One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,23

you are inside, you must—”

“Oh, it is you,” she began and turned toward him slightly before seeming to think better of it and walking on. “I wasn’t certain—you make a masterful footman, by the way. Even better than your bookshop clerk. I think I understand now why they call you Magpie. I read up on the species in Bewick’s Birds this morning, you see. ‘Crafty and familiar,’ he says. They’re great mimics apparently. Do you know, they can be made to repeat whole sentences? I suppose that’s why some people try to domesticate them.”

“My lady—”

But that was that. They were at the door, where conversation between them could too easily be either seen or overheard, and would in any case be regarded with suspicion, given the part he was playing. He was obliged to bow and back away, handing her over to the care of another liveried footman just inside, who had the honor of helping her to remove her cloak. Rubies glittered at her ears and throat. He might have lingered for another look if not for the sound of an approaching carriage.

He had had no chance to convey his plan. No notion of how or when he’d reconnect with her tonight. If Dulsworthy caught her snooping, it could mean trouble—for both of them.

Yet his thoughts, such as they were, had once again wandered far away from codebooks and Lieutenant Hopkins. Far even from this Brook Street mansion. Some walrus-faced nob had to speak sharply to him before he realized he was letting the rain drip off the edge of his umbrella and down a lady’s back. Evans would have his head, and might even fire him before he had a chance to sneak into the house.

Still, he was lost in the winding stream of Lady Kingston’s silly chatter.

Crafty and familiar.

A mimic.

Was that how she saw him?

If she only knew…

Chapter 5

Amanda drew back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and walked toward the ballroom, fighting with every step the impulse to make sure her bosom was still contained within the shallow bodice of her gown.

Guilt, not gravity, lay behind the impulse, as she well knew. She’d had to engage in subterfuge to escape the house in this dress, rather than the one her mother had chosen, which had been blue, of course, and perfectly demure. A dress not for dancing and flirting and adventure, but for sitting in a straight-backed chair on the fringes of the ballroom with the other matrons.

So Amanda had arranged for Martha to come, just as soon as Mama had seen her in the blue gown, and say that Philip was complaining of the stomachache. Everyone had played their part with perfection, even the unknowing actors: Martha had worn a wide-eyed expression of concern, Amanda had bustled and fussed and been on the point of declaring she couldn’t go to the ball, and Mama had protested and insisted all would be fine and declared that she would personally go upstairs to look after the boys.

Before ten minutes more had passed, Martha had helped Amanda out of the blue gown, into the rose one, and out the door.

The guilt that prickled at her now wasn’t entirely because she had deceived her mother, though. Certainly at two and thirty, she hardly required a chaperone. No, it was in larger measure the knowledge that she had insisted on the low-cut rose gown not to please George, who would almost certainly not be pleased by it, but to attract the notice of someone else entirely.

But would Major Stanhope even see it?

Not that she expected compliments from him if he did. Even knowing him so little, she felt certain it was not in his nature. She would have been contented with a few other words from him: some explanation of how he imagined the evening would proceed, at what hour she was to go looking for the book, and how she was to return it to him if she found it. But the walk into the house had been so brief—it had taken her more than half the time to decide whether it was really he beside her—and now, here she was, alone, moving through the receiving line and refusing to look down at her bodice.

Oh, who was she kidding? Her bosom was neither the size nor the shape to be prone to bursting out of its confinement.

On the threshold of the ballroom, she curtsied to Lord Wrexham, George’s brother-in-law, whose town house was by design too small to host the