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Byng pounced on that. “Jake!”

“We are friends, as he mentioned,” Cleo said, feeling her cheeks warm again.

Byng snapped his fingers. “We’d better make him an extraordinary wardrobe, in that case.”

Cleo felt a little misgiving. “You look like a naughty elf.”

“If I understand you correctly, Mr. Astor Addison’s wardrobe needs to be spectacularly vulgar, the better to convince polite society that Quimby’s is better left to the theatrical sphere?”

“Yes,” Cleo said.

“I am precisely the right person to help,” Byng said with a touch of pride. “My family has credited me with an uncommon flair for vulgarity ever since I ordered my first garment as a mere lad.”

“Which was?”

“A delightful mustard-yellow coat covered with scallops,” he said reminiscently. “Ties to match on my knee breeches, worn with a vertically striped waistcoat. Oh, and a tall hat with a red plume. My mother collapsed onto a settee, calling for smelling salts.”

Cleo broke into laughter.

“Over thirty-five years ago now,” Byng told her. “I am precisely the person to make a dandified American monster out of Mr. Astor Addison. I can tell by looking at him that his sartorial imagination is nonexistent.”

“I don’t think he cares about clothing,” Cleo agreed.

“We shall begin with fabric,” Byng announced. “We’ll need a monstrous amount of it to cover those shoulders.”

“Excellent,” Jake said from the chairs, where he had apparently been eavesdropping. “Lord Falconer, if you continue working with the sketches, I shall accompany your granddaughter upstairs to survey Mrs. Quimby’s fabrics.”

“I shall rest my feet before traipsing upstairs,” Byng said, looking satisfied as he walked over to sit beside the viscount.

“What do you think?” Cleo’s grandfather asked him, pointing at the sketch under way.

“Needs to be lower in the bodice,” Byng said.

Cleo rolled her eyes. Luckily, she didn’t have to wear the garments for more than a few months.

Jake held out the crook of his arm. “Miss Lewis?”

There was a look in his eyes that made sensation race down Cleo’s spine. Without touching her. Just . . .

She took his arm.

Albeit with the rueful feeling that somewhere up on a fluffy cloud, her mother was applauding. I can’t stand a bracket-faced bluestocking, Julia crowed. Go on, darling, prove that you’re my daughter!

Resolutely, Cleo banished her mother.

But not until Julia had a last word.

Those shoulders, dearest . . . Brawny in the best possible way.

Chapter Fifteen

Jake followed Cleo up the stairs, his eyes fixed on her derrière, reminding himself with each step that he was a gentleman. Gentlemen didn’t seduce ladies.

That blasted gray jacket stopped above the waist, and the gown itself was light and floaty. Cleo’s rear was—

Generous.

She wouldn’t like that word, but he couldn’t think of an appropriate compliment. Instead, his eyes kept gobbling up the way her hips swayed. He couldn’t look away.