go!” Fenwick kicked his captor.
Brute One cuffed Fenwick’s head, knocking his grimy cap off.
Longmore launched himself at the bully.
A muffled shriek came from the showroom.
Sophy, whose ears had been straining to detect signs of trouble outside, pulled on her cloak and ran out of the dressing room.
Dowdy and Ecrivier ran after her. “But your ladyship, your bodice,” Dowdy said.
Sophy ran to the window, where the seamstress stood, her hand over her mouth.
Sophy was in time to see a burly fellow take a swing at Longmore, who dodged the blow, and hit back hard enough to make the brute stagger.
“I do apologize for Farley and Payton, your ladyship,” Dowdy said. “But it’s that horrid little boy again, making trouble. I’ll send the girl out to—”
Sophy waved her away and looked about for a weapon.
Longmore’s walking stick leaned against a chair nearby. She grabbed it and ran out.
She heard Dowdy call after her.
She raced across the street.
Having knocked down the bigger one, Longmore was starting for the other one. Then Fenwick decided to help, and flung himself at the smaller one, a mad little dervish, all flailing fists and kicking feet.
Ignoring his protests, Sophy dragged the boy out of the fray.
Longmore immediately picked up the thinner fellow and threw him into the fence. He bounded back, and started for Longmore. At the same time, the bigger one pulled himself up off the ground, gave a roar, and started running at Longmore.
Sophy thrust the walking stick in the ruffian’s way. He tripped and went down hard on the pavement.
Longmore grabbed the thin one and threw him into the fence again. This time the ruffian folded into a heap at the bottom of the fence.
“Time to go,” Longmore said.
Sophy climbed into the carriage. Fenwick hesitated.
The brutes were stumbling to their feet.
“You, too, Mad Dick,” Longmore said.
The boy leapt up onto the groom’s place.
Longmore quickly settled the agitated horses, and gave them office to start.
As they drove away, Sophy called out, “Tell your mistress to cancel my order. I don’t care for the people she employs.”
Bedford Square and its adjacent byways, well away from the hubbub of the major shopping streets, were practically deserted. It took Longmore only a moment to get out of the square and into Tottenham Court Road.
The area was quiet enough for him to hear his passengers breathing hard.
Even he was more winded than he ought to be.
But then, the fight had turned out less straightforward than usual.
“Good grief,” Sophy said. “I can’t leave you two alone for a minute.”
“I was bored,” Longmore said. “Didn’t you advise me to pick a fight if I got bored? I was beginning to enjoy myself, too, when you and Mad Dick had to get into it. How the devil am I to have a proper set-to, when I’ve got to look out for a pair of interferers, and make sure I don’t trip over them—or they don’t get killed accidentally?”
That had certainly added interest and excitement to what could have been a mundane mill.
“You can’t think I’d hang about the shop when you’d given me a perfect excuse to make a hasty exit,” she said. “And then another fine excuse to cancel the order for that ugly dress. Really, it couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it.”
“What’re you saying, Miss?” Fenwick piped up from the back. “We went to all this bother, and I nearly got drug to the workhouse—and you didn’t even want a bleedin’ dress?”
“She’s the tricky sort,” Longmore said. “You said so yourself, as I recall.”
The street being less chaotic than those they’d traveled previously, he was able to give her more than a cursory glance. She was completely disheveled, her ugly cap hanging crookedly from one side of her head, her stringy hair falling down in back and clinging stickily to her forehead and cheeks. And her bodice was hanging loose.
“Your clothes are falling off,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She reached under the cloak to refasten her dress. After a moment’s struggle, she muttered under her breath. It sounded like street French.
More audibly she said, “That fool woman missed a hook. I don’t know what she’s done, but I can’t get the wretched thing undone. Fenwick, you’d better unhook it for me.”
“Not on your life,” the boy said. “There’s things I’ll do and things I won’t and getting tangled in females’ personal hooks and buttons and such is where I draw the line.”
“Don’t be so missish,” said Sophy. “You can’t expect Lord Longmore to stop the horses and do me up.”
“Better him than me,” Fenwick said. “I won’t touch them things with a pitchfork.”
“Coward,” Longmore said. The day simply kept getting better and better.
He turned into the nearest side street, and halted the carriage. He sent Fenwick down to hold the horses’ heads. Then he faced Sophy.
“Turn sideways,” he said. “I’m not an acrobat.”
She unfastened the cloak and shrugged it from her shoulders. It slid down to her waist. Then she turned and lifted her hair out of the way. She bent her head.
And he became aware of the air changing, humming with tension.
Her neck lay bare before him. Smooth, perfectly creamy skin, and a trace of golden down where the hairline tapered off.
He could almost taste her skin. His head bent, and all he could think of was licking the back of her neck the way a cat licked cream.
“You were brilliant in the shop, by the way,” she said.
“You told me to be myself,” he said, his voice thick. He could smell her skin, tinged with lavender and … pine?
He could barely focus on the hooks. He stared at her soft neck.
“I think it’s somewhere in the middle,” she said.
“What is?”
“The hook she fastened to the wrong bar. It’s a stitched bar, you see? Not a metal eye.”
He hauled
