Page 49 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
He shook the letter at her. “An invitation. To the dowager’s house. For tea. This afternoon.”
She looked at the nearby clock. “Oh. We’re late. I’ll grab my pelisse.”
“You can’t go anywhere with him, Fiona,” Posey protested.
Fiona slipped her arms into a gray wool coat and swept across the room toward Zander as she buttoned it up. “I already have, Posey. He’s no harm.” She stopped before him and looked up, a fragile smile on her lips, so small it almost did not exist. “You came to gather me instead of going over to her home yourself?”
“I’ve learned my lesson, Fee. You’re quite valuable. You might see something I miss or know something I don’t, and I’ll not do without you.” He offered her his arm, pretending those last words—I’ll not do without you—didn’t have a significant double meaning.
She stared at him, mouth slightly agape and eyes like stars.
“Where are you going?” the elder Miss Frampton demanded.
“You heard the man,” Fiona said, her voice a breezy cloud. “To tea.”
“I’ll come too.” Posey bustled away. “You need a chaperone.”
“No. Someone must mind the shop, and Papa’s asleep.” The breeziness had fled, and Fiona had her dragon claws out now.
The sister must have known it, too. She turned slowly, eyes narrowed, and Zander saw dragons ran in the family. “One hour, Fee. No more. Or I’m coming after you.”
Fiona took Zander’s proffered arm, and as they left the shop, she greeted the afternoon air with a bounce in her step.
“Thank you.”
“For what?” he asked, turning them toward a hack.
“For including me.”
Such a small thing, and he cringed to know he’d denied it to her over and over again. “Do others make it a habit not to include you?”
“Where it matters most, yes. I’m the youngest. I was never supposed to know about or feel our worries as a family, our rising poverty, our struggle to face off against old Foggy. They wanted to keep me safe from it all. But I only wanted to help.”
“Perhaps they should not have left you to your own devices.”
“Oh yes, the forgery thing is entirely their fault.” Bright words, playful, but her body drooped as he handed her into a hack and sat beside her, thigh brushing thigh.
“I don’t think that,” she said, her voice small. “I blame no one but myself.”
He swallowed down the lust, suppressed the rising physical reaction and chucked her chin up. “Think of how close we are to answers, dragon. We’ve an invitation to answers! You’ll know where your paintings are in half an hour. Less. Then we’ll set about getting them.”
“We, we, we.Our. Do you mean it truly?”
“Yes.” He kept making promises to her. Didn’t seem able to stop. He hoped to God he could keep them. Though no number of promises or fulfilments of them changed his situation—a floating no one, whose every pence went into the family coffers to repair the roof on the estate or fix up the dower house for rental or to pay mother’s new companion. Or for his own boots and cravats. He’d never known where the money for all of it came before a decade and a half ago. It had all appeared quite effortlessly, daily magic taken for granted. And now he knew where it came from. His own sweat. His brothers’ sweat.
This infatuation turned… something else… could not give her what she needed, what she did not know she wanted—stability, the same stability she’d tried to buy from the dowager with her talents.
The hack rolled to a stop, and he helped Fiona out. The dowager’s townhome rose before them.
“Stay close,” he whispered. “We cannot know what to expect inside.”
She whipped to face him, and her gaze felt like pins on his skin. “You suspect some nefarious plan.”
“I don’t know. Just… remain close.”
She nodded, and he knocked on the door. A butler—one he’d met many times before—opened before he could put knuckles to wood a second time.
“Lady Balantine has been expecting you, Lord Lysander. Do come in.” The butler bowed low and stepped aside and led them both to the parlor where Fiona had discovered him the day he’d used his purloined key.
