Chapter Twelve
Though Aunt Phi offered Arden the use of her carriage, he elected to walk to the tailor.
He wasn’t in Garlin for pleasure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the cloudless blue sky and the cool summer breeze while he was here—especially since the walk would take him along the beach, offering him a view of the ocean.
“It’s a far cry from Strall,” his aunt said when he told her. “The claustrophobic heat, the smog-choked sky, the smell.”
Despite the derisive words, Arden detected a note of fondness in her voice that he understood. While Strall certainly lacked the idyllic charm of Garlin, the city was his home, and he couldn’t imagine making his life anywhere else.
The walk took half an hour, but when he arrived on the little cobblestone street lined with shops and crowded with shoppers, he felt refreshed, his lingering guilt over his conversation with Mavis mostly abated—at least until a carriage stopped across the road and the woman who had become his own personal demon stepped out, dressed in a cream linen dress dotted with red embroidered flowers.
A wide-brimmed straw hat shielded her face, but her telltale copper hair was woven in a long braid that hung down her back, tied with a bright-red ribbon.
Arden stopped short, the tailor forgotten as he watched her smile at the footman who handed her out.
There was no reason for Arden to feel jealous of the man, but he remembered all too well what it felt like to bask in the warmth of one of her smiles—and he realized it was the first time in five years he’d seen her smile like that.
She said something to the footman, who sketched a brief bow before climbing back onto the carriage bench and flicking the reins, driving away down the street.
Arden glanced toward the shop his aunt mentioned with the wooden sign reading Beecham’s, but instead of making his way there, he followed Mavis.
He owed her an apology, and the weight of that would haunt him until he delivered it.
He caught sight of her slipping into a modiste’s shop when a trio of carriages cut off his path, delaying him a moment.
When he approached the shop, he hesitated—the modiste was no place for a gentleman, and he could hear Mavis’s warning from the night before ringing through his mind.
People will talk.
Neither of them could afford that, so he slipped into a narrow alley between the modiste and the cheesemonger next door.
When he stepped out again seconds later, he had his invisibility wrapped around him, allowing him to pass along the street unseen.
When a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter entered the modiste’s shop, Arden followed at their heels before the door closed.
The shop was filled with a dozen women chatting with the shopkeepers and rifling through books of fashion plates that were laid out on the worktable at the shop’s center.
A few others examined the handsomely dressed mannequins, debating the merits of different fabric swatches in the sunlight that streamed through the windows.
But as Arden scanned the room, he didn’t see Mavis.
She had come into this shop, hadn’t she?
“Sally, Miss Lindcourt is in the dressing room for her fitting,” a tall woman with deep-brown skin and black hair woven into dozens of small braids said, emerging from a dim hallway Arden hadn’t noticed before.
“I’ll be back there in just a moment,” another woman—Sally, he presumed—replied with a flustered smile before turning back to the woman she was assisting as she flipped through one of the books of fashion plates.
Arden made his way down the hallway, which opened up into a larger room filled with bolts of fabric stacked on shelves that reached up to the ceiling in a cacophony of colors—more than Arden had previously thought existed.
More mannequins stood clustered together, dressed in half-finished ball gowns, day dresses, and one in a particularly daring lace negligee.
“Sally, is that you?” Mavis called out, drawing Arden’s attention to the far corner, where a painted silk curtain hung from the ceiling. Arden’s mouth went dry when he recognized the shape of Mavis’s body outlined in shadow against the silk.
He should have made his presence known, but all he could do was trace the lines of her body with his eyes, skimming over the swell of her breasts, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips, her long legs—she wasn’t wearing a skirt, he realized with a jolt. She wasn’t wearing anything at all.
“Sally?” Mavis said again, and the curtain rustled.
Arden’s breath caught as he went to war with himself, both yearning and dreading for the curtain to open.
“Not Sally.” He deserved a fucking medal for an act of simple decency, but he didn’t think any reward would compare to what he lost when the curtain went still.
“Arden?” she hissed. Her shadow moved, hastily pulling on what looked to be a dressing gown.
When the door opened, his suspicion was confirmed, and while she might be more covered than she’d been a moment before, the peach silk clung to her body, revealing almost as much as it hid.
He forced himself not to stare at the glimpse of her bare calves, and instead meet her irritated gaze.
Strangely, that did little to cool his want either.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, keeping her voice barely louder than a whisper.
“I . . .” Arden trailed off, his thoughts still a jumble.
He realized, belatedly, that he’d been so distracted he’d dropped his invisibility.
He ought to be embarrassed—he hadn’t lost control of his magic since he was a boy.
He shook his head in an effort to clear it, crossing the room toward her so that he wouldn’t be overheard. “I saw you come in here and—”
“And you thought to spy?” She rose an eyebrow. “Do you often use your magic to watch ladies change?”
Defensiveness pierced the haze of his mind. “You’re hardly a lady. Besides, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”
He regretted the words immediately. It was a response to the shame that licked at him in the wake of her accusation—spying may not have been his intention, but he’d violated her privacy all the same.
As if delivering one apology wasn’t going to be difficult enough, now it seemed he owed her a second.
Mavis crossed her arms over her chest, though all that served to do was draw Arden’s gaze down to the pale, freckled valley between her breasts, framed by the peach silk of her dressing gown.
He forced his gaze back to hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to spy—I just saw you come in here, and I thought it best if I went unseen since, as you said, the last thing either of us needs is gossip.”
I’m sorry.
Mavis was so caught on those two words, she barely heard anything else.
He was apologizing to her. It was laughable, really, but Mavis didn’t laugh.
Though he might have made his presence known earlier—she’d nearly opened the curtain in nothing but her bloomers, thinking he was Sally bringing her the new model of corset she’d ordered.
How mortifying that would have been, even if he had, as he said, seen it all before.
A bolt of self-consciousness hit her out of nowhere—he hadn’t seen it all before.
Not really. Five years ago, her body was altogether different.
Her breasts had sat a bit higher on her chest, her stomach had been flat, and the skin on her hips and thighs hadn’t yet begun to dimple.
Oh, she didn’t think much of those changes most days, too glad to have lived long enough to see her body age to bother with the petty vanity Luster women often indulged in.
Now, though, she wondered if Arden would prefer her body as it had been before, when she’d been young and half starved, skin and bones without an ounce of fat to spare.
Would he find her well-nourished twenty-four-year-old body disappointing?
It was pointless to wonder, but she wondered all the same.
She swallowed her discomfort. “What are you doing here, Arden?” she asked him again.
“I owe you an apology.”
Mavis blinked. “Yes, you delivered it already.”
He glanced away, looking every bit as uncomfortable as she felt. “Another one.”
“Two apologies,” she said, drawing out the words. This was a novelty. “What is this one for?”
He let out a slow breath. “I can blame you for a lot, Mavis, but you didn’t cause my father’s heart attack.”
A heart attack. The new information made his accusation make more sense. She didn’t know much about the condition, but she knew it was worsened by stress, and dealing with money troubles would have caused plenty of stress.
“Not directly, you mean,” Mavis said quietly. “But I certainly didn’t help matters.”
It wasn’t her fault—Arden himself had admitted that her con hadn’t been what drained his family’s coffers, only dented them slightly. There were other factors responsible for his father’s stress. The logic should have made her feel better, but it didn’t.
Arden didn’t try to deny her words either, which was just as well. He was a terrible liar, and Mavis would have felt all the worse if he’d tried.
“I am sorry for your loss, whether you believe me or not,” she told him softly. “Losing a parent is a difficult thing to go through for anyone.”
Arden looked at her for a long moment, brow furrowing. “Are you truly an orphan? Or was that another story you made up to evoke sympathy?”
Now Mavis was the one faced with a question she didn’t know how to answer—not without revealing more of herself to Arden Ryskamp than she should, a truth so few people knew.
“My mother died when I was eleven,” she said, which was an easy enough truth to share. “As far as I know, my father is alive and well, but I suppose that goes to prove how unfair life can be.”
She didn’t want to talk about her father. She rarely thought about him much anymore, but he was still a thorn wedged beneath her skin, tender to the touch and impossible to remove.