Page 36 of The Wallflower Manifesto
The memory of it had him suppressing a smile as they approached the ladies.
“Lady Bentley,” Silas said with a polite (if stiff) bow. “I am honored you accepted our invitation. Miss Yardley, it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“Little Silas Cain,” Lady Bentley said with a dimpled grin, extending her hand as though their reunion were perfectly normal. “My, how you’ve grown.”
Silas gave a self-conscious laugh, kissing the lady’s knuckles in greeting. “I suppose I have.”
“I haven’t seen you since you were in leading strings, my boy,” she said, giving Abe a cursory nod. “Give me your arm and show me about this manor. We have much to speak about, I think.”
“Oh?” Silas managed, somehow completely swept away by a woman a head shorter and two stone lighter than he.
Millie and Abe stood side by side, watching them as they were engulfed by the partygoers.
“Well,” said Abe after a moment, crossing his arms over his chest. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Millie smiled, tilting her head. “You know,” she said, “I’m hardly surprised at all anymore. Perhaps my capacity for surprise has been damaged after all I’ve seen this Season.”
She turned to him. A spray of teardrop pearls in her hair glinted in the candlelight. She seemed to inhale a little deeper than she had been, color blossoming in her cheeks. and she gave him the slightest curtsy in greeting, seemingly unaware of the tempting view it presented of her decolletage.
She was wearing a deep indigo color punctuated with white scales of white nacre that had been sewn into an arcing pattern on either side of her waist. The color made her skin glow, pale and unblemished against the dark fabric. She looked like some fabled siren glimmering under the surf.
He wanted to touch the scales and the satin. He wanted to touchher.It made the pads of his fingers feel like they were being held against a kettle.
“Your letter was most intriguing,” she said, a curious glint in her eye. “I’m sorry I didn’t write back. I got absorbed in my wildflower letter. I assure you I am most eager to hear about the developments in your hunt for the jewel thief.”
“Did you finish your letter?” he asked, raising his brows in curiosity. “I would very much like to read it when you do.”
“Would you really?” she said, reaching up to touch a coil of glossy hair on her pale shoulder. “I … I suppose that would be all right. There is a copy here, in fact. I brought it to Dot yesterday when I picked up my journal.”
“And what did Mrs. Cain think?”
“I haven’t found that out just yet.” Millie bit her lip, scrunching up her nose. “I suppose I’m a little afraid to ask. It might ease my nerves, actually, if you’d read it first.”
“By all means,” he said, offering his elbow to her the way he’d imagined doing a thousand times since their stroll in the park. “Lead the way.”
“Very well,” she said, slipping her hand over his jacket and curling her fingers over his arm. “But only if you tell me about your investigation as we go.”
“I am close, I think,” he said, clearing the dryness that had taken his throat when she touched him with a quick sip of his drink. “It took a long while, but I found a name that recurred on the logs several times with all three agencies. It became evident that our thief is most likely called Francis Aiden. Mr. Aiden lives near Tottenham Court Road.”
“Goodness!” Millie gestured to the rear of the room, where the staircase lay behind a set of wooden doors. “Have you a plan for confronting him? It might be dangerous.”
“I have questioned the fellow, in fact,” Abe said, lowering his voice to enhance the drama of his revelation. “And there were a few things that stood out as strange. Firstly, he is rather advanced in years, and though he claims he is still a capable servant, his account of last Season’s work history was quite a bit more sparse than his name in the logs would otherwise suggest.”
“Well, that isn’t so strange,” Millie said, slipping her hand from his arm to guide them up the stairs. “A caught thief would, of course, lie.”
“True enough. Where are we going?”
“To Dot’s study,” Millie said, waving an absent hand. “I warn you, it is often a bit of a hovel.”
“My natural habitat, then,” he replied with a grin. “As I was saying, he was fairly old and not really the type you’d imagine swiping jewels from duchesses. I went back to my desk truly perplexed and revisited the logs. That’s when I noticed something else that was strange: our suspect, an established serviceman, spells his name F-R-A-N-C-I-S, but the signature on several of the work orders was spelled C-E-S.”
“Odd,” Millie said, opening the door that apparently led to Dorothy Cain’s study and stepping aside to indicate he ought to enter. “That is the feminine spelling, I believe.”
“Yes!” Abe stopped just short of entering the room, wedged against Miss Yardley in the doorway. He looked down at her, pleasure and surprise at her wit making him feel a bit manic. “Yes, that’s exactly right! And to boot, some of the jobs penned in by the name were not a man’s duties.”
She stared up at him for the space of a breath, brown eyes as wide as a cornered doe’s. “Oh!”
He leaned toward her, his grin widening at the way her breath hitched.
