Loretta Chase - Vixen In Velvet

“He can’t help himself,” Lord Lisburne said. “He tries, he says, to be more like Byron when he wrote Don Juan , but it always comes out more like an exceedingly weepy version of Childe Harold . At best. But happily for you, there’s no more room.”

No room . Relief wafted through her like a cooling breeze. She wouldn’t have to sit through hours of dismal poetry—

But she hadn’t come for her own entertainment, she reminded herself. This was business . Where Lord Swanton appeared, Maison Noirot’s prime potential clientele would be. Equally important, Lady Gladys would be here.

“All the better if it’s a crush,” Leonie said. “And a late entrance will draw attention.”

“Even if you deflated the sleeves and skirt, you couldn’t squeeze in,” he said. “I gave up my place and two women took it. The lecture hall is packed to the walls. That, by the way, is where most of the men have retreated to. Since they’re bored and you’re young and pretty, you might expect to encounter a lot of sweaty hands trying to go where they’ve no business to be.”

Leonie’s skin crawled. She’d been pawed before. Being able to defend herself did not make the experience any less disgusting. “I told Lady Gladys I’d be here,” she said.

“Why on earth did you do that?”

“It’s business,” she said.

“None of mine, in other words,” he said.

She had no intention of explaining about Paris and the night she’d been hurrying home, to warn her sisters of the danger, and found herself in a mob of men, being groped and narrowly escaping rape.

This wasn’t Paris, she told herself. This was London, and the place did not contain a mob. It was merely crowded, like so many other social gatherings. She walked to the lecture hall door.

He followed her. “A hot, stuffy room, crammed with excitable young women and irritated men, and Swanton and his poetic friends sobbing over fallen leaves and dead birds and wilted flowers,” he said. “Yes, I can understand why you can’t bear to be left out.”

“It’s business ,” she said.

She cracked open the door and peered inside.

She had a limited view, through a narrow space the doorkeepers had managed to maintain in front of the door. Primarily women occupied the seats on the ground floor, and they were so tightly squeezed together, they were half in one another’s laps. They and a few men—fathers and brothers, most likely—thronged the mezzanine and upper gallery as well. The latter seemed to sag under the weight. Men filled every square inch of the standing room. The space was stifling hot, and the aroma of tightly packed bodies assaulted her nostrils.

Meanwhile somebody who wasn’t Lord Swanton was reading, in throbbing tones, an ode to a dying rose.

She retreated a step. Her back came up against a warm, solid mass. Silk whispered against silk.

Lord Lisburne leaned in to look over her shoulder, and the mingled scents of freshly pressed linen and shaving soap and male wiped out the smell of the crowd and swamped her senses.

“Aren’t you glad you were late?” he said. “You might be sitting in there.” His breath tickled her ear. “And you wouldn’t be able to get out until it was over.”

She’d be trapped, listening to poetic dirges, for hours. She closed her eyes and told herself it was business , then took a steadying breath and opened them again. She would go through this door. She—

His large, gloved hand settled on the door inches from her shoulder. He closed the door.

“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go to the circus.”

Never warn me, my dear, to take care of my heart ,

When I dance with yon Lancer, so fickle and smart;

What phantoms the mind of eighteen can create ,

That boast not a charm at discreet twenty-eight .

—Mrs. Abdy, “A Marrying Man,” 1835

Miss Noirot turned quickly. Since Lisburne hadn’t moved, she came up against him, her bosom touching his waistcoat for one delicious instant. She smelled delicious, too.

She brought up her hand and gave him a push, and not, as you’d think, a little-girlish or flirtatious sort of push. It was a firm shove. While not strong enough to move him, it was a clear enough signal that she wasn’t playing coquette.

He took the message and retreated a pace.

“The circus,” she said, much as she might have said, “The moon.”

“Astley’s,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” she said.

“For one thing, no melancholy verse,” he said. “For another, no melancholy verse. And for a third—”

“It’s on the other side of the river!” she said, as though that were, indeed, the moon.

“Yes,” he said. “That puts the full width of the Thames between us and the melancholy verse.”

“Us,” she said.

“You got all dressed up,” he said. “What a shocking waste of effort if you don’t go out to an entertainment.”

“The circus,” she said.

“It’s truly entertaining,” he said. “I promise. Actors and acrobats and clowns. But best of all are the feats of horsemanship. Ducrow, the manager, is a brilliant equestrian.”

For all his careless manner, Lisburne rarely left much to chance. In her case, he’d done his research. Her given name was Leonie and she was, as she’d said, the businesswoman of Maison Noirot. One sister had married a duke, the other the heir to a marquessate, yet she went to the shop every day, as though their move into the highest ranks of the aristocracy made no difference whatsoever. This was an odd and illuminating circumstance.

The seamstresses, he’d learned, worked six days a week, from nine in the morning until nine at night, and her own hours seemed to be the same or longer. This, he’d concluded, greatly increased the odds against her having time to spend at Astley’s or any other place of entertainment.

She gave a little shake of her head, and waved her hand in an adorably imperious manner, signaling him to get out of her way.

He knew he stood too close—that was to say, as close as one could get without treading on her hem, women taking up a deal of space these days, in the arm and shoulder area as well as below the waist. In her case, he tested the boundary more than usual. Still, he was a man of considerable, and successful, experience with women.

He obediently moved out of the way to walk alongside.

“Here’s the thing,” he said as he accompanied her across the conversation room. “We can take a hackney to Astley’s, watch the show for an hour or so, and still get back before this funeral is over. By that time, the crowd’s bound to have thinned out. The girls are all here with chaperons. A good many girls, I promise you, will be dragged home earlier than they like, because there’s a limit, you know, to how much a brother, say, will sacrifice for his sister. Same for Papa and Mama and Great Aunt Philomena.”

They’d reached the door to the lobby. He opened it.

She sailed through, in a thrilling swish of silk.

“I know you’re unlikely to find the sort of clientele you prefer in a place like Astley’s,” he said. “But I thought you might enjoy the women’s costumes.”

“Not half so much as you will, I daresay,” she said. “Skimpy, are they?”

“Yes, of course, like a ballerina or nymph or whatever it is Miss Woolford will be playing,” he said. “She’s a treat. But the whole show is wonderful. The performers stand on the horses’ backs, and go round and round the ring. And the horses perform the cleverest tricks. As good as the acrobats.”

She looked up, her blue gaze searching.