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“The more horrid, the better,” she rejoined, stuffing her books back into her bag and securing the clasp with jerky movements. Ignoring his proffered hand, she climbed to her feet, hoisting her carpetbag as she rose. “It might also shock you to know that I’m an outspoken bluestocking. And proud of it.”
He stood too. “There’s nothing wrong with being a bluestocking.” His slightly amused manner seemed to belie his pronouncement though. Artemis bristled at the thought he might be laughing at her, but before she could mount any sort of defense, he reached for the hackney’s door. “You take the cab. I insist.” His good breeding required him to play the gentleman, despite the fact he clearly didn’t think much of her taste in books.
Artemis’s reply was stiff with grudging politeness. “Thank you.”
She gave the driver her direction, then climbed into the dark confines of the carriage. It contained a musty odor, redolent of damp leather, tobacco smoke, horses, and stale sweat, and she wrinkled her nose. If it was the least bit socially acceptable—and the stranger hadn’t mocked her reading choices—she would have invited him to share the hackney, just for the chance to smell his tempting cologne. She might be an unconventional bluestocking who would never be a perfect model of gentility, but she wasn’t foolish. She had to maintain a veneer of respectability.
Once she’d deposited her bag on the seat, she reached for the door handle and was surprised to see the stranger still standing there. Raindrops glanced off his hat and impossibly wide shoulders, but he seemed oblivious to the downpour. Even though his perfectly chiseled mouth had compressed into a hard line, the light in his storm-cloud eyes was almost wistful rather than disdainful as he regarded her. “I wish you good day, Miss Bluestocking,” he said in that deep, dark velveteen voice of his. And then the door shut, and he was gone.
As the hackney pulled away, Artemis couldn’t resist the urge to look back and follow the forbiddingly handsome stranger’s progress. But he’d already been swallowed by the crowd.
What a particularly odd and altogether disconcerting incident. In all of her twenty-nine years, Artemis had never been so singularly affected by a member of the opposite sex. Even the rake that had charmed and almost ruined her when she was a naive debutante a decade ago couldn’t hold a candle to…well, whoeverthatenigmatic, mercurial man had been.
It was as though her imagination had conjured him up—the epitome of a darkly brooding, Byronic hero who’d stepped out of the pages of one of her own books. One thing was certain: A man like that—no matter how much he provoked her interest by a mere glance and a touch—was not of her world. Nor would he ever be. This had been a completely inconsequential, chance encounter, nothing more.
