Page 11 of Lady, Behave
“No need to. I cut him. Straight away. The cur!”
“We know, dear.” Laurel threw a consoling look at Imogen but knit her brows. “As to rich, Addy? Really, you must not say that. We are frau—”
“Stop that!” Addy said, furious that Laurel kept calling the three of them frauds.
What if Grandpapa had once run a profitable fencing ken? He hadn’t diddled poor folks out of a shilling or drawn the King’s picture in bad ink to twiddle the currency. For many years he’d made a profit, dealing in prime goods, selling a good product for a decent price. He never nipped or shaved a crimp just to have one over on him. She knew because she’d heard him make deals with his cons. And he always asked for the provenance of paintings and statues. Old gold coins, too.
Grandpapa accepted nothing less than real goods, sort of…or nearly honestly come by. What’s more, she’d seen his collection. Beauties, they were. She’d never told her sisters that she’d viewed the piles and stacks of goods in his secret storeroom in the Dublin manse. Nor would she let on. Sleeping dogs, she believed, should snore on.
Shooing away Laurel’s accusations, she bent over to pucker her lips at the mirror. Tonight, she hadn’t tried them out on any man. A shame. A girl needed experience kissing. Except, of course, she should be saving herself for the luscious marquess, Gyles, who promised to kiss her soon…if she didn’t kiss him first. “Indeed, my dears,” she told her sisters, “we are the cream of the Irish.”
Laurel wrinkled her nose.
“I saw that,” Addy proclaimed, then proceeded to pluck the pins from her platinum tresses. “What I don’t understand is how Grandpapa’s coffers, which were so full when we were young, were at his death, so empty. Except for our dowries, or course.”
Imogen drew back with this odd look on her face. “I agree. His sudden poverty doesn’t make any sense. We all know that Grandpapa was a famous—”
Laurel shot a wide-eyed glare at Imogen.
And Addy caught the warning look.
“Man.” Imogen coughed. “A famous man! He was. Sorry. Ahem. Ugh. Something stuck in my throat.”
Like the word “thief”?Their eighty-year-old grandfather was reputed to be the greatest fencer in Ireland. But her sisters thought Addy innocent of the family tendency to…ahem…acquire items that did not belong to them. She did have some ability at the French language, but she feigned much of it when it came to the moniker and the respectability of Grandpapa. Now that their future depended on spotless reputations, she’d keep up the illusion of propriety. “We all know that the famous last Earl of Barry was a kind and generous man.”
“Ah, Monsieur le Comte de Barrie etait célèbre.” Fifi mumbled to herself in that raspy voice that she must’ve stolen from the bottom of a French brandy barrel. “Monsieur de la Voleur de Grand Chemin.”
Imogen frowned at the French woman.
To which, Fifi shrugged like an indifferent cat.
“Oui, Fifi.” Addy, joyous at the servant’s interruption, gave diversion from the horrid truth. “Famous. ‘The valet of the great road.’ No matter his money problems at the end. We must remember the splendid upbringing he gave us. And applaud him for the dowries for our future.”
Laurel and Imogen exchanged looks that might have frozen the English Channel.
However, Addy dismissed their inability to see the bright side of this. She preferred to focus on the present and the future. And the Marquess of Heath.
Addy had work to do to discover a way to keep that marvelous fellow enthralled. Aside from talking of headache remedies and kissing him, which was always dangerous. She wanted to know more about his deprivations and the conditions that had led to his malady. She intended to show him her other serious attributes, and he might remain interested in her.
Oh, bugger, that men could be fickle. Especially with young women who were good-looking and assumed to have cotton for brains.
Chapter Four
“I’m glad you’vecome with me today,” Gyles told his friend Lex, the Earl of Martindale. They’d left the Pavilion in Gyles’s coach and headed for Charles Street in a pounding rainstorm. “I do believe you have been missed these past two days at tea.”
“I had business to attend to,” Lex told him with a sigh of satisfaction. “I may have new evidence that will lead me to the scoundrel who sold my father and me to the French.”
“That’s what you were doing in Shoreham the other day?”
“I was.”
“Better to sprinkle pleasure in with that tedious search for a culprit,” Gyles said with hope to lure his friend from his quest.
“I agree. I need to take my mind from this, or it will eat me alive. And I do wish to see Miss Imogen again. Speaking of which,” Lex added with a grin. “You say this is the third day you’ve gone to tea at Lady Downs’s home? Are your intentions toward one special lady not too apparent?”
“They are.” With that stunning platinum hair and those exquisite blue eyes, he had discovered he wanted her wit as well, not just in his bed but at his breakfast table, too. “I enjoy Adelaide’s conversation.”
“Enough to give the charming little blonde the assumption that an offer is forth-coming?”
