“You do surprise me, my lord.”
Ambrose loathed anyone mocking him. “I’m educated,” he snapped, “and I also read a great deal.” Excellent—now he sounded defensive. Would his humiliation at this woman’s hands never stop?
They stared at each other for a long moment, and Ambrose felt the urge to grab her and kiss that mouth into silence, which he would absolutely not be doing.
“Surely someone on your staff has headache powders?”
And they were back to his headache now.
“I had one earlier, but it’s worn off already,” he muttered.
She then opened the small bag she was carrying and thrust a twist of paper at him. “Here, this may help. Good day, Lord Talbot.”
“I thought your club was opening today?” he said, taking what she offered with no idea what it held. It could be a poisonous insect for all he knew.
“We just told people that because we didn’t want more idiots turning up to disrupt the event. We opened it yesterday.”
Ambrose guessed he was classed as one of those idiots.
His eyes went to the white facade behind her. While his club was three stories with elegant arched windows and an entrance that rivalled the grandest of London town houses, this building had once been an exclusive gentleman’s lodging house. The facade was not as grand, but it was solid. It had sat unoccupied for two years, so he had noidea what the inside was like when she had taken over the lease.
“This will not go easy for you, Miss Wilson.”
Her lips twitched at the use of her formal name. “Nothing in my life to date has gone easy, Lord Talbot,” she said, and something passed across her eyes and then was gone. “I am, after all, a woman, and we both know that society does not accept a woman who does not conform to its expectations.”
Those words were uncomfortably true.
“Thankfully, the money I was given from the Nightingale family allowed me to create The Iris Club for women who are in need of a place to go where they can be themselves and not who men wish them to be.”
They were part of the group of people, along with the Nightingale family, who had recovered the Pavlov fortune a few years ago. It was a vast amount of wealth that had been hidden for many years. They distributed some of it among themselves, but there was a great deal left, and with that, the group was doing what they could to help people who needed it.
“Now you must excuse me. There is still much to do to get the club running smoothly because, as you know, we are mere women and therefore without intelligence.”
“I did not say…” His words fell away as she turned her back on him and headed toward the building.
She took a step, then tripped and went down hard. Before he could reach her, Tilly had regained her feet and fled inside, slamming the door behind her.
He cursed silently. He was, as always, wrong-footed by that woman. Was she unhurt?
He wanted to follow and check, but it would take someone knocking him unconscious to get him inside those walls.
At a loss to what his next move should be, he opened thetwist of paper in his palm and stared down at the sweets. Sherbet lemons were his favorite. He put one in his mouth and sucked, enjoying the hit of sweet and tart on his tongue.
Why had Tilly given him these? The gesture touched him, and he had no wish to be touched by anything that woman did.
“Dare I ask why you are standing outside the women-only club, staring at the facade while sucking loudly?”
He hadn’t heard the footsteps, but he knew to whom the voice belonged. Turning, he looked into the eyes of his brother-in-law.
“I found Miss Wilson being harassed by Peter and Hardacre,” Ambrose said. “Are you going to our club?”
“Seeing as you made me join and then dragged my cousins along with me, I guess we must,” Charles said. “Why were they harassing Tilly?”
It vexed him that Charles could call Tilly by her first name and Ambrose himself couldn’t, but as that was petty, he ignored the thought.
His brother-in-law was a good man and one Ambrose had come to call friend after he’d made himself worthy of marrying his sister. Tall, easygoing unless provoked, the man had given Violet something no one else had been able to after the death of her fiancé—happiness. For that Ambrose would be forever grateful.
“You’re not serious, Charles?”
