Page 4 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
Groans all around.
“I helped. It’s a recipe of my own invention.” He grinned despite the increasing volume of the groaning.
Mama sighed. “Cook has made some lovely bread, though, so we’ll not starve.”
They had two servants—a cook and a maid whose work mostly consisted of helping Mama. She had not been able to walk since her accident five and ten years previous, and sometimes had terrible headaches. But Lillian had been gone of late, visiting her sick mother across London, and so Papa had been staying home to take care of his wife.
He helped her out of the room, and Posey and Fiona followed. As they passed through the hall toward the small room where they ate their dinner, a knock sounded at the door.
Fiona jumped then stilled, a premonition skittering up her spine. No one ever called on them at this hour.
“A visitor?” Mama asked. “This late at night?”
“Is it Lady Crestmore?” Papa asked.
Few visited their little home except for the Duchess of Crestmore, Mama’s friend.
Fiona shook her head. “She’d never be so careless as to call unannounced at so late an hour.”
“It can’t be Lillian,” Posey said, a question in her tone. “She’s not due to return until tomorrow.”
Another knock echoed in the hall, and the front door shook with the force of the caller’s fist.
Another premonition skittered up her spine. But Fiona strode to the door. If something horrid was about to happen, she’d not run from it. “Silly to just stand here and look at the door. It won’t open itself.” She flung it wide.
There, standing before her, a man in a greatcoat, his shoulders shrugged up into his ears, his beaver hat pulled low. She knew that coat, knew that hat, and the familiarity of them, of the blade of danger about the man standing on their doorstep, knocked the breath from her body.
He lifted a hand, pushed the hat back on his head, and she finally saw his features. Dark eyes, sharp jaw shadowed with scruff, black hair a tad too long, a mouth thinned with… anger. All the demons of hell lashed out in his eyes, and he trained that fiery gaze on her.
She stumbled backward with a gasp, and he stepped over the threshold. The wind caught the candlelight, made it dance with the shadows.
“I’ve come to speak with Mr. Frampton.” His gaze snapped away from her to her father. “And I’d like to do so now.”
Fiona reached for the wall behind her, needing something to lean against as her legs had become less than useful.
“Me?” Papa asked, and his voice faltered just a bit.
The falter gave Fiona strength. She surged toward the stranger. “You were not invited into this house, and you will certainly not order us about.” She placed her hands on her hips and made herself as tall as she could, but she was tiny even to a shorter man, and this man towered high above her.
He didn’t even look at her. “I have business with your father, and I’d like to meet with him.” He flashed her a polite smile full of needles and knives. “Please.”
Papa put himself between them. “Very well, then.” He gestured for the stranger to follow him into the parlor they had all so recently exited. “Meet, we shall.”
“Who is that rude man?” Posey asked.
Fiona clutched her hands in her skirts and shut the howling wind outside with a slam of the door. “That is the man who’s been watching us.”
“What business could he have with your father, I wonder?” Mama looked at the parlor door as if wishing to see through it could make it so. Her hands clutched the arms of her bath chair so her knuckles shone white, and the blanket she had tossed across her lap slid partly onto the floor.
Fiona righted it. She could not guess the answer to her mother’s question, but that shiver that had twice traveled up and down her spine returned once more. Whatever he’d come to say, it would not be good.
Two
When Lord Lysander Bromley set out to learn the identity of the man who had forged his father’s most valuable paintings, he’d not expected the man to be a jeweler. When he’d set out to speak with the man, he’d not expected to have to corner him at home, and when he’d set out to do the cornering, he’d not expected to have to first defeat a tiny, female, fire-breathing dragon with large green eyes.
But he’d had to do all those things, and on perhaps ten hours of sleep in the last week, too.
The parlor Mr. Frampton, financially strapped jeweler to theton, led him to glowed bright and unexpectedly cozy. Mr. Frampton himself appeared unexpectedly harmless. His white hair was still thick and pulled into a queue at the back of his neck. His eyes, green like the dragon’s, held curiosity, welcome, and exhaustion in equal measure. Hardly at all like the wicked, thieving forger of art Zander had expected.
