“Ah. I see.” The man nodded gravely. “I’m Mr. Ogden, Mr. Marchand’s secretary. Since you cared enough to lie, MissWoodville, I’ll just see whether he has a moment to speak with you, if you would care to take a seat?”
Two tasteful brown leather chairs native to all places wealthy men congregate flanked his desk. She gingerly settled into one.
Well. This was almost too easy.
Mr. Ogden advanced about twenty paces to a room divided by a partial wall from the one in which she sat. More sunlight shone over the top of it, suggesting Mr. Marchand enjoyed another cathedral-like window in his office.
During their bass-voiced, murmured conversation, Ginny pulled in and released three long breaths. It did little to slow her galloping heart. Her palms were clammy inside her gloves; the cold tip of the knitting needle she’d tucked inside her sleeve pricked her skin. She would be prepared to defend herself if the need arose. She glanced down at her lap; the mirrorlike sea of marble made her dizzy. When she jerked her head up again she noticed the ormolu-trimmed sconces lining the wall and a sleek bronze statue of a woman in a toga, one bare breast exposed, tucked in an alcove. At the far end of the atrium, behind Mr. Ogden’s desk, a door led into a hall.
Just in case, this morning she’d silently asked her mother to send her the usual sign that all would be well. She’d found it in the garden in front of the Grand Palace on the Thames: a tiny gray stone shaped like a heart. She’d collected twenty such stones over the years, and she kept them in a little wooden box on her writing desk. Whenever she felt sickeningly uncertain or achingly alone, Ginny sifted them through her fingers, remembered that she was still loved, and took courage.
For extra luck, she’d worn her copper-colored silk dress, because the Honorable Francis Balfort had once pronounced her “mesmerizing” in it. Her sisters, Felicity and Fiona, were a matched set of petite, blue-eyed, black-haired fairy princesses, like their mother. They almost instantly inspired daft, protective cooing in men. Ginny inspired what could best be described as appreciative wariness in them. She was long-legged and lush, with fierce, straight black brows over big, round whiskey-colored eyes. Her mouth was pink and full and her black hair billowed like bonfire smoke when released from its pins.
“You look wise and a little dangerous, as though you ought to be striding the moors, calling down the thunder,” Francis, the third son of a duke, had once declared after he’d had three cups of ratafia at an assembly. After a long pause he’d added, “Apart from the freckles, that is.”
She didn’t bother anymore powdering the faint spray of golden-brown robin’s-egg-like speckles on her cheeks. They were a deceptively whimsical feature on a girl who, by nature and by necessity, patently was not.
At last Mr. Ogden returned.
“Mr. Marchand is able to spare a few minutes for a chat, Miss Woodville. If you will come with me?”
Over the past eight years she’d learned the lengths she was willing to go to protect her family, and more than a little about shameless bargaining. She’d walked into the unknown nearly every day.
She stood, squared her shoulders, hiked her chin, and like a madwoman followed him into the Reaper’s den.
Chapter Two
Ginny’s father had once received a rifle from his friend and rival, the Earl of Sydenham. It had a lustrous walnut stock, a filigreed trigger guard, and a silver thumb plate engraved with her father’s initials. It was a work of art that could blow a man’s head off at two hundred paces.
Mr. Marchand was like meeting that rifle in the flesh.
He was standing in the sunbeam slanting down from the high arched window.
She’d needed to tilt her head what felt like an inordinate distance to discover his eyes were gray. The jolt she felt upon meeting them was, in fact, like touching the hot barrel of a gun.
Whereupon she was assailed by a host of inconvenient epiphanies.
The first was that this was not a man who could be mesmerized by a copper-colored dress. It afforded about as much strategic defense as an eggshell.
She didn’t need to inspect him to be certain that his coat, trousers, and waistcoat were expensive, current, and exquisitely tailored, as tasteful as the surroundings, and also that all of this was sheep’s clothing. No gentleman had need of shoulders thatbroad, for one thing. They were unseemly, nefarious shoulders, no doubt acquired by doing things like wrestling people to the ground. And no gentleman she’d ever met exuded the unsettlingly calm confidence of a predator in repose.
He was slapping her calling card lightly against his palm.
“Engraved,” he mused. The rich timbre of his voice rustled across her nerve endings in a disturbingly pleasant way. “Impressive, Miss Woodville. I find I get so much more out of the experience if I can feel the words as well as read them.”
Detecting a whiff of irony, she narrowed her eyes slightly. “My thoughts exactly.”
He spoke with a gentleman’s cadences. No doubt learned through parroting.
Maddeningly, she could read no conclusions about her in his eyes. They were remote and vigilant and cynical. It was easy to believe that the person looking out of them had seen things beyond the reach of her imagination. Despite her better judgment, she wanted to know what those things were, for the same reason she’d asked fellow boardinghouse guest Mr. Delacorte, a salesman of exotic remedies, if she could have a look in his medicine case last night, and why she had taken Mrs. Haddock up on her offer to teach all the Woodvilles how to roll cheroots. One never knew what kinds of knowledge would come in useful.
Finally, Mr. Marchand extended her card to her.
Too late she realized she ought to have magnanimously said “Keep it.”
He arched a knowing brow when she took it from him.
She flushed. Clearly, he knew that engraving was expensive. This man knew the cost of everything, she would warrant.