Page 47

He shifted his position to block Jane’s view of the curtains, and she felt herself stiffen. She did not ask him what he was doing there. His obvious familiarity with the place and the girl spoke for themselves.

Hazelwood turned to the girl. “Miss Kirby, forgive me. I didn’t realize you had a customer.”

“It’s no trouble, Lord Hazelwood. Leave the waistcoat with me. You’ll have it as soon as I attend to the lady.”

Jane gritted her teeth. She did not miss Miranda Kirby’s signal. The girl was letting Jane know that Hazelwood belonged to her. It occurred to Jane that he might live there, above the shop, or in some apartment in the rear of the building. He might live where the big man from Koron had disappeared. He must know the man in any case. It could not be otherwise. Her mind shut down as a howling darkness descended like a sudden sandstorm.

She fumbled the unfamiliar English coins out of her bag. They spilled onto the counter, and Miranda picked out those she wanted, giving Jane a pitying look. Hazelwood did not move from his stand in front of the curtains. Their gazes met again. He had command of himself now. His eyes revealed nothing. He put the blue waistcoat on the counter.

Jane’s face felt flushed. He had toyed with her in the coach the night before, rendered her witless with a kiss that meant nothing. She had to press her lips closed to keep from speaking. You kissed me.

“You were to remain in the hotel this morning.” Just like that he assumed command of her.

“My cousins called for me.”

He glanced from her to the watching girl. “Miss Fawkener, Miss Kirby,” he said. “Miss Kirby’s father is an excellent tailor, perhaps not as well-known as Poole or Weston but certainly as good. He has his fitting room here in the back of the shop. Miranda helps him with some of the fine work.”

Jane absorbed the lies. She had seen her father lie smoothly and convincingly to bandits and greedy officials of every sort. The trick was to start with a grain of truth. So there was some truth in Hazelwood’s words, the kind of truth that concealed the bigger lies, including the lies of omission. He was not telling her about the big man.

“Do you have a maid or footman with you?” he asked, as if he’d forgotten she was with her cousins.

“We do. We’re meeting Clive at the foot of the street.”

“Let’s get you back to the hotel then.”

She wanted to protest that she was free to go where she pleased, but her throat was tight and words did not come. She nodded.

“Your soap, Miss,” Miranda said.

Jane did not know how she got out of the shop. Allegra and her footman were not waiting for her, so she stood on the steps looking blindly down the street for the barouche. Then she saw it coming her way with her cousins, apparently engaged in heated discussion.

She stepped forward, and the shop door opened behind her. Before she could turn, someone grabbed her by the shoulders, spinning her around. She looked up into Hazelwood’s face, close to hers at it had been the night before when she’d trusted him and thought him open and kind and funny and a bit in love as she had been.

He had thrown on a greatcoat over his shirtsleeves, and the shoulder capes fell over her arms, enveloping her in the heavy garment. She tried to pull back from his hold when a blur of movement caught her eye and something struck one of the panes in the bow window beside them with a heavy thunk. Hazelwood pressed her face against his chest as the window exploded in shards of splintering glass.

For a moment with her ear pressed against his chest, she could hear only his heart pounding.

She lifted her head. Glass bits glittered against the fawn-colored wool of his coat. He turned her toward the street again, and gripping her arm, led her down the stairs. Her cousins’ barouche pulled up. She caught the frown on Clive’s brow and the pout on Allegra’s lips. The footman scrambled to open the door and let down the steps.

Hazelwood jerked Jane forward. There was no time to speak, either to thank him or berate him. “See Miss Fawkener safely back to her hotel.”

Clive gave a curt command to his servants, and the carriage drove off.

Before the Husband Hunter orders wedding cakes from Gunter’s, she would be wise to check her runaway imagination. An unchecked imagination is as dangerous to the Husband Hunter’s happiness as an unbridled and spirited horse is to her limbs. Imagination, which so inspires poets and writers, may be a false friend, indeed, to the Husband Hunter. She, who is learning to read human nature deeply, and perhaps for the first time, may be led by a quick imagination to suppose that a gentleman thinks more highly or feels more deeply than, in fact, he does. When the Husband Hunter allows her too-rapid imagination to assume the conquest of a manly breast that seems hers for the taking like an undefended town, only one result is inevitable—mortification. Furthermore, the degree to which she has let her preference and her expectations be known within her circle of friends and even beyond, the greater the humiliation she must suffer.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Sixteen

Hazelwood closed the shop door behind him. Miranda stood with a broom and dustpan ready to sweep up the broken glass. He reached down and picked up a chunk of paving stone the size of a man’s fist. It had been aimed at Jane’s head.

He was angry. At Jane Fawkener for setting out to avoid him this morning and exposing herself to danger. At whatever form of hired lowlife would chuck a stone at a woman’s head on a busy street. At himself, most of all at himself, for kissing her and for stepping through those curtains with Miranda Kirby’s name on his lips. With one careless blunder he had undone all the trust he’d built up between them.

Stealing her book had been the only way to recover from his mistake.

Goldsworthy pushed aside the velvet curtain and stuck his large head into the shop. “Did you get it then?” he asked Hazelwood.

“I did.” Hazelwood held up the little blue book he’d lifted from Jane’s bag.