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“French, philosophy, astronomy, music, literature—but not dramatic—and watercolors. I seem to have no painting or musical skills, but I persevere.”
“I can help with French,” Yasmin offered with a smile.
“That would be very kind of you,” Cleo said, smiling back.
“We ought to go in to dinner before Ponder decides the first course is wasted and throws it away,” Byng said.
With a timing that suggested he was hovering outside, ear to the door, Ponder opened the door. “Dinner is served.”
Madame Dubois looked up. “Nonsense. I have not finished my sherry.”
“The food will grow cold,” the butler opined.
“It is your responsibility to make sure that is not the case,” Madame ordered. “You may leave us.”
Ponder left.
Yasmin leaned over and whispered in Cleo’s ear, “There are moments when I fear that Madame may marry me to someone before I realize what happened. She is formidable!”
No need to translate that word.
Chapter Ten
The following evening
Jake climbed the private staircase to the third floor clad in his uncomfortable livery again. After spending the day unable to get Miss Lewis out of his mind, he realized why.
It was his conscience.
He’d always had an overactive conscience, at least from his family’s point of view, given that it led him to eschew his uncle’s trade in opium.
John Jacob Astor, his uncle, saw the opium trade as just another business endeavor, but Jake didn’t agree. The ensuing family battle had led to Jake changing his last name to Addison.
Jake had thought about writing Miss Lewis a letter informing her of his plans to order a garish wardrobe. But then Moggly informed him that Miss Lewis was eating dinner in her suite once again. It would be easier to tell her in person.
She was the most irritating woman he’d met in his life, from the top of her gleaming red curls to that porcelain complexion. Who would have thought she had hair that color?
Though it made sense.
Stubborn nose. Stubborn jaw. Stubborn mouth.
Her hair wasn’t just red: it was blazing red. Even woven into a complicated knot, he could see that it was as unruly as she was.
Her curves would have made him feel weak at the knees back when he was a youngster. Luckily, at the age of thirty, he was far past such a response to a lady.
Still, when she had leveled blue-gray eyes at him and commanded him to leave her dining room, he discovered an ancient truth: one never knows oneself.
He had felt a trifle weak at the knees.
The only other woman he knew who was so independent was his own mother, who stemmed from a Boston family that claimed to have arrived in America on the Mayflower. Before his father died, the two of them had battled over everything from the merits of chicken to quail, Astors to Cabots, geraniums to roses.
Miss Lewis had a similar character, that of a woman who had never entirely given herself to a man and never would.
His fortune and his lineage—Astor was a name that excited women like a salt lick did deer—were enough to make him a target of every fortune-hunting mama in America. Even changing his name to Addison had had no effect. He was tired of the way women’s smiling faces turned toward him the moment he entered a New York drawing room.
Not in England.
Merry had told him as much, and here was the proof. When Miss Lewis smiled, it was from the pure glee of thwarting him.
