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Joshua looked up the stairs, to where Cassandra had gone.
He looked down the stairs, to where his business lay.
“Your wife is really teaching you to waltz, Das?”
“Yes. She has joined me here in London.” Das considered his fingers a moment. “She is keen to meet Mrs. DeWitt and suggested you might both join us for dinner one night.”
Well. There was a surprise. Joshua never met his secretaries’ families. And a duchess’s granddaughter was not likely to visit the home of an employee. But Cassandra did seem to like meeting new people, and she would argue that Das was more than an employee, and Joshua was curious.
“Have her write,” he said. “It’s probably some shocking breach of etiquette but Cassandra can decide.”
He considered the letters in his hand, considered the stairs leading up, the stairs leading down.
“Mr. Isaac and I can deal with Buchanan,” Das said. “If you have other matters to address.”
“Right,” Joshua said. “I just have to…Right.”
He went to the stairs. He went up.
* * *
Joshua foundCassandra alone in her room, fussing about with a gown. As he loitered in the doorway, she offered that polite smile and didn’t quite meet his eyes. How intolerable was her politeness when she wore it like armor! He had stripped it away last night, only to force her to don it again.
Nobody’s fault but his own.
“Where’s the cat?” he asked.
“My maid is seeing to him.”
“Where will he sleep?”
“With me, usually. Unless he, too, runs away in the middle of the night.”
“Ah.”
He let himself look at her bed. His kerchief was folded neatly on the bedside table. Three roses sat in the vase, one slightly the worse for wear.
He whipped his head back to look at Cassandra, who hastily ducked and made a show of inspecting the hem of the gown.
“She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?” Cassandra said, rubbing at a spot that he suspected did not exist. “Lucy, I mean.”
“Astonishingly so.” Yet he knew which of the sisters he would rather look at. “The other one, the redhead—”
“Emily.”
“She’ll be a beauty, too, one day.”
“Yes. And Miranda was called an Incomparable.”
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“They are all great beauties, my sisters.”
“Indeed.”
He looked at the letters in his hand. From somewhere down the hallway came the laugh. He closed the door against marauding sisters and, after a brief hesitation, locked it. Again he caught her watching him; again she returned to the gown.
“So.” He strode across the room and tossed the letters onto the little table. “If you’ve finished fishing for compliments…”
