Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,3

her gut.

“If I were you, I would never take up gambling, Tavvie darling,” Delilah said. Apparently she had great, great stores of suppressed irony to call upon. She didn’t take her eyes away from the woman’s face. “You haven’t a game face. Perhaps you ought to introduce us.”

Mr. Tavistock sighed again. And then resolutely, like a man charged with issuing a verdict in court, cleared his throat.

“Angelique,” he said evenly, calmly to the woman. The woman glanced toward him, then back at Delilah. She’d sensed something was amiss, and her expression hovered somewhere between concern and wicked curiosity. She seemed perfectly willing to commit to either one. “I will speak to you after I conclude my business with the Countess of Derring.”

He laid those last three words down slowly, evenly, like bricks.

Tavvie didn’t have a game face.

But Angelique, it seemed, did.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. But nevertheless Delilah thought she could see the moment her heart stopped, for just one second. She’d gone motionless, frozen like one of Derring’s statues, half turned toward Tavistock, half turned toward Delilah.

She met Delilah’s stare.

Some emotion, very like pity but also like shame, scudded across Mrs. Breedlove’s features.

Her chin went up ever so slightly.

“My apologies for the interruption, Lady Derring, and my condolences on your loss,” she said quietly. “I shall speak with you another day, Mr. Tavistock.”

She closed the door very, very gently behind her.

Chapter Two

Mrs. Breedlove’s perfume lingered, but the rest of her was gone when Delilah emerged into the anteroom five minutes later.

Young Mr. Mackintosh was behind his desk, the pink of his blush still fading from his skin. The poor dear was still a few years away from being old enough to savagely disappoint a woman.

How much he knew or understood about anything he’d just heard was a mystery, and she supposed, in the end, it didn’t matter.

To his credit, he looked distressed.

“Thank you, and good day, Mr. Mackintosh,” she said.

“Lady Derring, Mrs. Breedlove wanted me to give this to you.”

He leaped to his feet and handed a sheet of folded foolscap to her.

Her hands, awkward with nerves, fumbled as she opened it, and read:

I recommend sewing your jewels into the hems of your dresses before you flee into the night.

It was unsigned. The handwriting was tidy and elegant, even a little prim. It might have been an invitation to tea from the Duchess of Brexford, whom Delilah despised and whose approval she had craved because her husband had wanted her to crave it and didn’t every woman want what her husband wanted?

Delilah growled low in her throat and crunched the note in her fist.

The extraordinary . . . the unmitigated . . . the gall!

Hot, furious breaths shredded her lungs as she pulled them in and out.

To write to her as though they were equals!

But aren’t you? said some unwelcome, bitterly rational voice in her head.

Two women impoverished by the same man?

And Delilah was no one without a man, wasn’t that so? Her title meant not a thing when she hadn’t inherited it and she was poor.

Vertigo swept in. The husband, the land, the manners, the clothes, the vases and rugs, the friends, the horses, the barouche, the jewels, her favorite chair by the solarium window. How odd that they formed the fabric of her life, and yet none of it was hers. Her very personality wasn’t hers. It was something she’d donned like widow’s weeds or a pantomime costume in order to play her role. Who was she? Did she even exist? Perhaps this was all a dream. But would that be better?

She held the crumpled note in her fist while Mackintosh eyed her warily, his shoulders hunched as though he was prepared to dive beneath his desk. Perhaps her expression suggested she intended to hurl it.

She stuffed it into her reticule instead, next to that jingling ring of keys.

Her life thus far: nearly two decades of fear and ceaseless tension of poverty, followed by six years of relief and luxury and boredom and tolerance.

And now, it seemed, hideous fear was up at bat again.

She thought these thoughts on the way back to a house that didn’t belong to her, in the carriage that didn’t belong to her, drawn by horses that didn’t belong to her, driven by a driver whose expression was, as he handed her in, cagey—when days before it had been all warm deference. She knew that all the servants in London were part of a circulatory system and word would get out,