Page 22 of Undercover with the Heiress
‘It’s tolerable,’ Phineas quipped.
Barely.
Not all of it was intolerable, though. Jean, the cook, had been raised by her French grandmother, and while the squawking she called singing left no doubt as to why she hadn’t secured a role on the stage, the croissants she sent to the table each morning were exceptional. Hours later, he could still taste the wafers of pastry dissolving on his tongue. And when shewasn’t goading or sniping, Rosanna simmered with a measured happiness in the simple things, then accelerated without notice into an abundance of emotion. A daisy growing between the cracks in the courtyard brought forth a small smile. The delivery of new gloves made her coo with joy. And the day before, when he had returned home to learn that her brother Johannes had helped her to wallpaper her bedroom, she had beamed with unconcealed pride at their accomplishment. No faux modesty with Rosanna. She expected praise where she earned it, even if it did give her wrinkled hands and wispy threads of glue in her hair.
Those moments were a little more than tolerable. Damn himself, they were delightful.
‘Only tolerable?’ Taylor chuckled. ‘Most men in this room would give their good hand for a night with what’s yours for life. In this second, I think they’d be happy with five minutes.’
Taylor’s gaze flicked over Phineas’s shoulder. Instinct made him turn his head.
How she had got past the clerk in reception and made her way to the entrance of this dingy hollow of despair and penmanship, to the dregs of the bank, to its most emasculated workers, to men who wielded pens as pens, never mightier than the sword… He couldn’t imagine. Perhaps that dress had done the convincing for her. Lace knitted a web of desire and envy over cotton, the ivory fabric underneath overlaid with vibrant, embroidered flowers—claret red, magenta, saffron yellow, and deep teal, all linked by emerald leaves and vines. The contrast of innocent lightness and mature darkness was the perfect complement to her sun-warmed, honey skin. Just that morning, during her inane prattling at breakfast, she had announced that she was dispensing with laced corsets, bustles, and petticoats, claiming them pointless now she was a married woman.No point dressing to impress when I am unobtainable.I’ve always wanted to try the styles of artistic dress—now is my opportunity.
Phineas had to stifle a moan. Thank the heavens for the artistic dress movement.
Both decadent and minimal, like Rosanna herself, her dress gathered beneath her breasts before falling in a gentle drape over her figure, its hem an inch from the floor. Forest green thread sat stark against the soft swell of her bosom. As she took a slightly puffed breath, the fabric pulled taut. Phineas traced the path of a vine to distract himself, but the soft fall of her skirt over her rounded hips and the voluptuous line of her legs were no less distracting.
With effort, he blinked hard, then scanned the room. Could the other clerks not be more discrete with their ogling? She was hiswife.
‘Phineas!’ Rosanna called, and raised one gloved hand in greeting before launching into the room at a half skip. Her skirt flipped with her momentum, and when she stopped short before him, a delicious breath of roses and sunshine filled the air between them. ‘I had hoped we might have lunch together.’
‘Lunch?’ he asked.
‘I missed you,’ she said, swaying slightly like the coquette she wasn’t.
Did the room sigh?
‘I’ve been at the hotel all morning,’ she continued. ‘I was on my way home and thought you might be available.’ She turned to Taylor. ‘Only for an hour. If it’s acceptable. I promise, I won’t make it a habit.’
‘Taylor isn’t my supervisor—’
‘Of course,’ Taylor interrupted with a grin. ‘How could we deny a newly married man such a request?’
As they left with all eyes in the room on them, Phineas couldn’t tell if he wanted to crow like a rooster or punch every man inthe face. He settled for shoving his hands into his pockets and reminded himself that he had no right to do either.
She wasn’t his to fret over.
Outside, shards of sun forced their way between heavy clouds and soot. Scattered puddles along the pavement glistened with fragments of the sky before patches of cloud obscured the light and doused everything in a deeper grey.
‘I would have waited until this evening, but as you dine elsewhere and I never know if you’re at home or not, I thought it best to find you here. I didn’t want to wait until morning. And I didn’t want to disturb you in your rooms. Again.’
The road clanged with midday activity. Newspaper boys called out headlines, horse hooves clapped on the stones, hawkers shouted for attention, and boot spits kicked dirt into the air as they drummed up business. How extraordinary it was that, even surrounded by so much noise and bustle, silence could settle between two people and make the short distance between them brittle and cold.
‘I’m not an escaped convict.’ Phineas addressed the stones, barely catching the slight tilt of Rosanna’s head in his direction from the corner of his eye. ‘My stepfather bribed the judge. I served a year, then was released.’
‘But youarea deserter?’ she asked.
‘The ink doesn’t lie.’
‘Was it worth it?’
Her question caught him off guard. He’d never thought of worth or value to his absconding, just the deep conviction that he was right to do so, and that those who punished him for it were wrong. Spying on resistance groups and men suspected as being enemies of the empire—it had sounded noble when he’d been promoted, but the reality was that he watched peasants and labelled them as threats when they did not show enough deference. The rash choice to leave the army despite havingpromised to serve for the rest of his life had set in motion an entire train of events completely out of his control, each one crashing into the next moment of his life. Being caught. The whipping. The sentence. Sharing a cell with a forger. Fashioning himself a new name, and then another. Every necessary moment had converged into the ordinariness of walking the streets of London with Rosanna beside him, with her white bonnet concealing her long dark hair and a too-heavy smudge of rouge across her cheeks.
‘I have many regrets, but not that,’ he replied. ‘I loved every damn second before I was caught. If I could have that time over, I would do it again.’
Keeping the beat with his step, Rosanna slid her hand around his elbow. Her body hummed with nervous energy, raw and bright. ‘As intrigued as I am by the transition from convict to clerk, that is not why I came to see you. You’ll never guess who from Argonauts Trading is staying at the hotel. Right now. This very minute.’
Phineas chewed his lip. ‘Mr Vincent.’
