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Why would she want that?
Her heart began to pound, and she willed her tone calm. “What time is it?”
“Time enough to get there,” Sesily said, waving away whatever hiding Adelaide had intended to do. “Who was he?”
It didn’t seem possible that they didn’t recognize him. His day-old scruff did nothing to hide his true identity, and she’d recognized him instantly.Just as he’d recognized her.Still, she brazened it through. “Who was whom?”
Her friends did not even pretend to hear the question. Of course they didn’t. They saw too much. Understood too much. Such was the work they did, was it not?
“Not a Bully Boy,” Imogen said.
Adelaide shuddered. “Definitely not.” He’d said he was protecting her.
“Old friend?” Sesily offered.
“Absolutely not,” Adelaide said, and that much was true. She and the Duke of Clayborn had shared no more than twenty words on the north side of the river, and during those short, awful moments, she’d vowed never to make a friend of the horrible man. Indeed, she’d spent more than a normal amount of time attempting to uncover the man’s secrets so as to hold them against him.
She’d been under the impression that his only secrets weren’t his at all, but his brother’s, enumerated in the folder in her hand. Adelaide made a show of flipping through the dossier, as though she had not already committed the entire thing to memory. “He was... nobody.”
The pair blinked at her, blank-faced, before Sesily burst out laughing. “We are to believe that you—Adelaide Frampton—kissed some... nobody?”
“For... no reason?” Imogen added.
“In broad daylight?” Sesily again.
“It was dusk, actually,” Adelaide interjected.
“While waiting for us to collect you?” Imogen replied.
“After you’d committed a bit of light crime?”
Adelaide set her teacup down and stood, removing her cap and working at the buttons of the form-fitting waistcoat the group’s seamstress had created for her.
Sesily watched her for a moment before adding, “. . . in trousers.”
Adelaide adjusted her spectacles. “I’m perfectly well covered.”
“Oh, yes, no one would blink at a lady racing around the riverbank in trousers,” Sesily teased with a salacious grin. “Especially not when she’s kissing handsome men at dusk.”
“Why would they?” Adelaide quipped. “You’ve surely done all of that before.”
Sesily’s smile broadened, revealing a row of shining white teeth. “Indeed I have. But they expect it from me.”
That much was true. Sesily was a renowned scandal—daughter to a recently minted earl and his brash countess and, until several months earlier, unmarried, thirty, rich, beautiful, and with the absolute fearlessness that every woman on her own deserved to claim. Of course, society didn’t care for fearless women, so they’d spent years trying to beat Sesily down, calling her Sexily behind her back... never realizing that the name simply gave her more freedom. More power.
The other woman did not kiss handsome men at dusk any longer, however. She kissed handsomeman. Caleb Calhoun, who captained the boat from the deck beyond.
Adelaide leveled her friend with a look. “Would you believe I stood upon that dock, waiting for you to arrive, and wondered,Now, Adelaide, what would Sesily do?”
Sesily laughed and retorted, “In that case, you did the absolute right thing.”
“If you both are through,” came a new voice from the far corner of the cabin, the Duchess of Trevescan, known simply as The Duchess in many of Mayfair’s finer circles, as though she was the singular representation of the title—beauty, grace, money, power... and a long-absent duke who cared not a bit what his wife did with her days or with his funds, as indicated by the vessel upon which they all traveled at that very moment.
Adelaide turned toward The Duchess, her gaze falling to the newspaper in the other woman’s hands, emblazoned with a bold headline that read:
PETTICOAT JUSTICE? OR PRETTY VIGILANTES?
“They still attribute crimes across London to us, I see,” Adelaide said. “So all is right with the world.” After several years of working beneath the notice of Scotland Yard, the foursome had caused a minor scene at Whitehall one year earlier, drawing the notice of the new Metropolitan Police and, by extension, the papers. Surely there was no one who loved a rumor about ladies causing trouble like a newspaperman.
