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“Do I look like a spy to you, Your Grace?” she asked.
She still didn’t know which grace he was, only that his name was Chester. She ought to ask but it was almost embarrassing to ask a man she was now so familiar with. The introductions had blurred under ratafia and near-ruin; “Your Grace” was safe enough until she dared ask more.
He considered her with exaggerated seriousness. His gaze traced the line of her bonnet ribbons, the slope of her shoulders under rose silk, the careful set of her weight.
“You are certainly observant enough,” he said. “And your shoes”—his mouth quirked—“your shoes suggest you may need to run in pursuit of a criminal at any moment.”
Her gaze dropped.
The hem of her gown had betrayed her again; a shift of fabric had lifted just enough for the lantern to catch the edge of leather. Not a satin slipper in sight. Her honest, ugly, beloved boots.
Most people, seeing them, saw only the flaw they served: the hesitant gait, the drag of her right foot. The proof that something in her was damaged and therefore suspected as potential wife and questionable mother, if ever. The ton’s gossip painted her sickly in ways she’d rather not hear from the gossips. She had heard those verdicts in whispers for years.
He saw utility. Agency. Speed.
Laughter burst out of her—real, unladylike, utterly beyond her control. It startled her.
“I have never before been praised for my boots,” she managed.
“I cannot imagine why,” he murmured. “I have been admiring them all evening.”
Heat threaded under her skin. She had the foolish impulse to tell him that when he had caught her at the sideboard, his hand on her elbow had been exactly like that—not clutching, not fussing. Just…sure. Steady. As if he anticipated that she would stand on her own as soon as she could, and his only duty, in the meantime, was to keep her from crashing into the ratafia.
No one had ever touched her with that particular mix of respect and care. People either pitied, or pretended not to see.
“Very well,” she said, to cover the riot in her chest. “Russian spy. What is your next wild theory? Something not criminal, perhaps.”
He pretended to think. “I fear you will be disappointed. Theory the second: you are the mastermind of a criminal band.”
She rolled her eyes, already smiling. “Naturally.”
“You use the pâtisserie as a front,” he continued. “Crates marked FLOUR concealing contraband. Messages folded into waxed paper. The crème brûlée, of course, indicates who is to be robbed next. Maps on burned sugar. Eat the evidence, memorize the path.”
She snorted. “I should be a dreadful criminal, Your Grace. I go pink when I lie. I would confess everything to the magistrate before he had unhooked his cloak.”
“That sounds remarkably like honesty,” he said. “Which brings me to my third theory.”
She lifted a brow. “Which had better be more flattering than the first two.”
“Oh, I think so.” His smile softened. “There’s a poem, Piers Plowman. Heavy, thorny thing. But there is a lady in it—Lady Meed.”
“Meed?” she echoed.
“Reward,” he translated. “In the wrong hands she’s bribery, corruption, everything crooked about coin. In the right hands she’s simply what is fair—wages paid, work honored, no one cheated. The churchmen argue themselves hoarse about her while a plowman quietly goes on with his work, trying to live decently.”
“And you think I am like her?” Pepper said slowly. “An argument?”
He laughed under his breath. “A spark,” he said. “You stand in drawing rooms and talk about grain and ledgers when you’re meant to be discussing bonnets. You stand in kitchens and terrify sugar into behaving because you know what a spoiled batch costs a house. You make people remember where justice ought to fall. That is…inconvenient. And rather magnificent.”
She hadn’t meant to, but her eyes met his fully then.
It was a wild comparison. It was also the first time anyone had tried to name the shape she felt inside her when she argued with Mrs. Hart about risk, when she wrote furious letters as M. Beaumont, when she thought of Wyndale’s circular and wanted to throw ink at the wall.
He was handsome, of course. Any girl on the Steyne could have told her that. But it was the other things she saw now that unsettled her: the tiny line near his left eye that said he laughed more than he frowned; the way he didn’t glance away when she grew heated, but leaned in, as though her anger were something he could bear with her. The memory of his hand on her elbow—firm without taking, steady without patronage.
Dangerous, she thought suddenly. This man is dangerous.
Not in the way Mama meant when she spoke of gamblers and rakes. In a much worse way: in the way o[AR20]f someone she could like. Could trust. Could hand a part of herself to and hope he did not drop it.
