Loretta Chase - Regency Rogues and Rakes - Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares

The fellow was making for a door, and it opened a crack, its inhabitants expecting him, no doubt. Longmore got to him first. He grabbed the thief and dragged him backward. The door banged shut.

Longmore slammed him against the nearest wall. The man instantly crumpled and slid to the ground, dropping the basket. Though he couldn’t be much damaged—these villains didn’t break easily—he stayed where he was, eyes closed.

“I shouldn’t get up again in a hurry, if I were you,” Longmore said. “Filthy coward. Attacking women. ” Longmore collected the basket and cast a glance round the court. With any luck, dangerous accomplices would hurry to their friend’s rescue.

But no luck. The area was quiet, though Longmore was well aware he was being watched. He sauntered out into Piccadilly.

He found the girl minutes later. She stood slumped against a shop front, weeping. “Never mind the bawling,” he said. “Here’s your precious goods.” He fished some coins from a pocket and thrust those and the shabby basket into her hands. “What in blazes was in your mind, rushing on blindly without minding your surroundings?”

“W-work,” she said. “I had to get to work … your lordship.”

He didn’t ask how she knew he was a lord.

Everybody knew the Earl of Longmore.

“Thieves and drunken aristocrats roaming the streets, looking for trouble, and you without a weapon,” he said. “What’s wrong with women these days?”

“I d-don’t know.”

She was shaking like a leaf. She was bruised and dirty from her fall in the street. She was lucky that none of the scores of drunken louts on their way home from their debauches had run her over.

“Come with me,” he said.

Whether too shaken to think or simply intimidated—he often had that effect, even on his peers—she followed him across the street to the hackney. His friends could have continued on: They were drunk enough. But they’d stopped to watch the fun.

“Everybody out,” Longmore said.

They made noises of protest but they staggered out of the vehicle, all staring at the drab female. “Not your type, Longmore,” Hempton said.

Crawford shook his head. “Standards dropping, I’m afraid to say.”

Longmore ignored them. “Where were you going?” he said to the girl.

She stared at him, then at his friends, then at the tarts.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Nobody’s interested in your doings. We only want to get on to the next party. Where do you want the driver to take you?”

She swallowed. “Please, your lordship, I was on my way to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females,” she said.

“There’s a mouthful,” Crawford said.

“I work there,” the girl said. “I’m going to be late.”

She gave Longmore the direction, which he relayed to the driver, with strict orders to take the girl to her destination in half the usual time, or Longmore would find him and give him an excellent excuse for moving slowly.

He helped the girl up into the coach, slammed the door on her, and waved the driver away.

He thought about milliners.

One milliner, actually, a blonde one.

Leaving his companions to find another hackney, he continued on foot, on his own, the short distance to St. James’s Street. To get to Crockford’s, he had to pass White’s Club on one side of the street, and a very little way farther down, Maison Noirot, lair of French dressmakers.

He passed the dressmakers’ shop, walking slowly. Then he paused and looked back, up at the upper storeys where, for reasons that eluded him, two of the three Noirot sisters still lived.

He continued to Crockford’s, where he proceeded to lose large sums for quite an interesting while before he started to win large sums.

When, after an hour or so of increasing boredom, he left Crockford’s, it was still prodigious early by Fashionable Society’s standards. Nonetheless, London was coming to life. People going up and down St. James’s Street: a few vehicles but mainly pedestrians. The shops hadn’t yet opened.

Maison Noirot, he knew, did not open until ten o’clock, though the seamstresses—a great parade of them these days—all marched in at nine.

Still, over the past few weeks he had acquired a general notion of Sophia Noirot’s habits.

He waited.

For the last week, the whole of the fashionable world has been in a state of ferment, on account of the elopement of Sir Colquhoun Grant’s daughter with Mr. Brinsley Sheridan … On Friday afternoon, about five o’clock, the young couple borrowed the carriage of a friend; and … set off full speed for the North.

—The Court Journal, Saturday 23 May 1835

London

Thursday 21 May 1835

Waving a copy of Foxe’s Morning Spectacle , Sophy Noirot burst in upon the Duke and Duchess of Clevedon while they were breakfasting in, appropriately enough, the breakfast room of Clevedon House.

“Have you seen this?” she said, throwing down the paper on the table between her sister and new brother-in-law. “The ton is in a frenzy—and isn’t it hilarious? They’re blaming Sheridan’s three sisters. Three sisters plotting wicked plots—and it isn’t us! Oh, my love, when I saw this, I thought I’d die laughing.”

Certain members of Society had more than once in recent days compared the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot—which Sophy would make London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it killed her—to the three witches in Macbeth. Had they not bewitched the Duke of Clevedon, rumor said, he would never have married a shopkeeper.

Their Graces’ dark heads bent over the barely dry newspaper.

Rumors about the Sheridan-Grant elopement were already traveling the beau monde grapevine, but the Spectacle , as usual, was the first to put confirmation in print.

Marcelline looked up. “They say Miss Grant’s papa will bring a suit against Sheridan in Chancery,” she said. “Exciting stuff, indeed.”

At that moment, a footman entered. “Lord Longmore, Your Grace,” he said.

Not now, dammit , Sophy thought. Her sister had the beau monde in an uproar, she’d made a deadly enemy of one of its most powerful women—who happened to be Longmore’s mother—customers were deserting in droves, and Sophy had no idea how to repair the damage.

Now him.

The Earl of Longmore strolled into the breakfast room, a newspaper under his arm.

Sophy’s pulse rate accelerated. It couldn’t help itself.

Black hair and glittering black eyes … the noble nose that ought to have been broken a dozen times yet remained stubbornly straight and arrogant … the hard, cynical mouth … the six-foot-plus frame.

All that manly beauty.

If only he had a brain.

No, better not. In the first place, brains in a man were inconvenient. In the second, and far more important, she didn’t have time for him or any man. She had a shop to rescue from Impending Doom.

“I brought you the latest Spectacle ,” he said to the pair at the table. “But I wasn’t quick enough off the mark, I see.”

“Sophy brought it,” said Marcelline.

Longmore’s dark gaze came to Sophy. She gave him a cool nod and sauntered to the sideboard. She looked into the chafing dishes and concentrated on filling her plate.

“Miss Noirot,” he said. “Up and about early, I see. You weren’t at Almack’s last night.”

“Certainly not,” Sophy said. “The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t make the patronesses give me a voucher.”

“Since when do you wait for permission? I was so disappointed. I was on pins and needles to see what disguise you’d adopt. My favorite so far is the Lancashire maidservant.”