Page 11 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

Her hand fell away and something like fear fluttered into her eyes. She was studying him as she had earlier that day—or yesterday—when they had stood facing one another in the entry hall.

Langley was unaccustomed to being the object of scrutiny.

And having lost his spectacles in the fracas, he could not return the favor as fully as he would’ve liked. Though they stood closer together now than they had then, she was still a bit blurry around the edges. The combination of lamplight and moonlight was insufficient to put a firm name to the color of her eyes or her hair—brown wouldn’t do, in either case—and the dressing gown hid everything else of interest from view. Still, he knew beyond a doubt that she was pretty.

“But of course I do. You’re—” she began and broke off again, backing a step away in her uncertainty. “Are you hurt, sir?” she asked abruptly. It could not have been clearer to him that the question she really wished to ask was, Do you mean to hurt me?

To both questions, spoken and unspoken, he swiftly answered, “No.”

Nevertheless, she withdrew another step, and another, out of the reach of his vision, out of his reach, until—

Crunch.

“Oh dear. What have I—?”

“I believe, Lady Kingston,” he said calmly, “you’ll find those are my spectacles under your foot.”

“Your spectacles? But you don’t—that is to say, earlier you weren’t wearing—” As she spoke, she crouched, her eyes never leaving his face as her fingers brushed across the flagstone path near her feet until she found what he’d known she would. Her voice dropped as she finished her sentence: “—spectacles.”

When she rose, their twisted remains lay on her palm, but she did not stretch out her hand to given them to him. Neither did he step forward to take them from her, having no desire to find out what might happen if he took her by surprise her a second time.

“I’ll pay for their repair,” she offered.

“That won’t be necessary. If you’ll just—”

At last he thrust out his hand, but she shook her head and her other hand joined the first in wringing what life was left from his mangled spectacles. The moonlight made a sort of halo of her loosely arranged hair. “I can guess why you’re here. But I—I haven’t got it.”

For a moment, he wondered whether the blow to the back of the head had indeed knocked him senseless. He hadn’t the faintest notion what she meant, and it was only after the passage of an awkward silence that he recalled why he’d come to Bartlett House to begin with. His heart began to pound with such fury he felt certain she must be able to hear it hammering against his ribs.

“The book, do you mean? You haven’t got the book?”

Her teeth, small and pearly white, came out to gnaw at her lower lip, and she first nodded, then shook her head. “You see, I sat down earlier this evening to send you a note about it, but I really couldn’t figure out from your card, Mr.—Rook, is it? Or—or perhaps Crow? I’m really not very good with birds… If it had been a bee, then maybe—the boys are doing a project on bees, you know. Well, no, of course you don’t know. Anyway, it seemed awfully rude to address you by the wrong name, so I—”

“It’s none of those, your ladyship,” he spoke across her. “The bird on my card, that is.” Unbelievably, he found himself fighting down a laugh. Had he gone stark raving mad? Or had she? “It’s a magpie. A sort of…nickname, if you will.”

Her answering giggle did nothing to reassure him about the state of his mind—or hers. “A magpie, you say?” She seemed to have decided to carry on as if this were an ordinary conversation. “I suppose I should have guessed it eventually. Although…those are the birds attracted to anything shiny, aren’t they? Whereas you seem rather…”

Rather what?

She reminded him of a bird herself, chattering nervously, pecking aimlessly at the twigs of words and phrases but never quite weaving them in a whole thought. Rocking forward with an uneasy step, she held out his spectacles, and he took them, curling his fingers around the ruined frames. The metal was still warm from her hand, and he would have been tempted to tighten his grip to capture that sensation if not for the prickle of broken glass. “Well, as you yourself said, I really don’t know who you are.” She rocked back, knotting the fingers of her empty hands. A pause, heavier and more serious than any that had preceded it. “Who are you?”

He narrowed his gaze, just enough to bring her features into sharper focus. “If I answer that question, Lady Kingston, how can you be sure I’m telling the truth?”

As she swallowed, a bit of white fabric at the base of her throat—her nightdress, he supposed, otherwise hidden beneath the heavy brocade dressing gown—slipped in and out of view. He wondered what had kept her from sleep. The book? Or something else? “Well, I—I suppose I can’t.” Once more, she looked him up and down. “But I suspect you aren’t a shop clerk.”

That earned her a slight, and slightly wry, smile. “Well spotted, Lady Kingston. I am not a shop clerk. But you are better off without that book here, anywhere near you or your sons.”

Her brow furrowed. “My…sons? But it’s just a—a—I think I should warn you that Mrs. Trout, our cook, tried to make a few of the recipes from it, and she said the proportions were all wrong. You said it was priceless, but I don’t understand how a cookbook with bad recipes can be—oh.” In the pause, a slight breeze stirred the scents of the flowers, and her frown deepened. “It’s not a cookbook, is it?”

For years he had trained, practicing the best ways to interact with innocent civilians and learning how to withstand expert interrogation. Nothing had prepared him for this conversation. Lady Kingston was the most unexpected combination of scatter-brained and sharp-witted he’d ever met. He’d already given her his codename. Now he hardly knew whether it was right or wrong to tell her, “No.”

“I…see. Well, Lord Dulsworthy took it,” she explained after a moment. “He said he would return it to Porter’s on his way home.”

Langley knew if it had arrived at the bookshop this evening, he would have heard the news already. Lady Kingston too seemed to understand that his presence in her garden in the wee hours of the night meant that good old Duls. hadn’t kept his promise.

“No doubt he’ll see it delivered there in the morning,” Langley tried to reassure her, feeling anything but reassured himself. Had Dulsworthy entrusted the return of the book to someone else? Or had he kept it for some reason? If he had, what next?

Lady Kingston seemed to read his thoughts. “And if he doesn’t?”