Page 40 of The Lady Plays with Fire

“Come back Monday,” he said. “Same time. See what Blackadder makes of your changes.”

Her eyes flared, an ocean of vivid color in which a man would willingly drown. “Truly? Do you think he might approve of my suggestions?” Then she snagged her lower lip in her teeth and tilted her head. “But I suppose I ought to ask what such an indulgence will cost.”

Reaching behind her, he snatched up both the scrap of paper on which he’d made his corrections and the page on which she’d written hers. The light scent of her soap, her skin, caught him off guard. No actress of his acquaintance had ever smelled so sweet and fresh, like the Highlands on the first truly warm spring day.

His heartbeat pounded in his head, his chest, his cock. Good God, but he was a fool. How could he hope to work in close proximity with her without revealing his secret?

“More than you can afford.”

The words slipped out, half whisper, half growl, spoken more to himself than in answer to her question.

Then he strode offstage and into the shadows.

Chapter 13

Julia listened to his booted tread thump across the stage and down the steep, narrow steps. A moment later she heard the opening and closing of some nearer door she had not previously noticed. When she gathered the courage to turn and look behind her, he was gone.

Quickly she shuffled through the remaining papers on the desktop, some blank, some marked with lines and flourishes that would look, from a distance, like handwriting. At the very bottom of the stack lay Mrs. Cole’s script.

The script whose dog-eared pages contained the fate of Perpetua Philpot—which was to say, Ransom Blackadder’s plans to ruin Miss on Scene and the Magazine for Misses.

Knowing that someone might return at any moment, Julia picked up the script, hid it in the crook of her arm, and hurried away from the theater. Only when she was safely ensconced in a hackney cab, summoned for her by one of the urchins who hung about Covent Garden, did she allow herself to page absently through the script as she contemplated the enormity of what had transpired that afternoon.

She had not just witnessed but participated in a rehearsal for The Poison Pen!

She had come only with the intention of watching, gathering information about the play, the actors, anything that might be useful in preparing a defense against the aspersions Blackadder intended to cast on Miss on Scene and the magazine.

Certainly, she had never imagined taking the stage at the Theatre Royal herself. Still less had she contemplated the possibility of speaking lines of her own invention and earning a measure of praise for them. A part of her knew she ought never to have allowed herself to get swept up in the moment. But she had longed to try her hand at acting for so long, how could she possibly have said no?

Now she had an invitation to return to the next rehearsal, not merely to observe, but to contribute. She had in her hands not just Blackadder’s damning words, but also the power to change them.

And it seemed Lord Dunstane did not intend to demand anything from her in return.

How foolish it would be of her to feel anything like disappointment at such an outcome.

She recalled that moment, as his fingertips caressed her face, when she had felt far from sure about how things would end. No one who knew the man behaved as if he were above debauching a clergyman’s naïve daughter. Mrs. Cole had warned her. Mr. Sawyer had all but called Dunstane a rake.

She ought to be grateful for his restraint, rather than annoyed at his presumption in making the choice for her.

In the end, she had come away from today’s rehearsal with far more than she could have hoped—even if she wasn’t precisely satisfied, as he had promised.

Beneath her trembling fingers, the paper wrinkled and nearly tore.

“Drat these cobbled streets!” she exclaimed to no one in particular, ready to blame her agitation on the condition of the roadway, the careless cabbie, or the lack of carriage springs.

Anything to avoid confronting its true source: her ill-advised attraction to a certain Scottish nobleman.

She renewed her attention on the page in front of her. She had read plays before. Her father’s library, though modest, had contained all of Shakespeare, and not the schoolboy versions with all the scandal scrubbed away and the tragic endings made happy. But she had never seen an actor’s script, which was, she soon discovered, incomplete. Mrs. Cole’s copy contained just Perpetua Philpot’s part, with half lines from the other roles provided as cues. Here and there, Mrs. Cole or someone had penciled in a few words, a stage direction or some indication of the tone with which a line was to be spoken.

Julia wondered whether this was the ordinary state of things, or whether it was an attempt by the playwright to control the dissemination of his work, by ensuring that none of the actors knew the whole of the play. Only Lord Dunstane seemed to be privy to all the details.

It would require more work than she had expected to sort out Blackadder’s plot from such sketchy information—to say nothing of determining how best to foil it.

The words leaped as the coach jounced and jerked along, making the text doubly difficult to decipher. Eventually she closed the script and her eyes. But no sooner had she done so than her mind was flooded by memories of her strange afternoon: Mr. Sawyer’s puckish grin of encouragement, the creak of the boards beneath her feet, the unexpected warmth in Lord Dunstane’s light eyes.

Why had she told him about that day on the village green more than a dozen years ago? She had kept that foolish dream tucked away like a flower pressed between the pages of a book no one ever read. After all this time, it should have been brittle and faded. Instead, it had retained its freshness, its alluring scent.

She knew better than to fall under its otherworldly spell.