s disgusting,” Eloise gagged as she threw down her napkin and leapt up from the table. “I’m taking a walk. I need fresh air.”
“Alone?” asked Bridget, managing to temporarily wrest herself free of Graham’s tender administrations. “But you can’t. Lenora left me with strict orders not to–”
“La, la, la,” Eloise sang, clamping her hands over her ears as she skipped out the doorway.
“–let you go anywhere by yourself,” Bridget finished weakly. “Oh dear.”
“Your sister will be fine,” said Graham, giving his wife a kiss on her cheek before he walked to the side table and began to prepare himself a plate. “Do you want more bacon?”
“Yes, and how do you know that?”
“Because she’s Eloise.” Under a set of perpetually stern brows, Graham’s green eyes shone with gentle humor. “If you try to keep her inside, she’ll begin to shred the curtains.”
“Eloise is not a feralcat. All right,” Bridget sighed when she saw her husband’s resulting expression. “I concede, she is sort of like a feral cat. But I cannot help but worry about her. I’m also worried formyselfwhen Lenora discovers that I let her out.”
“It will be fine,” Graham repeated, nonplussed by Rosewood family dramatics. “Eloise will return when she’s ready, and by this hour tomorrow we’ll be in a carriage on our way to Crofton Manor.Alonein a carriage.”
“A-alone?” she repeated, her voice coming out breathless when Graham left his plate on the side table and prowled towards her chair, his countenance rapt with an intensity that instantly flooded her belly with butterflies.
“Alone,” he confirmed on a husky whisper.
Bending his neck, he took her earlobe between his teeth…
…and Bridget forgot all about Eloise.
The shipyard stankof salt, fish, and unwashed bodies. Sailors shouted at each other as they hauled in anchor lines and carried cargo off narrow, rickety gangplanks. White canvas sails snapped and billowed in the strong breeze, carrying massive schooners along the winding Thames to their designated wharf. Gulls swooped and squawked, their white underbellies nearly invisible against the backdrop of a clear, cloudless blue sky.
Amidst the barely controlled chaos, Adam waited patiently for one ship in particular, a sleek clipper that had departed Boston ten days ago and was scheduled to make port in London this afternoon, a full four days earlier than most ships were capable of making the voyage. His freight of choice was time; he wanted to employ the fastest fleet possible to carry barrels of copper from a mine in Connecticut that he’d recently taken a controlling interest in.
As it currently stood, copper was considered a largely useless metal. The mines in England were, rightfully so, purposed to produce coal, tin, and rock salt. But Adam knew of man, who knew of a man, who knew a man by the name of Thomas Edison, an American inventor of little consequence…except he had recently begun work on something he called an incandescent lamp.
It was years from being finished–if it ever was at all–but if Edison managed to do it, if he found a way to truly revolutionize indoor lighting, the world would be forever changed…and fortunes would be made.
