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She took a pin from her bodice and set his in its place. She set her pin into the neckcloth. Hers was nothing so magnificent as his, merely a smallish pearl. But it was a pretty one, of a fine luster. Softly it glowed in its snug place among the folds of his linen.
She was aware of his gaze, so intent, and of the utter stillness with which he waited.
She lightly smoothed the surrounding fabric, then stepped back and eyed her work critically. “That will do very well,” she said.
“Will it?” He was looking at her, not the pearl.
“Let the window be your looking glass,” she said.
He was still watching her.
“The glass, your grace. You might at least admire my handiwork.”
“I do,” he said. “Very much.”
But he turned away, wearing the faintest smile, and studied himself in the glass.
“I see,” he said. “Your eye is as good as my valet’s—and that’s a compliment I don’t give lightly.”
“My eye ought to be good,” she said. “I’m the greatest modiste in all the world.”
His heart beat erratically.
With excitement, what else? And why not?
Truly, she was like no one he’d ever met before.
Paris was another world from London, and French women were another species from English. Even so, he’d grown accustomed to the sophistication of Parisian women, sufficiently accustomed to predict the turn of a wrist, the movement of a fan, the angle of the head in almost any situation. Rules, as he’d told her. The French lived by rules.
This woman made her own rules.
“And so modest a modiste she is,” he said.
She laughed, but hers was not the silvery laughter he was accustomed to. It was low and intimate, not meant for others to hear. She was not trying to make heads turn her way, as other women did. Only his head was required.
And he did turn away from the window to look at her.
“Perhaps, unlike everyone else in the opera house, you failed to notice,” she said. She swept her closed fan over her dress.
He let his gaze travel from the slightly disheveled coiffure down. Before, he’d taken only the most superficial notice of what she wore. His awareness was mainly of her physicality: the lushly curved body, the clarity of her skin, the brilliance of her eyes, the soft disorder of her hair.
Now he took in the way that enticing body was adorned: the black lace cloak or tunic or whatever it was meant to be, over rich pink silk—the dashing arrangement of color and trim and jewelry, the—the—
“Style,” she said.
Within him was a pause, a doubt, a moment’s uneasiness. His mind, it seemed, was a book to her, and she’d already gone beyond the table of contents and the introduction, straight to the first chapter.
But what did it matter? She, clearly no innocent, knew what he wanted.
“No, madame. I didn’t notice,” he said. “All I saw was you.”
“That is exactly the right thing to say to a woman,” she said. “And exactly the wrong thing to say to a dressmaker.”
“I beg you to be a woman for the present,” he said. “As a dressmaker, you waste your talents on me.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Had I been badly dressed, you would not have entered Mademoiselle Fontenay’s box. Even had you been so rash as to disregard the dictates of taste, the Comte d’Orefeur would have saved you from a suicidal error, and declined to make the introduction.”
“Suicidal? I detect a tendency to exaggerate.”
