Page 4 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

“She’ll have her maid fetch it ’round to the shop,” declared Lord Dulsworthy, now raising his hand as if to clap the stranger on the shoulder and direct him toward the door.

The man moved only slightly, not out of George’s reach, but enough that George too could see his face, which had turned…Amanda could not decide how to describe his expression but settled at last on stern. George’s hand fell.

“The book in Lady Kingston’s possession is a rarity, sir,” the man explained in a cool voice. “And much anticipated by another customer. I must insist on retrieving it myself.” He returned his attention to her as he reached into his breast pocket, withdrew a card, and held it out to her. “A message here will always reach me, Lady Kingston.”

The line of his jaw was firm and his dark eyes narrowed slightly. Intense was perhaps a better word than stern to capture his demeanor, but in any case, the look sent a prickle of uncertainty along her spine. All this, for a recipe book?

Awkwardly, she juggled the package into the crook of her arm to free one hand. Once more, out of the corner of her eye, she saw George’s fingers twitch as if he were tempted to snatch the card from the stranger. He was always so protective of her, of the boys. But the card was safely within her grasp before he made any further movement.

Across the rectangle of stiff paper, the stranger’s neatly manicured thumb nearly met her considerably grimier one. Like the broad-brimmed hat, gloves were sometimes an encumbrance during scientific pursuits. With a murmur of embarrassment, she took the card and tucked it beneath the string wrapped around the package. “Thank you. I’ll be in touch soon.”

“I await your message most eagerly, Lady Kingston.” With another bow, he turned and was gone.

Almost before the door closed behind him, certainly before she could draw breath, the boys raced into the hall, their questions echoing off the high ceiling: “What book, Mama? Who was that man? Can I open the package?” As they fell to arguing between themselves over the honor, George resumed upbraiding Lewis, his voice only adding a deeper note to the cacophony. Amanda was surprised that neither Matthews nor her mother came running to shush them.

But no one came. No one even seemed to notice when she said, “I’ll just take this upstairs, shall I? And freshen up? I’ll only be a moment.”

The stout door of her bedchamber ought to have restored everything to its usual quiet, but even in the silence, her head buzzed. The unaccustomed noise in the entry hall must have left her ears ringing. Or perhaps too much time in the sun had done it. Either way, her nerves jangled and hummed like a badly tuned pianoforte.

Out of habit, she reached for the bell to ring for her maid. With the other hand, she clutched both the book and her hat, now rather mangled, against her side. As her breast rose and fell with the slight exertion of climbing the stairs, the corner of the book pressed into her ribcage, its sharpness a reminder of that morning’s scuffle. She glanced down at the package—the paper wrappings, the string, the calling card with no writing visible. She thought of the striking-looking stranger. She let the silk-tasseled bell rope slip through her fingers without pulling it.

Instead, she tossed her hat onto her dressing table with a flick of her wrist and stepped toward the bed. Against the ivory silk coverlet, figured with delicate embroidery of yellow and pink roses and green vines, the coarse brown paper and twine looked out of place. She slid the card free and put it aside without looking at it. There was nothing mysterious, certainly nothing interesting or exciting, about having received the wrong book this morning. Nothing intriguing about the man who had delivered the correct one.

Nevertheless, she caught herself holding her breath as she slipped the knot and peeled back the paper to reveal exactly what she’d expected to find the first time: a copy of Pascal’s De l’Esprit géométrique, bound in tooled blue leather.

If she felt something like disappointment, she hid it, swiftly enfolding the book in the paper again. Jamie would be delighted. In the morning, she would send ’round a note to—to—

It required more resolve than it ought to pluck up his card from where it lay on the coverlet. For pity’s sake. Why was her fancy determined to make something out of nothing? Mistakes were made every day. A shop certainly might employ a gentlemanlike sort of fellow to smooth them over. He’d said the recipe book was valuable. All the more reason to entrust the task of retrieving it to someone other than an ordinary clerk. Just because the events of today stood out in her mind, a splash of color on the canvas of her dull, ordinary life, it did not therefore follow that either the mix-up or the man was actually interesting.…

When she swept the card toward her with two fingers, its sharp corner snagged one of the embroidered roses and unraveled a quarter-inch or so of pale pink silk thread. Absently, she smoothed the injury with her fingertip before turning over the calling card, wondering what the man’s name might be.

But the card bore no name, and her pulse kicked up a notch in spite of her determination to be calm.

Half of the creamy-white rectangle was taken up with a black and white picture of a bird. Long-tailed and sharp-beaked. And beside it, a direction that did not belong to Porter’s bookshop.

Mind your step, Amanda. Mind your step.

What exactly had she stumbled into this time?

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” she scolded herself aloud and tried to shake off her foolishness. So she’d been given the wrong book. So the man who’d been tasked with exchanging it for the right one carried an unusual card. Her imagination was running away with her.

The sooner the mistake with the packages was resolved, the better. Lord Dulsworthy was waiting below to take her driving, and he would be wondering what had become of her.

She picked up the book and tucked it behind one of the mountains of pillows on the bed. Jamie wouldn’t pry, but Philip might, and she did so want it to be a surprise. Then she turned toward the door to her sitting room, intending to lay the card on her escritoire, where she would sit down in the morning and write the note that would put an end to the matter.

Only the thought of her mother’s curiosity, sharp as the edges of the stranger’s mysterious calling card, gave her pause. After a quick glance around, she tucked it into her shift. It lay against her skin, cool and crisp.

As she crossed back to the bellpull to summon her maid, the corners of the card pricked her with every movement, yet she did not remove it from her bodice. Would Martha spy it there when she helped her change into a fresh gown?

If she did, then the snagged coverlet would be something to distract her with. The girl had an eye for detail and a knack with needle and thread.

This afternoon, she must keep her promise to go driving with dear, old George. But tomorrow evening, once the cookbook had been returned and quiet once more hung over the house like a pall, then Amanda would be at leisure to lie in her bed beneath the freshly mended coverlet, to trace the embossing on the stranger’s card, and to embroider the memory of this little interlude to her heart’s content.

Chapter 2

With the stairs of Bartlett House pitching downward before him, Major Langley Stanhope paused to pinch the bridge of his nose between his thumb and first finger. He did not swear, though a few colorful phrases sprang to mind, remnants of a youth spent in quite another part of London than the wide, tree-lined streets of Mayfair.

Not that he’d failed in his mission. Not yet.