Betina Krahn (12 page)

As she stood there, mesmerized, he parted the linen tape and slid his hands down her sides slowly, gently, tracing her shape, verifying those numbers experimentally. Trickles of excitement wended their way along the underside of every exposed inch of her skin. Suddenly all she could see were his full, ripely curved lips.

“Thirty-eight … twenty-four … thirty-six. You do indeed have curves, Mad Madeline,” he said huskily, staring
into her eyes. “But now the question is, are those numbers the result of your reformed foundations, or are they just you?” He let the tape drop to the floor and brought one hand up to stroke the curve of her cheek.

“There is only one sure way to settle the matter,” he said, brushing his fingertips down the side of her neck and down her shoulder so that they came to rest on the top button of her tunic. With a deft twist of his fingers, it was freed from its velvet loop.

“Miss Duncan?”

Beaumont Tattersall’s voice broke over them from the doorway and they jolted apart.

She stammered, “I was merely acquainting his lordship with the … design process.” Lord Mandeville became suddenly engrossed in a giant spool of cotton thread.

“Daniel Steadman and his family have arrived. I thought you would want to know,” Beaumont said. Madeline seized the opportunity to escape what she was certain would be Lord Mandeville’s mocking smile. Declaring that she needed to greet her new cutting-floor foreman, she excused herself and hurried from the factory.

It was only as she strode along the village lane that the insinuation in Cole’s last remark registered fully with her. She glanced down at her unfastened button and was instantly livid. The crust! How dare he barge into her factory, scoff and sneer at everything in sight, and then take liberties with her person? She hurriedly refastened that dangling button. Obviously he had mistaken her
progressive social views for moral laxity and felt free to use the personal nature of her products as an excuse for inappropriate and offensive intimacies.

But as she walked, the breeze drew some of the heat from her burning cheeks and pride, and she realized her charge against him wasn’t entirely correct. His actions had been inappropriate, but they had not been entirely offensive to her.

She stumbled and had to catch herself. All the more reason for her to see him gone.

Cole Mandeville had also fled the factory in a temper, disconcerted by his sensual impulses toward Madeline Duncan. She was so much the opposite of the sleek, subtle, mysterious women of the world he had always found desirable. She was appallingly wholesome, forthright, and transparent, an unabashed innocent. His hard-won experience and sophistication counted for nothing with her. She hadn’t the faintest notion of what the world was about, or even of how close she had come to being backed up against one of those tables and kissed within an inch of her virtue.

He
knew, however. Just like he knew that her precious workers were a pack of weak sisters, idle good-for-nothings, drunks, peacocks, and sharp charlies who were collectively taking advantage of both her ignorance and her largesse. They lolled and snored and drank and chased butterflies and each other—until she hove into view and they became all earnestness and diligence and industry. The wretches.

But, in all honesty, it probably didn’t take much to convince her they were geniuses, artisans, or just decent-but-downtrodden folk. Those wide eyes saw only what they wanted to see. And when he looked into them, he could see only the pain in store for her when she finally faced the truth about her “noble” workers.

He ground his teeth and tried to banish that pristine blue and her inevitable disillusionment from his mind. Never mind
the satisfaction of being proven right, suddenly he just wanted to put miles between them and forget he had ever seen her.

He made straight for the tavern, for paper and ink, and penned his first report to his uncle. It was short and to the point:

By nightfall that report was tucked safely in a leather pouch on a mail coach speeding toward London … right next to a letter from Madeline Duncan:

The next morning Cole stumbled down the ladder from his lodgings, having slept poorly and having performed his morning shave from a bucket of stale, rusty water. The smell of the main room of the tavern—soured ale, stale tobacco, sweat, and greasy ash—washed over him like stagnant water. He held his breath and headed straight for the door. As he stood in the entrance, gulping in fresh air and vowing never again to take for granted the simple act of breathing, a flash of scarlet across the way caught his eye. It was Madeline Duncan, tripping down the steps of a substantial brick house tucked away next to the factory.

He hadn’t noticed that house before, set back as it was from the common path. He hadn’t thought about the fact that
she
had to live somewhere, and that
her
dwelling probably didn’t smell like the bottom of a bait bucket. His eyes narrowed. She was unmarried and had no dependents. That meant she had that sizable house all to hersel—

“Somethin’ to break yer fast, yer lordship? I reckon ye’ll be hungry, what with ye havin’ no supper an’ all.”

Hiram Netter’s voice startled him, and he turned to find the tavernkeeper holding an iron kettle filled with suspicious-looking sausages wreathed in slimy onions and bobbing in grease. He closed his eyes, but not before he noticed the grime caked on the fellow’s apron and fingernails.

“I’m not much for morning food, I’m afraid.”

Tugging his vest down into place, he struck out across the green in the direction Madeline Duncan had taken. Somehow he would wangle an offer of better accommodations from her. After passing several newly occupied cottages, he came across one with a pony cart in front of it. The cart
was filled with shabby household goods as well as a squalling baby. A racket loud enough to drown out the growling of his stomach was coming from the open door. As he approached, he caught a glimpse of red inside.

“A right peach of a place, miss,” a soss-bellied fellow was declaring above the roar of a woman scolding and snatching at a number of rambunctious children racing about the cottage. “Afore long Bess’ll have ’er right as pie, won’t ye, Bessie?”

“What?” A tall, lanky woman with a face like a hatchet turned on him, scowling, then seemed belatedly to understand. “Oh … aye, Miz Duncan. Right as rain.”

“I’ve brought you a few things to help set up your kitchen.” Madeline gestured to three willow baskets filled with bags of flour and sugar, jars, crocks, tins, and a huge shank of a ham sitting on a wooden pushcart parked by the door. “If you need more to tide you over while you’re settling in, just see Beaumont or myself at the factory. Thomas, we’ll need your help setting up the machines and worktables tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there, miz, never fear.” Thomas was scratching his chest and eyeing the ham with undisguised delight.

Cole stepped back as Madeline exited the cottage. For the brief moment that they came face-to-face, all he could see was the pleasure shimmering like sunlit water in her eyes. He backed two more steps.

“Hard at it already, I see,” he observed. It was annoying that she was granting shiftless ne’er-do-wells the hospitality that she had so emphatically denied him. His gaze caught on the red-gold threads the morning sun painted in her hair, and that annoyed him too. “Just how much did all this cost, Miss Duncan?”

The pleasure in her face dimmed noticeably. “A bit of flour, salt, and tinned fruit scarcely qualify as capital expenditures, Lord Mandeville. Not that it is any concern of yours, but I like to greet each family as they arrive, bring them a few supplies, and see them settled into their new homes.”

“And into the lining of your purse,” he added.

“Well,”—her eyes narrowed—“it is
my
purse, after all. You lawyers do seem to have difficulty remembering that.” With that, she turned her back and began to remove the enormous basket of food from the cart.

She tugged and lifted and finally succeeded in wrestling it to the edge, where it teetered dangerously until she secured a grip on the handles. With a heroic heave she lowered it to the ground, while burly Thomas and strapping Bessie stood in the doorway behind her, watching her struggle single-handedly with the hamper that would feed them and their brood of children for the next week.

Furious with the feckless pair for not helping her, with her for not demanding that they do so, and with himself for caring one way or another, he carried the hamper to the door for her, then stalked off down the lane toward the factory.

“Who be that swell?” Thomas asked, scowling after Cole Mandeville’s retreating form.

Madeline followed his gaze as she dusted her tunic.

“That? I’m afraid that’s Lord Mandeville. My court-appointed nanny.”

Thomas Clark shook his head. “Testy sort, ain’t he?”

Her smile bore a defiant hint of mischief.

“He probably didn’t sleep well.”

Madeline greeted two more families that morning before returning to the factory. On the way back she prepared herself for her next encounter with Lord Mandeville, determined not to be caught at a disadvantage again. It was the surprise of walking out of the cottage and straight into him that had rendered her so witless, she told herself. That, and his breeze-ruffled hair and the newly wakened look of his eyes, the impossible breadth of his shoulders and the insolent cant of his mouth—the wretch was a walking heap of distractions. And for some reason, around him she was appallingly distractable.

It wasn’t at all like her to respond so physically to another person. She was comfortable with herself as a thinker, a human soul, and an agent of social change. But now she realized there was a part of her she had never acknowledged before: the elemental female part. How unsettling that it was arrogant, overindulged Lord Mandeville who seemed to bring it out in her.

By the time she set foot in the offices, she had fortified her defenses and felt reasonably well prepared to deal with his cynical snarling. She was not at all prepared, however, to have Endicott come charging out of the sample room and down the hall with his velvet frock coat flapping and his eyes wild.

“He’s a beast, I tell you!” he declared, pressing his fingertips to his temples. “An insensitive lout—a pure philistine! His aesthetic sense is so stunted that he could not recognize Mother Nature herself—much less a principle of natural design. I simply cannot work under such conditions, Madeline—look at me, I’m a shambles!” He held out a pale, artistic hand to show her how it trembled. “I must flee to nature’s bosom—to let her beauty and symmetry restore my creative balance!” With a toss of his long, romantic locks, he sailed out the door.

Madeline hurried into the sample room and found Cole Mandeville poised before a fabric-draped dressmaking form with silk pins in his mouth, tilting his head from side to side.

“What on earth do you think you are doing?” she demanded, halting several paces away with her arms stiff at her sides.

“Trying my hand at this ‘design’ business,” he answered, taking the pins from his mouth and stabbing them into a pincushion. He adjusted something on the front of the form, then stepped back and eyed it approvingly. “I don’t see what’s got your Endicott’s drawers in such a bunch. This is not so all-fired difficult. In fact, I believe I may have something here. What do you think?”

His expression angelic, he turned the dress form toward
her. She was startled by the sight of leaves pinned over the female form’s breasts and private area. Real leaves. From trees.

“Of course they’re not genuine fig,” he said, stepping to the side to view it from a new angle. “To get the full effect, one really should have fig leaves.”

She looked up at the gleam in his eye and had to struggle with the violent impulses that seized her.
Of course I regret stabbing Lord Mandeville with a whole box of silk pins, Your Honor. Silk pins are very expensive these days
.