Page 6 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
“Hell.” The curse clipped out from beneath Zander’s teeth, and he dove for the girl.
But not fast enough. She’d become a puddle of wool and limbs on the floor. Her father and the standing woman, likely to be her sister, dove for her, too. Frampton knelt, and the sister sat, pulling the girl’s head into her lap and tapping her pale cheeks with the flats of her fingers.
“Fee, oh Fee, wake up.” The sister’s hands fluttered about the girl’s breast.
Zander pushed them away. “Let me lift her, put her on the settee.”
The sister wrapped her arms around the fainted girl and glared at him. Another dragon. Sigh. He’d stumbled into a cave of them, it seemed. “I do not know who you are, sir. You shall not touch her.”
She truly wished him to waste time with pleasantries? He only just kept his eyes from rolling back in his head as he bowed low, exaggerating his elegance. “Lord Lysander at your service. I’m an art curator. I’m not going to hurt her. I intend only to make her—and you I might add—more comfortable.”
The woman growled. Growled? Perhaps he should have expected a forger to have a feral family. Or a forger to have been nurtured in a feral family. He studied the soft lines of the fainted woman’s face. Was she really who he sought?
“Will you allow me to assist her?” he asked, checking his nails as if he did not care.
The sister’s gaze glued to him, she scurried away, and he replaced her lap with his arms before the green-eyed dragon’s head could hit the hard floor. A feather, she was, and he lifted her with ease. He’d seen her often over the past fortnight as he’d stood outside their shop in the wind and rain, waiting for an opportunity. He’d seen both women more often than he’d seen the father. Another frustration, that. He’d hoped to speak to the man on his way home, but when he visited the shop, he had a daughter on his arm, or two, and Zander had never had a chance to speak to the man alone.
Zander would wait no longer. He crept closer than ever to finding Lady Balantine, finding the paintings, his family’s inheritance, and getting it back. Paying for his past mistakes. He wouldn’t let a family of women looking on stop him from getting the information he’d come to collect. If they did not know about their patriarch’s nefarious activities, they were about to find out.
He laid the dragon on the small blue settee in the corner of the room away from the fire. A bit too cold here, but the color seemed to be returning to her cheeks. She’d best stay unconscious if she didn’t want another shock.
“Does anyone have smelling salts?” he asked.
The family pushed past him to crowd around the fallen girl. Woman, really. A discovery he could not help but make as he’d carried her across the room. Such a sweet innocent face when those raging eyes were not open and accusing—slightly rounded cheeks and a pert little nose and chin. A wide, pink mouth, the bottom lip plumper than the top. And hair the color that shifted from one yellow hue to the next.
A hand touched his wrist, and he looked down.
The woman in the bath chair looked up at him, entirely composed. “You must leave. You’ve upset my family enough for an evening.”
“I’ll not leave without the information I’ve come for, without answers to my questions.” He couldn’t. He’d been searching too long to back down now, even with the soft stern eyes of this woman boring into him, promising pain if he hurt her family.
“Then ask them and be gone.” She had the type of commanding presence one did not dismiss, seemed capable to her very bones.
“Very well.” He’d not intended to speak of this in front of Mr. Frampton’s wife and children, but they would be unlikely to allow him a private conversation with the fainted woman, and she might be who he really needed. He’d have to do this here. Now. “I have come to talk to Mr. Frampton about Lady Balantine, about the Rubens paintings he copied for her. Or perhaps I’ve come to speak to your daughter, Mr. Frampton.”
Mr. Frampton shook his head and wrung his hands. “What you’re saying makes no sense. Forgery?”
The fainted woman’s eye ticked. A wince? Maybe not so fainted, the brazen chit.
“I tracked down a footman who used to work at Lady Balantine’s London address. He tells me she had correspondence with you, with your shop. He also tells me this correspondence regards the painting-shaped packages that would arrive from that location, delivered by a young boy who lives nearby.” Though now he studied the Miss Frampton currently prostrate on the settee… perhaps it hadn’t been a young boy delivering packages, but a small woman cleverly disguised.
Hell, he shouldn’t smile. Not now. But he did so enjoy a ridiculous scheme.
“We know no dowager,” Mrs. Frampton said. “Nor boy. Nor anything about packages that were painting shaped or otherwise. My husband and I know parures and gems.”
“Gold, silver, wire, paste,” Mr. Frampton added. “I am a man of fashion not forgery.”
“Precisely.” The softest glance traveled between husband and wife as Mrs. Frampton nodded. “You can hold my husband’s art in the palm of your hand, not hang it on a wall. And since you have no ability to speak sense or believe me when I speak sense, I ask you to leave.”
Mrs. Frampton did not tremble, but Zander did. He couldn’t leave. Not now when he was so close. He felt like a leaf clinging to a branch in late autumn. The smallest breeze, a breath, could send him swaying to the earth. Like the young woman fainted on the settee.Fakefainted. Sure of it now.
Something like despair almost drowned him in a wave that stole his breath and his sense, and he choked out, “The dowager has my inheritance, and if I do not find her—” He forced his mouth shut, refusing to continue voicing a truth he never should have given up.
He looked at each face staring wide-eyed at him. The angry father, the curious mother, the vengeful sister. He peered, just a moment, at the face of the likely-not-truly-unconscious dragon, her pale-blue eyelids fluttering. Crafty, she was. He’d have to retreat and join the fray another day. Once he’d had time to think and hours to sleep.
He’d wanted only, since his father’s death, to undo the wrongs he’d done, find his family’s paintings—the real ones, not the copies hanging in the gallery at home—sell them for mountains of money, and help his brothers restore the family coffers. And reputation. But he’d failed once more.
He’d not fail in the end, though, because he’d not give up. Let the girl deal with her family, with the revelations he’d set in their midst, then he’d be back. For her. Because he believed the father when he said he was no forger. And he believed the unspoken words of a woman who fake fainted when faced with her sins.
