first contract she’d signed. While most of working-class Paris made do with a handshake, there were still any number of issues involving her mother and their motley family that had required contracts of one sort or another.
And she was about to break one.
She could tell herself it was his fault. He’d forced her, blackmailed her into this position, and she was simply doing what she had to do. They were his just deserts.
So why did it feel so dishonorable?
It didn’t matter. Someone in this vast household had taken pity on her. The ordinary cloak and new boots had appeared hidden in her bed, like one of the pillows, with a note and purseful of coins. Escape when you can, the note read, and Elinor would be a fool not to.
She had friends in this household. She could even count Willis and Jeanne-Louise as people with sympathy toward her situation.
But it was unlikely that any of them could write, particularly with a fine, masculine hand.
And then it came to her. Mr. Reading. He was enamored of Lydia, though for some reason he’d kept his distance. Maybe rescuing her gauche older sister was his way of winning Lydia’s favor. Except as far as she could see, Lydia’s favor was a foregone conclusion, and it was Mr. Reading who was diffident.
Escape was all well and good, she thought, feeling particularly cranky. But where did one go, if one managed to actually leave the house? Obviously she’d head for the château and extricate Lydia. Mrs. Clarke certainly wouldn’t stop her. But how did one leave in the first place when one was a prisoner? She had no idea how to get out without running afoul of Jeanne-Louise, or, heaven spare her, Rohan himself. He seemed to roam the halls like a bat, waiting to pounce.
She had no idea whether bats actually pounced or not. And Rohan wasn’t at all like a bat, which were horribly ratlike and not to her preference at all.
Rohan was like some kind of cat. When she was very young Nanny Maude had taken her to an exhibition of wild animals in Hyde Park, and there were all sorts of huge, exotic cats. Rohan wasn’t a lion, he was one of the others. Sleek and black and dangerous, with hard eyes and a strange beauty. Rohan was like some kind of cat.
And she was a mouse. A mouse who snarled. And had teeth. An angry little mouse who fought back.
For the first time in what seemed like forever she giggled.
“What’s so amusing, my precious?”
She jumped. She’d given up locking and barring her doors—he always seemed to find a way past them. This time he’d simply strolled in from her dressing room, moving as silently as…a cat.
She couldn’t help it, she giggled again. Once started, it was very hard to regain her composure. “I was thinking about you, my lord,” she said in a dulcet tone.
He raised an eyebrow. He looked particularly elegant tonight, and she remembered it was the beginning of the Revels. “You were thinking about me and laughing? How very damaging to my self-esteem.”
“Actually I was laughing about me. I was envisioning you as some kind of cat, playing games with me, but that, unlike a timid little mouse, I fought back with hisses and fangs.”
“Hisses and fangs, dearest? Oh, surely not. You really do have the strangest notion of your charms.”
Elinor snorted, an act Nanny Maude had always deplored. “To what do I owe the honor of your visit, my lord? Your vast orgy begins tonight. Shouldn’t you be planning on ruining some innocent?”
“But you see, poppet, I am.” He took a seat on the divan, glancing around him with great interest, and she could only thank God she’d had the sense to hide the clothes and money. “How have you been entertaining yourself? I sent an array of books to entertain you.”
“And lovely they were, though certain illustrated volumes were not to my taste. I don’t know what antiquities those drawings were taken from, and I doubt that such interesting contortions could actually take place. And I took leave to doubt the size of various portions of the anatomy of some of the people represented.” She managed to keep the flush of color, which had flooded her face when she first opened the volumes, away.
“Well, many of them were gods,” Rohan said carelessly. “Those were drawings taken from Roman ruins and temples in India. If you like, we can look at them together and I can