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He signaled their waitress to bring a fresh cup. “I had my newspaper to occupy me.”

The waitress replaced Viv’s old coffee with a quickness and eagerness to please that brought to mind an unwelcome memory of Viv’s stepfather. Captain Pennington never lingered over his coffee and paper without demanding a dozen little attentions from her mother and sisters. They were always on the jump to bring him another slice of toast, more jam, his pipe, and a penknife he used to work at his fingernails. Then, after all their efforts, he would shove back his chair, scraping the floorboards, and announce that he was going out for coffee.

She took up the fresh cup of coffee and glanced at Mr. Larkin over the rim. He had none of her stepfather’s restless impatience, and he was good at not drawing attention to himself.

“What?” he asked.

She put down her coffee. “Your lip is swelling, I think.”

A fleeting expression crossed his face that she could not read. She expected him to touch the lip, but he didn’t. He was keeping whatever had really happened to himself.

She took another sip of coffee. She had called him Winkworth in the little sketch she’d written of their meeting, but the name didn’t suit him. With most of the people she put in her stories, she seized upon some element of the person’s looks or dress that lent itself to caricature, a prominent feature, an outlandish bit of clothing, a mannerism or affectation. Her pretend fiancé was assured and self-contained. She hadn’t found any obvious vanity in him except perhaps in his claim to know London particularly well. And that might be the result of his history, but when she thought about his story it all seemed too convenient, too like a fairy tale—the absent family, the undemanding job, the implausible past in which he’d been orphaned and then educated and provided for by a duke.

She turned her notebook around and slid it across the table. He’d had a chance to study her without her notice. She wanted a similar chance. “Will you give it a glance?”

His dark brows went up. He pushed his coffee away and drew the little notebook closer. “You’re sure?”

She nodded. “Did I get it right, do you think?”

“You want my opinion?”

“You’ll give it whether I want it or not.” That drew a smile.

He turned the pages, his eyes lowered to her notebook. Over the rim of her coffee cup, she studied him. He moved about London with extraordinary freedom. He had changed her way of going about her researches. She had set out to find the stories that each street had to tell, but he made her realize that she was writing from an observer’s perspective and not as one who was part of the scene itself. That seemed to be his particular quality. He was part of London, at ease there. He was a people watcher like her. He had spotted the man in lavender gloves, but while she had seen the gloves as a mere affectation, he had understood that a pickpocket would not call attention to his hands with purple gloves.

It was fanciful to think, but she wondered at the sequence of events that led to their odd partnership. She fully believed there to be elements of design in the marvelous workings of the universe, but she did not imagine that the grand scheme of things had been arranged to give her the chance to write her stories with a promise of publication. Every step of the way from her aunt Louisa’s invitation to accompany her to Bath and to meeting Lady Melforth in the Pump Room to the Strydes’ insistence on Lady Melforth’s hiring a companion for her stay in London was a forward momentum in Viv’s life utterly unlike her Weymouth days. Meeting Mr. Larkin in Babylon Street seemed no more remarkable than the rest of the story. It had all worked to Viv’s advantage. Now she wondered what steps had led him to that meeting and what he was getting out of their bargain.

He looked up at last, his hand resting on the notebook. “You don’t think female shoppers wish to be seduced?”

“I don’t. No one wants to be…worked upon, to be buying who knows what because of the setting or the sheer abundance of goods. One wants to be in charge, making one’s decisions based on one’s actual needs and one’s purse.”

He straightened a little and pressed his free hand to his wounded side.

“Did your assailant hit you in the ribs?” she asked.

“We were talking about seduction,” he said.

“We are talking about shopping, sensible shopping, about knowing one’s needs and one’s means and making purchases accordingly.”

“You’ve never been seduced in Weymouth?”

“In Weymouth?”

“When the sky is blue and white clouds drift by and the sun sparkles on the sea and warms your face and the air is fresh? Can you tell me that on such a day, you’ve never closed up your book, put away your pen, and walked nowhere, anywhere, just to be part of the day?”

“Of course, I love—” She stopped and looked conscious of falling into his trap.

He stood and extended a hand to help her up. “Then you’ve been seduced,” he said.

“And you,” she said, “have reopened that wound.”