Page 2 of A Scandal at Stonecliffe

He sketched a little bow to her. “Do say you will take a turn around the room with me, Mrs. Billingham, and tell me what misfortune claimed poor Hubert.”

“Yes, that will be a great comfort to me,” Verity replied, taking the arm he offered. “Gentlemen. If you will excuse us.”

Nathan nodded to the others and started away, bending his head a little toward Verity in what he hoped looked like sympathy. “What the devil are you doing here? Pretending to be...whatever it is you’re pretending to be.”

“A widow,” Verity supplied. “A wealthy widow, which is why you saw all the men hovering about like bees.”

“I daresay that’s not the only reason.” He cast his gaze down at the neckline of her dress, which skimmed across the top of her full breasts. “That’s scarcely what I’d call mourning.”

She hid her laugh behind her widespread fan. “That’s because poor dear Hubert died over a year ago.”

“And your hair is red.” What a perfectly ridiculous thing to say. As if that had anything to do with anything, Nathan admonished himself. It was just that she looked so different with her hair that rich dark auburn instead of the dull brown that he’d seen before.

“Yes, it is.” Her voice brimmed with amusement.

“Is that the real color? Do you even know the real color?”

“Honestly, Nathan, you sound as if the color of my hair offends you.”

“No. Of course not.” He wasn’t about to tell her how far from offended he was by the sight of her hair. “It’s just...one never knows what’s real with you and what is not.”

“Well, my hair is red, and I cannot disguise the color of my eyes, so you see me as I am. Except for the jewels, of course.” She touched the diamond studs in her ears. “They are as false as my name.”

“Verity.” Nathan sighed. “You are going to get yourself in trouble. What are you doing?”

“My job.”

“Don’t tell me you’re spying again.”

“Don’t be daft. I have been hired to find some jewels.”

“You’re stealing?”

“You would jump to that thought first, wouldn’t you? I don’t know why you have such a terrible image of me.”

“You don’t know why!” His voice rose on the words, and two of the guests turned their heads toward him. He lowered his voice, though it lost none of its indignation. “You wormed your way into Lady Lockwood’s house by pretending to be a maid—from Yorkshire, no less.”

“I don’t know what’s so terrible about Yorkshire.”

“It’s not Yorkshire, it’s you—with your costumes and accents and pretenses. You pulled all of us into a bizarre scheme to recover some document because, oh, yes, it turns out you’re actually a spy.”

“I was a spy,” she corrected him. “Not anymore.”

“No?” He remembered too clearly getting shipped off to Stonecliffe with Verity as part of a plot to keep Annabeth safe. “Then why did I endure a week of escorting you around the garden while you pretended to be Annabeth, all the while criticizing my acting?”

“Well, you must admit you weren’t saying anything very lover-like.”

“As if some chap up in a tree peering at us through opera glasses could tell what I was saying to you!”

“To be fair, I never claimed there were men in trees with opera glasses. That would be quite silly. A spyglass would be much more practical for the purposes.”

Nathan hissed. “Which made the fact that you were pretending to be Annabeth even more unnecessary. Now you pop up in the midst of the ton as a ‘widow from Russia.’ And you wonder why I think you’re up to something illegal?”

“I’m not from Russia. I never mastered that accent, and I can’t speak a word of the language. I’ve been living in Russia the past few years with Hubert, which was rather foolish of him given, you know, his condition.”

“No, I don’t know,” Nathan responded. “Who in Hades is Hubert? And what was his ‘condition’? I ought to know, seeing as how I was such good friends with him.”

“Hubert was my poor departed husband, who died of consumption.”