Page 6 of The Lady Plays with Fire

Unaccountably, her reprimand made a laugh rise in his chest. Surely a reaction to the absurdity of his predicament.

She had shushed him! This . . . this girl, really—she couldn’t be more than twenty—whose lot in life no doubt meant her experience with the theater was that of an occasional sweetmeat, a luxury doled out in dribs and drabs by her crotchety aunt. That would explain her despair when it had seemed the outing would be denied. Her single-minded focus on the stage. Her . . . enthusiasm.

The word sent a shiver of distaste through him. He could not remember the last time he had been so enthusiastic about anything.

And perhaps that was part of the problem. Perhaps that was why he was finding it all too difficult to ignore Miss Addison’s intrusion into his box, his view, his thoughts. If he let himself, he could still recall the softness of her skin, the scant half inch between the top of her kid glove and the hem of her sleeve, where he had touched her.

Good God. He shook off the tingle of memory with a flick of his fingers and tucked that hand against his ribs as he folded his arms across his chest. Evidently, he needed to work off a bit of, er, enthusiasm himself.

The remote situation of Castle Dunstane, combined with the sparse population of the Highlands generally, meant that female companionship could be difficult to come by.

And what an outrageous euphemism that was. As if he required companionship from anyone, especially a woman.

But he was still a man, with a man’s needs.

Fortunately, London was an excellent place to slake them. He’d simply waited too long to visit the metropolis and then let himself be diverted by the first tolerably pretty young woman to fall beneath his gaze.

Now, however, he was well-positioned to find a more suitable object of attention. If he sat up a bit straighter and leaned away from Miss Addison, rather than toward her, he could see the stage well enough.

Well enough, for example, to recognize the charms of the actress playing Emilia. When the performance was over, he would go to the green room and introduce himself. She would know why he had sought her out, and when he offered to take her to supper, she would not refuse—unless she had a protector already. But perhaps not even then. Infrequent though his forays into Town might be, Graham still had a certain reputation as a . . . well, call it a patron of the arts.

In a few hours, he would have forgotten all about the thin, silky skin of Miss Addison’s wrist, against which her pulse had thrummed so insistently, making him all too aware that he was the cause of its precipitate rhythm. He would forget about the length of her hair, or the turn of her throat. About the saucy tilt to her nose.

She would be—was—nothing to him, the merest nobody, her presence a minor inconvenience of the sort one ought to expect when one was foolhardy enough to venture amongst people again.

Furrowing his brow, he focused all his attention on the stage. Emilia was even more beautiful than he had first realized, with perfectly symmetrical features and gleaming golden hair.

Not, however, a particularly good actress. Her gestures lacked subtlety. And more time ought to have been spent sanding the sharpest edges from her voice before giving her a speaking role. She hailed, quite obviously, from Plymouth—somewhere very near the docks.

Time was when he would have been delighted by the girl’s performance. Lord, how particular he had grown—a consequence he supposed, of having learned to school the contours of his own speech. Just as well that Miss Addison was not privy to his thoughts. She would think worse of him than she already must—not that he cared one jot for her good opinion.

A murmur of annoyance must have passed his lips. Or else the grinding of his teeth had been audible. Miss Addison twisted her head over her shoulder to fix him with a look of mild irritation that slid almost imperceptibly into concern. Or perhaps alarm. He was probably scowling, the expression common enough with him that he was not always aware of doing it. And given their relative positions, it must look for all the world as if he were scowling at her.

Which, in a way, he was.

“Are you well, my lord?” she mouthed. Despite her evident apprehension, the excitement of the evening—or at least, the light of the chandelier—twinkled in her blue eyes.

“Perfectly,” he replied with a brusque nod.

But the word itself was drowned out by the sudden clamor of applause as the curtain fell, and her gaze snapped back to the stage without seeming to notice his dismissive gesture, as if she were startled to discover the performance was at intermission.

The noise made her aunt jerk a little in her seat. He wondered whether she had been dozing—an understandable response to the uninspiring performance, in his opinion. Miss Addison, he noted, did not clap.

Perhaps they were better judges of the theater than he had given them credit for being.

Below, the rustle of the crowd rose to a dull roar as people began to look about themselves and converse with acquaintances across the aisle or a few rows away. Some got to their feet and began to mill about. Others lifted their faces to study the occupants of the boxes, to see which scions of society could be spotted, and with whom.

Graham wished, not for the first time, that he had taken a seat at the back of the box. Though even there, he would hardly have been unobservable. Particularly not to Miss Addison, who had once more turned toward him, her expression now almost expectant.

“Well, my lord? I take it you were displeased by the performance so far.” Again, that mischievous blue sparkle—not merely an effect of the light, then. The chandelier was behind her. “Either that, or our intrusion on your box has soured your enjoyment of the evening.”

May not both things be true?

It was precisely the sort of quelling retort he would ordinarily make—although there was nothing ordinary about the present situation. But for the first time in many, many years, he did not speak the taunting words that rose effortlessly to his lips. He did not have to.

Miss Addison did it for him.

“Both,” she supplied in a slightly deeper voice, a vaguely Northern accent. Mocking him.