Page 54 of Love and the Shameless Lady

“I mean it.” He wouldn’t be stuck tattling on earnest citizens who merely wanted change, if he weren’t so damned respectable, so proper and unassuming that no one would suspect him of being a spy. “We’re rigidly polite and deadly boring.”

Daisy’s brows drew together. “I loathe that word.”

“Which?”

“Boring. I don’t think anyone should ever be called boring.”

This outburst surprised him, seeing as he couldn’t imagine anyone telling Daisy she was boring, and yet, that reaction was definitely a personal one.

“One person’s tedium is another’s excitement,” Melinda, ever the peacemaker, said. “But I agree, it’s horrid to call someone boring to his or her face.”

Daisy nodded, picking moodily at a morsel of chicken on her plate. Who had called her boring? Julian wondered.

Miles picked up the story. “My deplorable scandal hit just before Gloriana’s first season. She has never forgiven me. She’s convinced that if I’d behaved respectably, she would be a duchess by now, never mind the fact that there were no available dukes when she went on the market.”

“My scandal happened not long after yours, making our family reputation even worse,” Daisy said. “I can’t help but hold myself at least partly to blame.”

“Not at all,” Lord Garrison said. “She has plenty of suitors, some of them decent men, but this is her first peer.”

“And she’ll be miserable with him.” Melinda sighed. “Fortunately, we encountered the Marquis de Bellechasse in York not long ago, quite fortuitously, as he was just passing through. He heard me lamenting and invited himself along, as leaven, he said. And you two will make it a much livelier gathering.”

“Not a good kind of liveliness, I’m afraid,” Daisy said. “I wish I could leave.”

“Nonsense, we’ll enjoy ourselves in spite of Lord Hythwick,” Melinda said. “The marquis will make a charming guest.”

“I know him well,” Julian said, hoping this was true.

Finally they all retired to the drawing room, Lord Garrison bringing the port along with him. A footman brought the tea tray and left, closing the door behind them.

At last, they could discuss what really mattered.

“Melinda,” Daisy said, “can you think of anyone else in society whose story parallels the ones I wrote?”

Julian refrained from rolling his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since you told me,” Melinda said, “but there’s no one.” She passed a dish of tea to Daisy. “It’s far too preposterous a story, and there can’t have been two young ladies abducted by smugglers twenty years ago.”

“Then why would someone want to kill me?”

“I believe we should turn our attention to other aspects of your novels,” Julian said.

“Such as what?” Daisy nipped a lump of sugar and stirred it into her tea.

“Smuggling, for one,” he said.

“None of the smugglers I know would seek to murder me!”

“Perhaps you revealed some of their secrets,” he suggested. “Perhaps they feared you would reveal more.” He accepted a dish of tea with a word of thanks.

“I don’t know any of their secrets. As I told you before, any tricks I mentioned, such as common signals and hiding the brandy in tombs, are known to everyone thereabouts, including the revenuers, and if I mentioned different ones in the second book, they, too, were well known.”

“And now they are known to a great number of readers,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter, because the smugglers think of new ideas all the time to avoid being caught.”

“Nevertheless,” Miles said, “Sir Julian is right. One or more smugglers might have cause to wish you out of the way, and if I understand correctly, the house was full of smugglers the night you were attacked.”

“Drunken smugglers, most of whom went home. A few slept on the settles in the coffee room.”