Page 17 of The Lady Plays with Fire

At that moment, an unhitched delivery cart rolled into the roadway, a grizzled man with an eye patch chasing after it. Graham’s horses started and shied, demanding all his attention and preempting his answering laugh.

By the time he had matters under control and the obstruction had been cleared, the moment for a clever retort was long past. Uncertain how to pick up the dropped thread of their conversation—banter, the playwright in him wanted to call it—he opted instead for comfortable silence for the remainder of the journey.

But when the curricle at last rolled to a stop in front of Porter’s, he discovered the sense of comfortableness had been his alone.

Julia hurried down, refusing to await his assistance. “No need, my lord,” she insisted, her feet already on the ground. From the pavement, she looked up at him, her color still high, though now he saw that the bright spots in her cheeks hinted at embarrassment. “I’ve clearly delayed you long enough. I thank you for—” She paused, then laughed again, and this time he heard a certain wryness in it. Perhaps there had been no banter between them after all. “I was about to thank you for your kindness, but I have a notion you would protest if I did.”

“Protest your thanks?”

“No.” Her eyes met his again. They still sparked, but with something other than merriment. “Being thought kind.”

If she meant to tease him again, this time the remark was just barbed enough to sting.

He nodded once and touched the brim of his hat. “Take care, Miss Addison.” The habitual gruffness of his voice transformed those words of leave-taking into a warning.

Not that she required one. She had the right of things already. He wasn’t kind . . . even if he had been on the point of offering to wait while she made her purchase and then drive her home.

She dipped her head in acknowledgment and turned to go into the bookshop, wiggling her fingers in greeting to another young lady headed in the same direction. Her other hand was still clamped around the theater ticket, he noted.

He had forgotten all about Covent Garden.

As she reached the door, Graham shook the reins, unwilling to wait and see whether she glanced over her shoulder at him.

He should be thinking about how to transform George Fanshawe into a more worthy adversary for Perpetua Philpot’s poison pen. How, in other words, to ensure Ransom Blackadder’s triumph.

Julia Addison was no concern of his.

And he would remind himself of that fact as many times as necessary, until it stuck in his brain—or wherever the lesson most needed to be learned.

Chapter 6

Julia reached the door to Porter’s at the same time as Miss Theodosia Nelson, a West Indian heiress whose fashionable bonnet trimmed with yellow ribbon perfectly set off her brown skin and eyes. She wrote the magazine’s news columns, foreign and domestic, which provided young ladies with the latest information about politics and the war with France, topics that supposedly lay far outside their interest.

As if the state of the world, the risks being taken by fathers and brothers and lovers, concerned them not at all.

Theodosia reached for Julia’s hand to squeeze it in greeting, but stopped short when she discovered her clenched fist. “What’s that?” she asked, a curious tilt to her head. “In your hand?”

“Oh.” Julia uncurled her fingers to reveal the circle of ivory. “The ticket to Mrs. Hayes’s box. She sent me to fetch it.”

“And was that—?” Theo looked past Julia with narrowed eyes, prompting her to turn.

The curricle was already spinning away, twinkling like a gem in the sunshine. A gaudy gem, she tried to convince herself, but the sour words left behind a bitter tang. In truth, she’d never seen anything quite so splendid.

A pity it belonged to such an unpleasant, humorless man.

“Lord Dunstane is a friend of Mrs. Hayes,” she replied, at last dropping the ticket into her reticule—what a goose she had been, carrying it about in her hand, like something she couldn’t bear to part with.

Theodosia sent her a speculative glance but said nothing.

Inside the shop, Julia and Theo parted ways, as Lady Stalbridge had advised. A gaggle of young ladies descending all at once on the back room might have attracted undue attention, though from whom wasn’t entirely clear. As always, the bookshop was almost empty. The same clerk stood behind the counter, the one who had refused to help Julia out of her predicament a fortnight earlier, still shuffling through what she suspected might be the same set of receipts. Even he did not look up when the bell above the door jangled to announce their arrival.

Theo strode past a wall of bookshelves and gave a passing glance to a few volumes of sermons before disappearing. Julia stayed longer, looking at row upon row of history, a good deal of it in languages she couldn’t read, about wars long past and kings whose triumphs had dwindled into dusty myth.

Still, she was absorbed enough that when Lady Stalbridge spoke low in her ear, she started.

“Did I see you arrive in Lord Dunstane’s company?”

She was standing shoulder to shoulder with Julia in the narrow aisle between two rows of towering shelves, though Lady Stalbridge had positioned herself facing opposite, toward the mathematics section.