AllFreeNovel
Share Us
From there it was an easy walk to the shop. The drive was not so easy.
Marcelline’s mind was working as always, looking for a way to turn matters to her account. He’d said ... what had he said before he slammed out of his cabin?
He’d said something about paying the dressmaking bills. That it suited him very well.
But he’d been so angry, and he hadn’t come back.
His valet had appeared, though, with a bottle of wine and assorted cold meats and cheese that must have cost a king’s ransom in bribes.
A woman could, too easily, get used to such luxury.
She couldn’t afford to get used to it.
“I can’t decide,” she said, “whether you’re exercising forbearance or merely indulging your curiosity to see my lair.”
“Why should I do either?” he said. Seeming to make himself perfectly at ease, he stretched out his long legs, as he hadn’t been able to do when Jeffreys shared the seat with her. He rested one arm along the back of the richly appointed seat and looked out of the louvered panel, open at present to let him see out while shielding him from others trying to look in. Not that it was any secret who he was, when the crest emblazoned on the door shouted his identity to all the world.
The late afternoon light traced the smoothly sculpted lines of his profile.
Longing welled up. To touch his beautiful face. To feel that arm curl about her shoulders. To tuck herself into that big, warm body.
She crushed it. “Or perhaps you took pity on us,” she said.
“It was your maid or seamstress or whatever she is upon whom I took pity,” he said. “You can take care of yourself, I’ve no doubt. But Saunders told me the girl was prodigious ill. For a time, he said, he wasn’t sure she’d survive the voyage. She did not look well just now.” He paused briefly. “She doesn’t lodge with you?”
“She did, but that was only temporary. I can hardly lodge my seamstresses. For one thing, it isn’t good for them to do nothing but eat, drink, and live nothing but shop. For another, there isn’t room. Not that I should want half a dozen seamstresses about all day and all night. The working hours can be trying enough, what with their little jealousies and—”
“Half a dozen?” he said. He leaned forward. “Half a dozen?”
He was too astonished to pretend he wasn’t.
Yes, of course she’d babbled that advertisement for the corner of Fleet Street at Chancery Lane, and it was the direction she’d given the coachman. That didn’t mean her shop wasn’t squeezed into a passage or a cellar.
“Half a dozen girls at present,” she said. “But I’ll certainly be hiring more in the near future. As it is, we’re shorthanded.”
“Half a— Devil take you, what is wrong with you?”
“You’ve already pointed out any number of my character flaws,” she said. “To which do you now refer?”
“I thought ... Noirot, you’re the damndest woman. Your dogged pursuit of me led me to believe you were in desperate straits.”
“How on earth did you come by that idea?” she said. “I told you I was the greatest modiste in the world. You’ve seen my work.”
“I imagined a dark little shop in a basement, drat you,” he said. “I did wonder how you contrived to make such extravagant-looking dresses in such a place.”
“I’m sure you didn’t wonder about it overlong,” she said. “You were mainly occupied with bedding me.”
“Yes, but I’m done with that now.”
He was. He truly was. He’d had enough of her. He’d had enough of himself, chasing her. Like a puppy, like the veriest schoolboy.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” she said.
“It’s only Clara I’m thinking of,” he said. “Much as it pains me to contribute to your vainglory, it was clear, even to me, that the women of Paris were besotted with your work. You’re the most aggravating woman I’ve ever met, but you make yourself agreeable to women, I noticed, and that and beautiful, fashionable clothes are what matter, I daresay. I should not hold a grudge, merely because I long to shake you until your teeth rattle.”
Her weary face lit up, her eyes most brilliantly of all. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew you’d see.”
“Still, I don’t trust you.”
