Page 11 of The Lady Plays with Fire

And absolutely not a challenge to which she intended to rise.

He turned the book over in his hands, ran a fingertip down its spine, opened to the title page, and gave a hum of surprise. “Mr. Hume, eh? I had thought Mrs. Hayes—and you—more likely to prefer novels.”

Julia bristled. “And why shouldn’t we read history? Or philosophy,” she hastily added. She hadn’t looked at the book before giving it to him, and Mr. Hume had been too prolific for her to assume the nature of the volume Lord Dunstane now held.

“No reason,” he replied, the thread of amusement in his voice undoing whatever attempt at mollification he had intended to make with his words. “But very few young ladies do, or so I’m given to understand.”

As he spoke, he continued to examine the book, and her mind raced.

Please don’t let him thumb through it. Please don’t let him—

Beneath his fingertips, the pages, slightly yellowed with age, fanned open, leaving Julia’s now-mangled sheet of paler foolscap standing up in the center.

“What’s this?” he exclaimed. “Looks like whoever sold the book to Porter’s left a letter behind—”

“Merely a receipt, I’m sure.” She snatched it from between the pages before he could investigate further. “And of course young ladies read history,” she insisted, though in truth, she rarely did. All the battles and masculine posturing, hardly any women. “All the drama, those invented speeches—it’s very little different from a night at the theater.”

His eyebrows lifted. “I could argue—”

Of course he could. He was exactly the sort of person who would take pleasure in picking apart anything and everything others said.

He held out the book, returning it to her. “But I won’t.”

Why did his refusal deflate her? She had neither the time nor inclination to spar with Lord Dunstane. She had come to Porter’s for one purpose, and she certainly did not intend to let a handsome, insufferable, insufferably handsome Scotsman interfere with—

Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the purposeful stride of someone approaching: Lady Stalbridge, with the key to the back room dangling from her left hand.

Lord Dunstane did not appear to notice her. Or, if he did, he had no interest in an introduction. “I’ll wish you a good day, Miss Addison,” he said, with a dip of his head, and before she could reply, the bell above the shop door jangled to signal his departure.

“And who was that?” asked Lady Stalbridge, following him with her gaze—which, when his retreating form had disappeared, she then turned on Julia. No mistaking, in any light, that the countess’s eyes were blue, and sharp enough to see right through a fib.

“Lord Dunstane,” Julia said and paused to draw breath before launching into an explanation of how they had come to be acquainted.

But Lady Stalbridge did not require an explanation. “The Earl of Dunstane?” she echoed, glancing once more toward the window, though he was no longer visible. “The theater patron?”

“P-patron?” Was that Lady Stalbridge’s discreet way of describing a gentleman who flirted with actresses?

“Yes. His name is well known among those seeking support for various productions and playwrights, though the man himself almost never comes to London to see the results. I suppose he has other ways of knowing whether his investment paid off,” she added, with the sort of sly smile that made Julia think her surmise about the actresses wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Which playwrights?” Difficult to imagine whose work would please surly Lord Scottish.

“Most famously—or infamously—a fellow Scot, Ransom Blackadder.”

Julia could not entirely contain her reaction, though she knew Lady Stalbridge was watching her and no doubt thinking of the same thing: Julia’s pointed review of Blackadder’s latest in the Magazine for Misses last spring.

“Speaking of,” she said, though neither of them had expressed their thoughts aloud. Into Lady Stalbridge’s hand, she pressed her review of Othello, the state of which had not been improved by being clutched in Julia’s too-warm palm. “I have to go. Mrs. Hayes will be wondering what became of me.”

Turning, she laid the dull little volume she had no intention of purchasing on the counter. With her fingertips, she pushed it a few inches in the direction of the harried clerk. She would send Daniel, Mrs. Hayes’s errand boy, out later to fetch some horrid novel the whole household would enjoy. Lord Dunstane had left Porter’s empty-handed, and she did not intend to risk being confronted by him in yet another bookshop, particularly not in the midst of making such a frivolous purchase.

Really, it ought not to have come as such a surprise to her, the connection between the ton’s favorite misanthrope and the supposed gentleman so ready to dismiss the intellectual capability of young women, the feelings of a lady’s companion, and the respect due an elderly widow.

Unfortunately, the notion of Lord Dunstane as a patron of the theater did not make him any less intriguing to her.

Or any less attractive.

Chapter 4

Graham’s study in the house in Half Moon Street was a square, modern room, with painted woodwork, papered walls, and upholstered furniture, everything light and bright and as unlike Castle Dunstane as it was possible for a room to be. Two large windows faced the street, framed by blue silk curtains edged with gold fringe. Shepherdesses frolicked across the toile-covered walls.