The Scoundrel and I - Katharine Ashe Page 0,18

ribbons of her bonnet.

“I am afraid so. I encouraged her to take some broth, but she refused. Perhaps she will do so for you.”

“I should not have gone out today. With the shop closed, I should have remained at home with her while I am able. Instead I—” She dressed up like a costly doll and blushed like a ninny beneath the gaze of a naval hero. “I wasted the afternoon.”

“I cannot agree, Miss Flood. You must allow yourself some pleasures, especially now. Your grandmother is happier knowing that you are happy. She informed me with great animation that you have a suitor.”

“A suitor?”

“I wish you well in it,” he said with a kind smile, donned his hat, and departed.

In the bedchamber, her grandmother’s eyes were unusually bright.

“You are late tonight,” she said in a labored whisper as Elle crossed the room. “Were you . . . with him?”

Elle’s pulse beat like a little drum. “With whom, Gram?”

Her grandmother’s lips crinkled into a smile. “Young Sprout told me . . . about your gentleman caller.”

“The grocer’s boy? What on earth—What stories is Sprout inventing now? And why did you tell Mr. Curtis that I have a suitor?”

“Miss Dawson . . . called this afternoon.”

“Minnie? She called here? While I was—”

“With a gentleman.” Gram’s papery smile widened, and quite abruptly Elle decided that she did not care if the grocer’s boy or Mr. Curtis or Mineola or everybody in London knew she had spent time with a scoundrel if it gave her grandmother this pleasure.

“I was not precisely with him, Gram,” she admitted. “He is helping me with a—well, a very important project for the shop that I must complete before Mr. Brittle and the others return from Bristol. But what did Sprout have to do with it? Did he deliver the flour and tea while Minnie was here?”

“She paid him a penny . . . to wait at the shop . . . then to come tell me.” Her weary eyes were shining. “He said the carriage was glamorous.”

“You don’t care about carriages. You want to know about the gentleman,” Elle said with certainty. “But there is nothing to tell, Gram. He is”—tall and handsome and delicious smelling and ridiculously charming and she was definitely not immune to scoundrels—“the usual sort of man, I suppose.”

“Gabrielle, you are . . .” Her grandmother’s chest constricted and her lips tightened momentarily. “A poor liar.”

“How do you suppose that?” Elle said, hiding the lump in her throat.

“Even before today . . . I knew,” she whispered, her pain so close to the surface.

“What did you know?”

“That you are happy.”

Happy? Aching over her grandmother’s pain, yes. Panicked over the missing type, certainly. Happy, no. Not since her grandmother had fallen ill.

“Gram—”

“Your voice . . . step . . . breaths were lighter yesterday.” Her eyes were closing. “After I rest, you must . . .” Her voice was barely audible. “Tell me about him.”

But there was nothing to tell. Nothing real. This was a game to him, a momentary diversion. She had no maidenly virtue to lose; naïve fool that she had once been, she had given that eagerly to lying Jo Junior. She had nothing like that to fear from the naval captain. And her heart was incapable of making the sort of attachment to a man that she had for her grandmother and once had for her grandfather and mother. So after Elle watched her grandmother fall into sleep, she went into the kitchen and prepared dinner for herself as she did every night. That she had no appetite for it she refused to attribute to the nervous tingles that had beset her stomach for two days now. It was so much easier to blame the cakes and chocolates.

~o0o~

Again wearing his uniform, which Cob had brushed and polished, Tony drew in a long lungful of moldy air and lifted his hand to knock on the door of the miserable flat into which his former first lieutenant had moved his family after he lost everything he owned except the clothes he’d worn playing cards that night.

Mrs. Park answered it. Hollow-cheeked, with dark circles beneath her eyes and her collarbones poking through her exceedingly modest gown, she was still a fine looking woman, pretty, perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight—a few years older than Elle.

Adamantly putting out of his head the little print mistress, he bowed.

“Good day, ma’am.”

“Do come in, Captain,” Mrs. Park said softly, stepping away from the door. Everything about her except her bony