The Scoundrel and I - Katharine Ashe Page 0,21

that I am attending a ball tonight. I do not quite believe it.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I did not tell them about the missing type,” she said, forcing her gaze away from his profile that she wanted to trace with her fingertips. “And I feel positively awful.”

“Wager you did it to protect them rather than yourself.”

“How do you know that?”

He only smiled.

“Perhaps it was to protect me too,” she admitted.

“What did you tell them?”

“That Madame Étoile is considering hiring Brittle and Sons to print advertisements, and she wished to interview me extensively before doing so but has little time to spare.”

He turned his face to her.

“I know!” she exclaimed. “I am a positively wretched liar. I could not even invent a halfway believable lie. But how could I tell them the truth? If Jo Junior even suspected that they helped me replace the missing type, he would go up and down Gracechurch Street blackening their reputations with their employers, until each of them had been released.”

“Jo Junior?”

“Josiah Brittle Junior. My employer’s eldest son.”

“Has it in for you, does he?” he asked with a single lifted brow, and abruptly she realized that speaking to this man about her past with Jo Junior was the height of folly.

“Yes. A bit. Oh, see, we are here! So swiftly. What speedy horses you bought today, Captain,” she said lamely. He knew. Casting her a curious glance, he leaped down from the box and went around the horses to assist her.

She liked the sensation of his hand taking hers. She liked it far too much. It made her feel insensibly light—almost weightless—merely his hand holding hers to assist her from the carriage. Perhaps her grandmother was right. Perhaps she was enjoying this taste of a gentleman’s attention, even if it was only in order to save her position at the shop.

And perhaps she was the greatest fool alive.

Inside the house Seraphina greeted them with the same affectionate elegance as before.

“Off to change for the evening, then,” the captain said as his cousin shepherded her up the stairs.

“Don’t forget, Anthony. You must wear your uniform,” Seraphina said and then drew Elle into the pink and cream satin room.

~o0o~

He did not wear his uniform.

Elle had a very poor opinion of sailors. Her father had been a sailor. He had abandoned her and her mother in a hovel on the unforgiving coast of southern Cornwall, to reappear after her mother’s death when Elle was eight, only to sell every book and trinket in the hovel and spend it on gin then die a year later of a failed liver. She had formed her opinion of the sailorly ilk young and quite firmly.

Captain Anthony Masinter seemed cut from another sort of seafaring fabric altogether. And, however much she wished to deny it, he cut a truly splendid figure in his navy blue and whites.

Dressed for a ball, he was even handsomer.

A coat of rich blue complemented his tan skin and dark hair, and formal black breeches hugged the muscles in his legs so well that Elle was obliged to glue her attention to his face. But that proved no less taxing to her nerves. For as she descended the stairs on silk slippers and he turned from his contemplation of a painting, his beautiful eyes swept her from tip to toe, and his features went instantly, entirely slack.

“What?” she said, reaching up to cover the delicate collar of paste diamonds that Penelope had fastened about her neck and which draped over her otherwise exposed bosom. She wished she could cover up her whole body. Her shift and petticoat were tissue thin, the gown just as scant, and the overskirt entirely translucent, cinched beneath the bodice with a single silver ribbon. “Is something amiss? Am I not convincing enough?”

“As a printing-shop girl,” he said in a low voice, “not really.”

“As a princess, thoroughly,” Seraphina said behind her. “She dresses up nicely, doesn’t she, Anthony?”

“Aye.” As he came forward there was a light of deviltry in his eyes that dispelled Elle’s nerves and made her abruptly eager for the evening’s adventure. He glanced at his cousin. “Not dressed yet, Seri?”

“I will be momentarily. But you must go ahead of me to Lady B’s. Who knows how long Uncle Frederick will last tonight? Now go fetch the carriage, Tony.”

He looked about the foyer. “Your butler’s broken his leg, has he?”

Seraphina chuckled lightly. “Darling, go. I must say a word to Miss Flood without you present.”

“Aha. Feminine secrets.” With a bow, he went.

Elle turned to