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“The bedchamber would be fine too,” Jake said, his voice dropping to a deeper note. “I live to serve.”

“Hush.” Cleo cleared her throat. “How can you not have seen Macbeth? It’s a staple in every repertoire.”

“I don’t like going to the theater.”

“You don’t? Then why on earth haven’t you just sold the theaters?”

“My father loved them so much.” He gave her a wry smile. “I was a terrible disappointment to him.”

“I know that experience,” Cleo said. “My mother wanted me to have the same joie de vivre as she had, to be a partner in . . . in crime, though that isn’t the right word. I just couldn’t do it.”

“She wanted you to be a friend, not a daughter?”

Cleo nodded. “Even when I was very young, perhaps ten years old, she needed a confidante. Her moods were so volatile, you see. She would be tempestuously in love, and then thrown into the depths of misery or hideously bored. The poor men wouldn’t know what happened to them.”

“But you were always there.”

“Yes.” She turned back to her plate. She ate one piece of kipper every morning to be polite, but the truth was that she vastly preferred eggs.

“My father was not volatile.” Jake started turning the crank on his coffee bean grinder, and the smell spread through the room. “He was steady in his true love for the theater.”

“It’s odd that both our parents had such a passion for the theater. My mother did love plays, as well as actors.”

“The odder part is that you are the first person I’ve met who was more interested in the business side of the profession. That, my dear Miss Lewis, is the truly astonishing part of this odd coincidence.”

His mouth curved into a smile, and Cleo felt another stab of desire.

“But to be truly precise, the best aspect of all this is what happened last night.”

“I’m not sure that should happen again,” Cleo said. Little prickles of anxiety kept going through her. Her grandfather would be so disappointed if he knew that she was taking after her mother, sleeping with a man out of pure desire, scandalously unmarried.

“It will happen,” Jake said, pouring hot water over his ground beans.

“Is that a stocking?” she asked, looking closely at what he was doing for the first time.

“Yes. I used to use a sock, but silk stockings are far better,” he said. “Don’t worry; it is unworn. But more importantly, Cleo, you and I are together. However you want to term it or label us. Our servants know. We know. It only remains to tell your family and mine.”

Cleo couldn’t help it: the opal ring went through her head again. If they were together, why hadn’t he gone down on one knee? Why a bear tooth rather than a ring?

But she forgot all about the question.

Jake’s plans for the evening were so detailed that he managed to talk her into practicing some of them immediately.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“I don’t feel like going to dinner tonight,” Cleo told Jake two weeks later. They were lingering over breakfast, the way they often did these days. Rather than schedule meetings in the morning, as she normally did, she had taken to pushing everything to the afternoon.

The evenings? The nights?

All Jake.

They talked constantly, never seeming to run out of subjects for conversation.

“But Merry is excited to introduce you to her husband,” Jake said, unnecessarily. “We can’t miss it. She invited Yasmin and Lilford, although have you noticed that they don’t speak any longer?”

Cleo rolled over on her back and stared up at the ceiling. Jake had lured her from the breakfast table to the bed, and she was still catching her breath. “I believe Yasmin was enticed by his profile, but something happened and now they don’t speak.”

“I never liked him,” Jake said comfortably.