Margaret Moore - A Lover's Kiss

Her tone and coy look suggested it wasn’t so much the plays that Sir Douglas enjoyed as the actresses.

“I do,” he replied without any hint that he understood her implication. Or that she was quite wrong.

“I do not think I will be going to the theater,” Juliette demurred. “Or riding, or out in a carriage. Or walking in gardens.”

Madame de Malanche regarded her with alarm. “Are you ill?”

“Non.” Juliette glanced at Drury. “I simply will not need so many expensive clothes.”

He could hardly believe it. A woman who wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to run riot and order a bevy of new clothes whether she needed them or not? It wasn’t as if she didn’t require clothing, judging by the garments he’d already seen her wearing.

Or did she think he was ignorant of the cost? Or that he couldn’t afford it? “Perhaps no riding clothes, since I believe my cousin is no horsewoman. Otherwise, I give you carte blanche to get whatever you like, Juliette.”

Madame de Malanche’s eyes lit with happy avarice, but Juliette Bergerine’s did not. “How can I ever repay you?”

She had obviously forgotten her role—and in the company of the sort of woman who could, and would, spread any interesting tidbit of gossip she heard.

He quickly drew Juliette into a brotherly embrace. “What is this talk of repayment? We are family!”

He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Remember who you are supposed to be.”

He drew back and found Juliette regarding him with flushed cheeks. His own heartbeat quickened—because of her mistake, of course, and not from having her body pressed so close to his.

After all, why would that excite him? He’d had lovers, most recently the beautiful Lady Chelton. Yet he couldn’t help thinking that most of them, including Sarah, would have taken advantage of this situation with a glee and greed that would have put the greatest thief in London to shame.

“My cousin is a modest, sensible young lady, as you can see,” he said, addressing the room in general. “Having suffered so much during the war, she naturally feels compelled to be frugal. However, I have no such compulsion when it comes to my cousin’s happiness, so please make sure she has everything she requires, and something more besides.”

“I most certainly shall!” Madame de Malanche cried eagerly, while the linen-draper and silk mercer smiled, as did the shoemaker, still tapping away in the corner.

The overly excited haberdasher waved a pair of stockings like a call to arms and the milliner came boldly forward with the most ridiculous hat Drury had ever seen, quite unlike the charming chapeau Juliette had worn when she’d left him in her room.

“Sir Douglas, the corsetier has arrived,” Millstone intoned from the doorway.

That was too much.

“I believe that is my cue to depart,” Drury said, hurrying to the door. “I leave it all to you, Juliette. Adieu!”

In spite of his desire to be gone, he paused on the threshold and glanced back at the young woman standing in the center of the colorful disarray. She looked like a worried general besieged by fabric and furbelows, and he felt a most uncharacteristic urge to grin as he beat a hasty retreat.

Only later, when Drury was in his chambers listening to James St. Claire ask for his help to defend a washerwoman unjustly accused of theft, did he realize that he had left a Frenchwoman to spend his money as she liked. Even more surprising, he was more anxious to see her in some pretty new clothes than worried about the expense.

At the same time, as the modiste and others pressed Juliette to select this or that or the other, she began to wonder if there wasn’t another motive for Sir Douglas Drury’s generosity.

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