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“What does Miss Thorne taste like, sir?” she asked.
“Heaven,” he murmured against her skin. “She tastes like heaven. And she tastes like she’s mine.” Finn pulled the spectacles from their perch on her nose. “Where did you get these?”
“I don’t recall,” she said with a shrug. She folded like a house of cards under his piercing stare. “I borrowed them from one of the maids, if you must know.”
Finn had never seen a maid with jeweled spectacles, so that was probably a lie. He chose to overlook it. Finn heaved a sigh. “You do know that I’m not going to let you go to Lord Gelson’s, don’t you?”
She tilted her head and regarded him somberly. “You do know that I didn’t ask for your permission, don’t you?”
“Damn it, Claire. You have to stop these missions of yours.”
She snorted. It was quite an endearing sound, really. “I’ll never stop my missions. I’m a faerie, for goodness sake. If you take away my missions, you might as well take my wings.”
Finn lifted a lock of her hair to his nose. She still smelled like summer. Would he ever tire of that scent? He hoped not. “Will this wash out?”
“It’ll be gone by tomorrow.” She patted his knee. “Don’t fret.”
He finally looked down at what she was wearing. She wore an emerald-green gown, trimmed with a wide gold ribbon beneath her breasts. Breasts that made him fear they were about to tumble out of her gown. Would be such a bad thing? Definitely not.
“I’m taking you back home,” Finn said.
“I want to go to Lord Gelson’s. We don’t have to stay long. I just want to see how well Colette pretends to be me pretending to be Mrs. Abercrombie. What I don’t understand is why Colette wanted to be Mrs. Abercrombie in the first place,” Claire said.
“Colette has wanted entrée into that part of society for quite some time. I assume she met Mrs. Abercrombie, or you, as it were, and decided that since Mrs. Abercrombie was going to be ‘leaving town,’ she could step into her shoes for a night or two.”
“The gall of that woman,” Claire bit out.
“It’s actually quite fortuitous,” Finn said.
“How so?”
“She’s in the line of danger instead of you.” Finn reached up to rap on the roof and get the driver’s attention.
Claire stopped him with a hand on his arm. He looked down at her. She was a vision, even if her face was heavily powdered and her hair a hideous color. He ran one finger along her eyebrow. “You dyed those too?” he asked.
“Whatever it takes.”
“Can you be anyone? Anywhere?”
She mulled it over for a moment. “Typically, yes.”
“What’s the real you?” he blurted out.
She laughed. “You know the real me.”
“Do I?”
She looked directly into his eyes. “Yes. You do.”
***
He didn’t. He didn’t know anything about her. He knew of her world, but nothing about what made it work. He didn’t know she carried his child. He didn’t know that she was quite happy that she had to marry him. Of all the men she could have been stuck with, she supposed he was the best.
“You worry me, Claire. What was your plan tonight?”
“My plan was to introduce myself to Mrs. Abercrombie and learn what I could.”
“Alone?”
