Page 26 of Rules for Ruin

“What a knight in shining armor you’ve turned out to be, Mr. Royce. First sending that boy to follow me, and now coming to my rescue.” She bent her head to briefly nuzzle her dog. “He is yours, isn’t he?”

“He works for me, yes.” Gabriel expected her to react with anger. Instead, a fleeting glimmer of relief crossed her face. “That doesn’t trouble you?”

She huffed. “I thought Lord Compton had sent him.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Why would Compton have you followed?”

“Why would you, more to the point?”

He felt the brush of her full skirts whispering against his trouser leg as they walked. The Crinoline Academy, Ollie had called the school Miss Flite had visited. And she was surely wearing a formidable crinoline now.

Gabriel pushed the image out of his mind. The last thing he needed was to be envisioning Miss Flite in her underclothes. “Perhaps I wanted to keep you out of trouble,” he said. “If Ollie hadn’t come to fetch me—”

“I was perfectly fine as I was.”

“You were five minutes away from being grievously insulted by any one of those blackguards. Or worse. And you with what—a parasol to defend you? A little scrap of a dog?”

“His name is Franc,” she informed him.

“Frank?”

“Franc,” she corrected him, with no discernable change to her pronunciation. “He’s French.”

Gabriel’s mouth tugged into a reluctant smile. “A French franc, eh? Fancy that.” He reached to give the little dog a scratch.

“I wouldn’t,” Miss Flite warned. “His bite is worse than his bark.”

“Is that a fact?”

“And so is mine,” she added.

This time Gabriel grinned.

“My parasol is tipped with steel, by the way,” she said. “It’s sharp as a razor’s edge. I was in no danger in that place, and I certainly didn’t require rescuing.”

Gabriel glanced at her black-ruffled parasol. He hadn’t noticed it before, but looking at it now…

It was, indeed, tipped with steel. The silver-sharp edges gleamed treacherously in the sunlight.

His brows lowered. He’d seen many a knife or razor secreted on a woman’s person, but he’d never observed a fashionable silken accessory made up with such lethal intent. What sort of woman carried such an article?

“On the contrary,” Miss Flite continued, “you interfered at the very moment I might have learned something useful.”

“About a woman named Grace?” he asked.

“That man said he knew her.”

“And old Ned said you were asking about someone from two decades past. That idiot who made the mistake of addressing you is all of twenty himself if he’s a day. Unless he was an infant when he met this woman—”

“Yes, yes. Very well. But still, it really is none of your business, Mr. Royce.” She paused. “Or should I say Gabriel?” Her eyes betrayed a flicker of curiosity. “Is that really your Christian name?”

“You don’t approve?”

“It isn’t that. It’s only that you don’t seem very angelic.” Stopping at the end of the alleyway, she bent to place her dog on the ground. “And you run St. Giles, do you?” she asked again as she straightened. “What does that even mean?”

“What about your name?” he countered. “Am I not to have the pleasure?”

She looked straight ahead for a moment as they resumed walking down the alleyway to the right. Her dog trotted in front of her at the full length of his lead. “Euphemia,” she said.