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He’d slipped, forgetting for a moment that Edward Larkin was a mere secretary to a rich man. “If he asks me. I do read the papers and get curious. Buildings have histories, you know. Are you ready to shop?”

She held his gaze, letting him know that she was weighing his words, noting the inconsistencies in that little self-revelation. Her keen attention was a heady mix of wanting her to truly see him, Lark, the man he was under the gentlemanly attire and fearing that she would. He kept his expression bland. At last, she spoke. “Let me make a few more notes.”

He nodded, released from scrutiny. She wrote rapidly for a few minutes while he considered how to get her mind back on shopping. When she put away the little notebook, he offered his arm again.

“There are at least a dozen hosiers on the street, a straw bonnet maker, a corset and stay merchant, and one who sells brushes and combs. There’s a shop for ladies’ shoes and one for fancy French paper. What’s your preference?”

“French paper,” she said. “Have we stopped our wandering game?”

“Only while you purchase paper.”

*

Viv put away her notebook and accepted Mr. Larkin’s arm. They retraced their steps to the stone lion on Oxford Street. Once again, he puzzled her. What he did for the duke changed with each of their conversations. For a rich man’s secretary, he was knowing and haughty, and he probably rivaled his employer in finery. The little inconsistencies in his account of his employment reminded her of the earlier thought she’d had that he was perhaps an actor. But that couldn’t be right either because he seemed almost to own the city.

At the corner, Oxford Street’s incessant discordant rhythm recalled her to her task, which had nothing to do with the mysterious nature of her betrothed. Delivery van drivers urged their horses onward, angling this way and that, as they maneuvered past their fellows. The pavement pulsed with the staccato movement of passersby surging forward and stopping for shop windows. Oxford Street drew female shoppers with their billowing skirts taking up the walkway, but the atmosphere was far from that of Bath’s genteel, ladylike Milsom Street where Viv had shopped with her aunt.

Mr. Larkin was right that Viv had been relying on what she already knew of shopping. She had not been open to discoveries. Her plan to find and name a few reputable merchants for the readers of their guide looked like folly in the face of the sheer number of shops.

And it struck her as odd that no one appeared actually to buy anything. “Why does no one enter the shops?”

“Ah,” he said. “Looking is part of the game. Each shop preens a little, showing off its goods, asking you to linger and admire. It’s supposed to be pleasurable.”

“Pleasurable?”

They approached the corner of Holles Street. “How many shops did you wish to see?” he asked. “This is a nice stretch, a stationer, a tea dealer, and a chemist.”

He steered her to the window of the tea dealer. Through the glass, orderly rows of black and green canisters each more than a foot high lined open mahogany shelves. There was an artistic flare to the contrast between the neat jars, with their vaguely foreign markings and hand-lettered labels, and a porcelain tea set in blue and white laid out on a white cloth-covered table as if ready for a lady to pour. The shop window told a little story of goods coming from the distant East to grace an English table.

Viv had not thought of shopping as pleasure before her time in Bath. In Weymouth, she or one of her sisters would be dispatched by their mother to procure a needed item, urged to hurry, and directed to one of the shabbier shops away from the Esplanade where merchants catered to fashionable visitors. She supposed that those experiences had defined her idea of shopping.

She turned to him. “How can anyone choose? Generally, I’ve not had much patience for shopping. One wants a thing…”

“Tooth powder, soap, shoes?”

“Exactly, and one does not need or want a hundred pairs of shoes to choose from.”

He nodded gravely, but she detected a gleam in his eyes. “You want to enter a shop, look right, look left, make your purchase, and go. That’s your method?”

“Don’t mock. Someone needs to make sense of all this. A woman can’t spend all day wandering as you put it. One simply wants merchandise of a decent quality at a price that’s not too dear.”

“No more wandering then.” He turned from the window to look down the street. “What sort of shops do you want to see? And how many?”

Viv followed his gaze. On both sides of the wide thoroughfare, signs advertised goods of every sort. She could not possibly visit or catalogue all the shops she saw. The piece she had planned to write for the guide wouldn’t work. A few shops would have to give her the flavor of Oxford Street. “I will concentrate on shops that cater to women.”

“Milliners? Ladies’ shoe sellers? Hosiery and glove merchants?”

This time Viv tugged him into motion, turning them east. “Yes. All those, and a few more, but the main aim of this outing is to find out where a woman can shop without interference.”

“Without men annoying her, you mean.”

“Yes! I’m sure you, as a gentleman, can walk the length of Oxford Street without some woman following you or pestering you to talk with her and treating you as if you…” She let the thought trail off. She wasn’t going to explain it to him. She was too aware of his person. His mere presence stirred her in ways she did not wish to name.

“As if I what?”

“Knew things.”

“Oh, things. As it happens, I do know things.”