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So he told himself.
Yet he stood for a moment, collecting his mind and his poise, and trying to ignore the shakiness within, as though he’d run to the edge of a precipice and stopped only inches short of stepping into midair.
But of course there was no precipice, no void to fall into. That was absurd. She was merely a woman, the tempestuous type, and he was a trifle . . . puzzled . . . because it had been a while since he’d encountered her kind.
He went the other way, to find his friends—or the bodies of the fallen, rather. While he arranged for their transport to their respective lodgings and domiciles, he was aware, in a corner of his mind, of a derisive voice pointing out that he had nothing more important to do at present than collect and sort a lot of dead-drunk aristocrats.
Later, though, when he was alone in his hotel and starting a letter to Clara because he couldn’t sleep, he found he couldn’t write. He could scarcely remember the performance. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d sat in the theater, anticipating his next encounter with Madame Noirot. His notes about the performance became gibberish swimming before his eyes.
The only clear, focused thought he had was of Madame de Chirac’s ball looming mere hours away, and the fool’s bargain he’d made, and the impossible riddle he’d insisted on solving: how to get the accursed dressmaker in without sacrificing his dignity, vanity, or reputation.
When Marcelline returned to her hotel, she found Selina Jeffreys drowsing in a chair by the fire. Though the slender blonde was their youngest seamstress, recently brought in from a charitable establishment for “unfortunate females,” she was the most sensible of the lot. That was why Marcelline had chosen her to play lady’s maid on the journey. A woman traveling with a maid was treated more respectfully than one traveling alone.
Frances Pritchett, the senior of their seamstresses, was probably still sulking about being left behind. But she’d come last time, and she hadn’t taken at all to playing lady’s maid. She wouldn’t have sat up waiting for her employer to return, unless it was to complain about the French in general and the hotel staff in particular.
Jeffreys awoke with a start when Marcelline lightly tapped her shoulder. “You silly girl,” Marcelline said. “I told you not to wait up.”
“But who will help you out of your dress, madame?”
“I could sleep in it,” Marcelline said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Oh, no, madame! That beautiful dress!”
“Not so beautiful now,” Marcelline said. “Not only wrinkled, but it smells of cigar smoke and other people’s perfumes and colognes.”
“Let’s get it off, then. You must be so weary. The promenade—and then to be out all night.”
She had accompanied Marcelline on the Longchamp promenade and obligingly faded out of sight when Marcelline gave the signal. Unlike Pritchett, Selina Jeffreys never minded in the least making herself inconspicuous. She’d been happy simply to drink in the sight of so many rich people wearing fine clothes, riding their beautiful horses or driving their elegant carriages.
“One must go where the aristocrats go,” Marcelline said.
“I don’t know how they do it, night after night.”
“They’re not obliged to be at work at nine o’clock every morning.”
The girl laughed. “That’s true enough.”
While she was quick, it was efficiency rather than hurry. In a trice she had Marcelline out of the red dress. She soon had hot water ready, too. A full bath would have to wait until after she’d slept—later in the day, when the hotel’s staff were fully awake. Meanwhile Marcelline needed to scrub away the smell of the gambling houses. That was easy enough.
The taste and smell of one gentleman wouldn’t be eradicated so easily. She could wash her face and clean her teeth but her body and mind remembered: Clevedon’s surprise, his quick heat, the bold response of his mouth and tongue, and the thrumming need he’d awakened with the simple motion of his hand sliding down her back.
Kissing him had not been the wisest move a woman could make, but really, what was the alternative? Slap him? A cliché. Punch him? That hard body? That stubborn jaw? She’d only hurt her hand—and make him laugh.
She doubted he was laughing now.
He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.
She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.
It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcelline instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.
But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. Whatever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.
“Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect.”
And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.
Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess of Clevedon from Dowdy’s.
Clevedon had complicated what ought to have been a straightforward business. On her own, getting in would have merely demanded expert camouflage, evasive maneuvers, and, of course, thorough self-assurance. But no matter. Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.
Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever, returned to the same place. It didn’t stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.
Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.
All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.
Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.
That night
It would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp, she’d said, as though he was her lackey.
But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.
He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.
Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He w
as, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.
She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.
And why should she consider anything else? It wasn’t her friends who’d be whispering behind her back and shaking their heads in pity.
He could easily imagine what his friends would whisper: Cupid’s arrow had at last struck the Duke of Clevedon—and not on account of Paris’s greatest beauty, not on account of its most irresistible courtesan, not on account of its most fashionable, sought-after titled lady.
No, it was a nobody of an English shopkeeper who’d slain his grace.
He silently cursed his friends and his own stupidity, stepped down from the carriage, and strolled to her table.
As he approached, her dark glance slanted his way. She said something to the talkative fellow. He nodded at her and, without taking any notice of Clevedon, bowed and went into the hotel.
When Clevedon came to the table, she looked up at him. To his very great surprise, she smiled: a warm, luscious upturn of the mouth that had nearly brought him to his knees.
But he was not slain, not by half.
“You’re prompt,” she said.
“I never keep a lady waiting,” he said.
“But I’m not a lady,” she said.
“Are you not? Well, then, you’re a conundrum. Are you ready? Or would you prefer a glass of something first, to fortify yourself for the ordeal?”
“I’m as fortified as I need to be,” she said. She rose and made a sweeping arc with her hand, drawing his attention to her attire.
He supposed a woman would have a name for it. To him it was a dress. He knew that the sleeves would have their own special name—à la Taglioni or à la Clotilde or some equally nonsensical epithet, comprehensible only to women. Their dresses were all the same to him: swelling in the sleeves, billowing out in the skirts, and tight in the middle. It was the style women had been wearing throughout his adulthood.
