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“Her maid will never get the creases out of those pleats,” muttered the maidservant standing beside Longmore.
In a distant corner of his mind he marveled at anybody’s noticing at such a moment something as trivial as wrinkles in Clara’s attire. In the same distant corner he knew there was nothing to marvel at, given the speaker: Sophy Noirot.
That was only a distant awareness, though. The main part of his mind heeded only the scene in front of him, one he saw through a curtain of red flames. “I’ll take the wrinkles out of him, the cur,” he growled.
“Don’t be an id—”
But he was already storming across the terrace, knocking aside any guests who got in his way—though most of them, seeing him coming, moved out of the way, and quickly.
He marched up to Adderley and punched him in the face.
* * *
“—iot,” Sophy finished.
She swallowed a sigh.
She should have held her tongue. She was supposed to be a maidservant, and menials did not call their betters idiots. Not audibly, at any rate.
But that was the trouble with Longmore. He got in the way of everything, especially clear thinking.
She pushed away the first, emotional reaction and summoned her practical side, the one Cousin Emma had cultivated. A cousin by marriage, Emma was nothing like Sophy’s vagabond parents. Emma was not a charming wastrel like her in-laws. She was a hardheaded, practical Parisian.
Practically speaking, this was a disaster.
Lady Clara was Maison Noirot’s most important customer. She bought their most expensive creations and she bought lavishly, in spite of her mother’s hostility. It was Lord Warford’s man of business who paid the bills, and his orders were to pay promptly and in full, not to make fine distinctions among milliners.
Lord Adderley was bankrupt, or very nearly so, thanks to the gaming tables.
If Lady Clara had to misbehave with somebody, Adderley wasn’t Sophy’s first choice. Of the Upper Ten Thousand, he came in at nine thousand nine hundred fifty six.
Had Longmore been more intelligent, less impetuous, and several degrees less arrogant, she would have counseled him not to go barging in and kill his sister’s lover. Since Lord Longmore qualified in none of those categories, she didn’t waste her breath pointing out that murder would only complicate the situation and leave Lady Clara’s reputation in ruins forever.
He was furious, and he needed to hit somebody, and Adderley deserved to be hit. Sophy was tempted to hit him herself.
This wasn’t the only reason she didn’t close her eyes or turn away.
She’d seen Longmore fight before, and it was a sight to make a woman’s pulse race, if she wasn’t squeamish, which Sophy most certainly wasn’t.
The blow should have dropped Lord Adderley, but he only staggered backward a few steps.
Tougher than he looked, then. Yet all he did was hold his ground. He offered no sign of fighting back. She couldn’t decide whether he was following some obscure gentlemanly code or he held strong opinions about keeping the general shape of his pretty face as it was and all his teeth in his head.
Longmore, meanwhile, was too het up to notice or care whether Lord Adderley meant to defend himself.
Once more he advanced, fists upraised.
“Don’t you dare, Harry!” Lady Clara cried. She pushed in front of her lover to shield him. “Don’t you touch him.”
Then she burst into tears—and very good tears they were. Sophy herself couldn’t have done better, and she was an expert. Crooning over her injured lover—who was on his way to a magnificent black eye, if Sophy was any judge—tears streaming down her perfect face, her creamy, amply-displayed bosom heaving, Lady Clara played her part to perfection.
Her ladyship would awaken, along with their baser urges, the sympathies of all the gentlemen present. The ladies, satisfied to have witnessed the downfall of London’s most beautiful woman, would allow themselves to feel sorry for her. “She might have had a duke,” they’d say. “And now she’ll have to settle for a penniless lord.”
Fashionable London still wasn’t tired of repeating bits of Lady Clara’s speech rejecting the Duke of Clevedon. One of the favorite bits was the concluding remark: Why should I settle for you?
For a moment, Lord Longmore looked as though he’d push his sister out of the way. Then he must have realized it was pointless. He rolled his eyes and sighed, and Sophy watched his big chest rise and fall.
Then he threw up his hands and turned away.
The crowd closed in, blocking Sophy’s view.
No matter. Any minute now, the Marchioness of Warford would get wind of her daughter’s lapse from virtue, and Sophy owed it to the Spectacle to be there when it happened. And at some point, she’d need to look more closely into a disturbing rumor she’d heard in the ladies’ retiring room.
It was going to be a long night.
She turned away to look for a discreet route to the other end of the ballroom. Unlike the men-servants, the maids were expected to remain inconspicuous. They were to keep out of the main entertainment rooms, and travel in the serving passages as much as possible or attend the ladies in the retiring rooms, where they repaired hems and stockings, ran back and forth for shawls and wraps, applied sal volatile to the swooners, and cleaned up after the excessively intoxicated.
She was deciding which of two doorways offered the best eavesdropping vantage point when Longmore stepped into her path.
“You,” he said.
“Me, your lordship?” she said, her tongue curling round the broad Lancashire vowels. She was aware she’d forgotten herself a moment ago and spoken to him as she normally did, but Sophy was nothing if not a brazen liar, like the rest of her family. She looked up at him, her great blue eyes as wide as she could make them, and as innocent of comprehension and intelligence as the cows she prided herself on imitating so well.
“Yes, you,” he said. “I’d know you from a mile away, Miss—”
“Oh, no, your lordship, it’s no miss but only me, Norton. Can I get you something or other?”
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for playacting.”
“You’re going to get me into trouble, sir,” she said. She didn’t add, you great ox. She kept in character, and smiled brightly, opening her eyes wide and hoping he’d read the message there. “No dallying with the guests.”
“How the devil did he do it?” he said. “Why did she do it? Is she mad?”
Sophy scanned the area nearby. The guests were busy spreading the news of Lady Clara’s lapse from virtue. Lord Longmore, apparently, was not so interesting—or, more likely, he was alarming enough to discourage anybody from even looking at him in a way that he might not like. Since he’d made his state of mind perfectly clear to the company, no one owning a modicum of sanity would care to try his temper further at present. Everybody would take the greatest care to see nothing whatsoever of where he went or what he did.
She grabbed his arm. “This way,” she said.
If he’d balked, she would have had as much luck leading his great carcass along as she would a stopped locomotive.
But very likely the last thing he expected was to be hauled about by a slip of a female. Whether bemused or merely amused, he went along tamely enough. She led him into one of the serving passages. Since most of the servants were finding excuses to get near the principals of the scandal, she doubted anybody would wander through for a while.
Still, she looked up and down the passage.
Certain the coast was clear, she let go of his arm. “Now, listen to me,” she said.
He glanced down in a puzzled way at his arm, then at her. “Here’s one positive note. We’ve abandoned the Lancashire cow performance.”
“Have you any idea what would happen to me if I’m found out?” she said.
“What do you care?” he said. “Your sister married a duke.”
“I care, you—you great ox.”
His head went back a degree and his black eyebrows went up. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Yes,” she said between her teeth. “So don’t say anything more. Just listen.”
“Gad, we’re not going to discuss this, are we?”
“Yes, we are, if you want to help your sister.”
His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
“Believe me, I’m no happier about this recent turn of events than you are,” she said. “Have you any idea how bad this is for our business?”
“Your business,” he said.
He spoke quietly, but she knew he wasn’t calm. The violence he held in check vibrated in the atmosphere about him. She understood why people scrambled out of his way when he bore down on somebody or something.
Violence wouldn’t be useful at the moment. She needed to distract him—and for once, the truth would do well enough.
“Adderley is up to his neck in mortgages, and the moneylenders will own his first-, second-, and third-born,” she said. “Leonie can tell you to the farthing how much he’s worth, and if he’s worth a farthing, I’ll be amazed.”
“I know that,” he said. “What I want to know is how my sister ended up on the terrace with him. I know she’s naïve, but I never thought she was stupid.”
“I don’t know how it happened,” Sophy said. “I could have sworn she was only honing her flirting skills on him—on all of them. She’s never shown signs of favoring anybody.”
“You’re sure of this?” he said.
She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It boded trouble for Adderley. Much as she wished Adderley trouble, she couldn’t let Longmore break him into small pieces, as he so clearly wished to.
“I’ve heard he can be very winning,” she said. “And I know she’s been feeling—”
“Oh, good. We’re going to talk about feelings.”
If she’d had a heavy object near to hand, she would have hit him with it. He wouldn’t feel it, but the gesture would make her feel better.
“Yes, we are,” she said. “I’ll spare you all the complicated whys and wherefores and come to the point. Lady Clara is feeling a little rebellious, and I daresay she was waiting for a chance to do something naughty when her mother wasn’t looking. Apparently, Adderley saw his chance and turned a minor naughty into a major one. Apparently.” She frowned. There was something wrong with that scene. But she’d have to work it out later.
The priority was the man standing a few inches from her. He seemed to have stopped breathing fire.
“I’ll have to call him out, the swine,” he said. “Which means going off into some dismal wood at the crack of dawn. It’s the very devil on one’s boots, morning dew, not to mention the fuss Olney makes about gunpowder on my shirt cuffs.”
Sophy grabbed his lapels. “Listen to me,” she said.
He looked down at her hands in the same puzzled way he’d looked at his arm before.
But his lordship was not the world’s deepest thinker, and a great deal could be counted on to puzzle him. She gave his lapels a shake. “Just listen,” she said. “You can’t kill him in cold blood.”
“Whyever not?”
Ye gods grant me patience. “Because he’ll be dead,” she said as patiently as she could, “and Lady Clara’s reputation will be stained forever. Do not, I pray you, do anything, Lord Longmore. Leave this to us.”
“Us.”
“My sisters and me.”
“What do you propose? Dressing him to death? Tying him up and making him listen to fashion descriptions?”
“If necessary,” she said. “But pray, don’t trouble yourself about it.”
He stared at her.
“Whatever you do, do not injure, maim, or kill him,” she said, in case she hadn’t made everything perfectly clear. “The right uppercut was excellent. It expressed magnificently a brother’s outrage—”
“Did it, by Jove. You wouldn’t by any chance be composing your eulogy on my sister’s reputation? The one to appear in tomorrow’s Spectacle?”
“If I don’t do it, someone else will,” she said. “Better the devil you know, my lord. Only let me do what I can—and you go out and be all manly and protective of your womenfolk.”
“Ah.” His black eyes widened theatrically. “So that’s what I’m to do.”
“Yes. Can you manage it?”
“With one hand tied behind my back.”
“I beg you to do it the usual way,” she said. “Don’t show off.”
“Right.” He stood looking at her.
“Yes,” she said. “Time to go. Your mother will be getting the news any minute now if she hasn’t already.” She made a shooing motion.
He only stood, still looking at her in a very concentrated way, and she became aware of a heat and hurry within and a feeling of not being entirely clothed.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Not now.
“You need to go,” she said. She tried to give him a push.
It was like trying to push a brick wall.
She looked up at him.
“That tickles,” he said.
“Go,” she said. “Now.”
He went.
Mere moments earlier, Longmore had been primed for murder.
