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“Funny,” Longmore said. “Neither do I.”
“Why don’t I escort the boy out of the square, where she can’t see the little bugger,” said Brute One. “Farley here’ll look after your horses, sir. And you can go on about your business—”
“You ain’t taking me nowhere! I won’t go!” Fenwick kicked his captor.
Brute One cuffed Fenwick’s head, knocking his grimy cap off.
Longmore launched himself at the bully.
A muffled shriek came from the showroom.
Sophy, whose ears had been straining to detect signs of trouble outside, pulled on her cloak and ran out of the dressing room.
Dowdy and Ecrivier ran after her. “But your ladyship, your bodice,” Dowdy said.
Sophy ran to the window, where the seamstress stood, her hand over her mouth.
Sophy was in time to see a burly fellow take a swing at Longmore, who dodged the blow, and hit back hard enough to make the brute stagger.
“I do apologize for Farley and Payton, your ladyship,” Dowdy said. “But it’s that horrid little boy again, making trouble. I’ll send the girl out to—”
Sophy waved her away and looked about for a weapon.
Longmore’s walking stick leaned against a chair nearby. She grabbed it and ran out.
She heard Dowdy call after her.
She raced across the street.
Having knocked down the bigger one, Longmore was starting for the other one. Then Fenwick decided to help, and flung himself at the smaller one, a mad little dervish, all flailing fists and kicking feet.
Ignoring his protests, Sophy dragged the boy out of the fray.
Longmore immediately picked up the thinner fellow and threw him into the fence. He bounded back, and started for Longmore. At the same time, the bigger one pulled himself up off the ground, gave a roar, and started running at Longmore.
Sophy thrust the walking stick in the ruffian’s way. He tripped and went down hard on the pavement.
Longmore grabbed the thin one and threw him into the fence again. This time the ruffian folded into a heap at the bottom of the fence.
“Time to go,” Longmore said.
Sophy climbed into the carriage. Fenwick hesitated.
The brutes were stumbling to their feet.
“You, too, Mad Dick,” Longmore said.
The boy leapt up onto the groom’s place.
Longmore quickly settled the agitated horses, and gave them office to start.
As they drove away, Sophy called out, “Tell your mistress to cancel my order. I don’t care for the people she employs.”
Bedford Square and its adjacent byways, well away from the hubbub of the major shopping streets, were practically deserted. It took Longmore only a moment to get out of the square and into Tottenham Court Road.
The area was quiet enough for him to hear his passengers breathing hard.
Even he was more winded than he ought to be.
But then, the fight had turned out less straightforward than usual.
“Good grief,” Sophy said. “I can’t leave you two alone for a minute.”
“I was bored,” Longmore said. “Didn’t you advise me to pick a fight if I got bored? I was beginning to enjoy myself, too, when you and Mad Dick had to get into it. How the devil am I to have a proper set-to, when I’ve got to look out for a pair of interferers, and make sure I don’t trip over them—or they don’t get killed accidentally?”
That had certainly added interest and excitement to what could have been a mundane mill.
“You can’t think I’d hang about the shop when you’d given me a perfect excuse to make a hasty exit,” she said. “And then another fine excuse to cancel the order for that ugly dress. Really, it couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it.”
“What’re you saying, Miss?” Fenwick piped up from the back. “We went to all this bother, and I nearly got drug to the workhouse—and you didn’t even want a bleedin’ dress?”
“She’s the tricky sort,” Longmore said. “You said so yourself, as I recall.”
The street being less chaotic than those they’d traveled previously, he was able to give her more than a cursory glance. She was completely disheveled, her ugly cap hanging crookedly from one side of her head, her stringy hair falling down in back and clinging stickily to her forehead and cheeks. And her bodice was hanging loose.
“Your clothes are falling off,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She reached under the cloak to refasten her dress. After a moment’s struggle, she muttered under her breath. It sounded like street French.
More audibly she said, “That fool woman missed a hook. I don’t know what she’s done, but I can’t get the wretched thing undone. Fenwick, you’d better unhook it for me.”
“Not on your life,” the boy said. “There’s things I’ll do and things I won’t and getting tangled in females’ personal hooks and buttons and such is where I draw the line.”
“Don’t be so missish,” said Sophy. “You can’t expect Lord Longmore to stop the horses and do me up.”
“Better him than me,” Fenwick said. “I won’t touch them things with a pitchfork.”
“Coward,” Longmore said. The day simply kept getting better and better.
He turned into the nearest side street, and halted the carriage. He sent Fenwick down to hold the horses’ heads. Then he faced Sophy.
“Turn sideways,” he said. “I’m not an acrobat.”
She unfastened the cloak and shrugged it from her shoulders. It slid down to her waist. Then she turned and lifted her hair out of the way. She bent her head.
And he became aware of the air changing, humming with tension.
Her neck lay bare before him. Smooth, perfectly creamy skin, and a trace of golden down where the hairline tapered off.
He could almost taste her skin. His head bent, and all he could think of was licking the back of her neck the way a cat licked cream.
“You were brilliant in the shop, by the way,” she said.
“You told me to be myself,” he said, his voice thick. He could smell her skin, tinged with lavender and … pine?
He could barely focus on the hooks. He stared at her soft neck.
“I think it’s somewhere in the middle,” she said.
“What is?”
“The hook she fastened to the wrong bar. It’s a stitched bar, you see? Not a metal eye.”
He hauled his attention to the dress. The fabric was bunched up near the middle of her back. Above the place where the dress was crookedly fastened, a small gap had opened. He could see a bit of undergarment. Fine muslin. Embroidered. With tiny flowers.
He swallowed a groan.
“You got right into the spirit of the thing,” she said. “You were brilliant.”
He cleared his throat. “I was being myself.”
He told himself not to rush his fences.
He wasn’t easy to persuade. Resisting temptation had never made any sense to him. But there was nothing to be gained by giving in now, in a public byway. Even a dolt like the Earl of Longmore could understand that.
Do the job and be done with it, he told himself.
Certainly it was no onerous task. He was used to doing and undoing women’s clothing. He’d done it wearing gloves, more than once. He’d done it in the dark. He’d done it at speeds that might be records for the Northern Hemisphere, while the female hissed, “Hurry, for heaven’s sake—he’s coming!”
He set to work.
It should have taken seconds. But there was some sort of tangle, and he was fumbling, and getting nowhere. His fingers felt like sausages. No matter how he tried to get at the hook, he failed, and with each failure his temperature climbed another degree.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“These hooks,” he said. “They’re the very devil.”
“That fool must have bent them,” she said. “They ought to be easy to manage. We haven’t a retinue of servants, and one can’t always count on having a sister on hand. One needs to be able to dress without help, if necessary.”
“You must be deuced flexible,” he said.
Wrong thing to say.
She went quiet and his mind started painting pictures. Just in case he wasn’t heated enough already.
He wasn’t used to behaving himself for long stretches. And she was … flexible … and his mind wouldn’t let go of the idea. And she smelled like a woman and lavender and greenery. And he could see a bit of her underthings.
His head was going to explode.
“Lord Longmore?” she said.
He gathered what was left of his wits. “The hook is either mangled or tangled,” he said. “I can’t see what the problem is.” Because he was going crosseyed, from the scent and the warmth of her body and the consciousness of his hands and how he needed to keep them at their job.
His pulse was racing, sending heat flooding downward.
Christ.
“She caught it in the seam stitching, probably,” she said. “She was in a fearful hurry. Couldn’t wait to be done with me. I’m surprised she didn’t leave it to the Frenchwoman. Ecrivier. You saw what that was all about, I don’t doubt.”
“I should have made the boy do this,” he said. “His hands are smaller.”
“Go ahead and pull, and don’t worry about breaking the thread,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky. “We can easily mend it. Or better yet, leave it. All you need to do is fasten enough to keep the bodice in place.”
“It’s only one confounded hook,” he said. “I’m not surrendering to a bit of metal—especially not with Mad Dick looking on, composing Cockney mockery.”
He squared his shoulders.
He peeled off his gloves.
This time, when he touched the back of her dress, she shivered.
His palms were sweating.
He bent closer, squinting. He found the bit of thread the hook was tangled with. He pulled it free.
He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
He heard her suck in air.
Well, then.
She’d noticed.
And not in the way of noticing a fly landing on her skin, or a dog thrusting his nose into her hand but in that special feminine noticing way.
The siege machinery had advanced.
At great sacrifice. But still.
He cheerfully did up the other hooks and buttons, pulled the cloak up over her shoulders, and turned away to pull on his gloves.
He’d fought a terrific battle with himself, with his very nature, and he’d emerged victorious.
He’d advanced.
“You can come back, you little coward,” he said to Fenwick. “She’s decent again.”
Lord Longmore drove back to St. James’s Street at death-defying speed.
