Chapter One #2
Settling on the other seat, making sure not to touch her with even the tip of his boot, he faced her only to find her facing him. Daring him, a provocation from the past. He’d always liked her bravado, though it was doing him no favors now. “All this for a bloody book, Lady Persephone?”
The hand resting lightly in her lap clenched into a fist.
He wasn’t using that nickname, not now, not ever. They weren’t friends anymore.
“I’m hoping this conveyance is yours, Mr. Thorne, and not one you borrowed without consent,” she said, reaching to unpin the damp disaster of a hat mashed atop her head. “I recall an occasion where you pilfered a horse cart and toured the Yorkshire countryside until they caught you.”
He studied her, unable not to. Time had sharpened and softened in equal measure, leaving the girl he remembered tucked somewhere beneath this gorgeous woman with raindrops on her lashes, curves he had no business noticing, and a mouth that had once knocked him senseless.
Her gown was caught between the color of a ripe raspberry and a tasty French claret, he couldn’t decide which.
Her hair was a shade darker too, or maybe that was the damp.
All in all, he recognized her—but then, he didn’t.
“It’s my carriage,” he said, thankful for the wrong reasons that he’d taken the brougham this morning, new to market and only available to the select few who’d been early investors. “No need for me to steal a damned thing anymore, sweetheart.”
She smiled at the endearment as he inwardly cursed using it, then plucked at her gloves, removing them one slow, gentle finger-pull at a time. He wished he wasn’t mesmerized by the creamy skin she revealed. “I’ve heard about your achievements, along with everyone in England.”
“Yes, well,” he murmured, not wanting to go there. The rumors about him were legendary, earned in part, but also embellished in every telling, the ones about his romantic conquests especially.
Her cheeks lit as the silence settled, finally a show of emotion. Clearly, she’d read the tantalizing things printed about him.
Removing a cheroot he had no intention of smoking from his waistcoat pocket, Laurence rolled it between his fingers.
He desperately needed something to do with his hands.
“No footman attached to this charade of a literary endeavor, I see. Alone amidst a crowd wishing to tear you apart, a risk I warned you about years ago. Don’t think because you’re one of them they won’t turn on you. ”
“At the moment, I can’t afford staff. Or couldn’t until today’s payment from my publisher, the first of many.
My father cut me off when I sold my manuscript, but I’m making a small fortune, so—” She shrugged, amused, her face aglow as she tilted it toward the window, her finger trailing lazily along the pane.
“He can keep his money, and I shall keep my freedom. Although you were right, something men rarely are in my experience. I didn’t recognize the ruckus this would cause, my little book of rules and stories to back them up.
They think they’re the main characters, when they’re a mix of every soulless creature I’ve ever met. It’s not one person, it’s one hundred.”
“You need security,” Laurence said, amazed she’d actually done it.
Published years of class confidences presented as fiction, skewering a group who’d now watch her bleed in the streets rather than assist her.
Aristocrats were more rabid than the underworld types he routinely dealt with.
Still, the daughter of a duke bringing herself low when everyone else—everyone—he knew was reaching higher astounded him.
When he was rarely surprised by anything or anyone at this point.
“I need a financial advisor,” she corrected, dragging a petite knuckle down the glass. “Someone like you. And if you’re headed to my father’s townhouse, your coachman is going in the wrong direction.”
With a muted curse, Laurence pounded on the roof, alerting his driver, Tupper, to pull over.
“Where?” he ground out, wishing she’d told him from the start.
This would only give them more time together, when he didn’t trust himself to keep up this detached ploy for long.
Perce Lathbury smelled like something fresh and enticing currently blooming in his ill-kept garden and, unfortunately, the final nail in the coffin, he remembered everything.
How she’d gotten that scar bisecting her eyebrow when she bounced off her mount; the day he’d stolen that horse cart and she’d begged her father to save him from being whipped for it; how smooth and soft her hand had been curled in his.
He didn’t have many good memories of childhood, but this troublesome chit was in every one he’d managed to keep.
Her gaze fixed on the passing scenery, she gave him an address in Clerkenwell, a modest district just outside the city.
Laurence didn’t tell her they’d traded places and that he now had a townhouse in Regent’s Park.
Though he preferred the tiny flat he’d never been able to give up on a drab but homey lane in Limehouse.
His staff was amazed he spent as many nights in the stews as he did the West End.
He settled back as the carriage made a sharp turn and began to pick up speed along the pitted road heading out of the city.
Reaching in his pocket, Laurence fit his spectacles in place, adjusting the slender wire arms behind his ears.
He actually didn’t mind wearing them. They’d decreased his headaches by half and, like Dorsey claimed, women seemed to like them.
He decided to test if the aloof one across from him felt the same.
Stretching out his legs, his boot brushed her skirt. “An advisor what you need, is it?”
“Yes and—” Words dying, her gaze struck him, a fiery, molten silver. She swallowed, her breath a hushed sigh when it left her.
He tilted his head, keeping his lips from shifting even so much as a hair. Though he wanted to grin. Got ’cha, the boy who’d known her would have said.