But if Cami spoke in her cousin’s defense, what good would it do? After all, Aunt and Uncle Merrick had already given their consent to the man’s courtship of their daughter, despite his reputation. If only there were a way to protect Felicity and still acquire the information, the experience, I need to make Lord Ashborough’s story my own….
Then she remembered that walk in the park. Tomorrow, she would have an opportunity to begin a thorough character study of the man. If she was clever, she could use the information she gathered to convince her aunt and uncle to sever all connection to a man of Lord Ash’s ilk. She would find a way to use his courtship of Felicity to expose the depths of the man’s depravity.
And if it also happened to benefit her book, what harm could there be in it?
She paused to examine the picture she had drawn. Her skill with words had always far outstripped her abilities with lines and shading, and this effort was no exception. The portrait was, to use Mr. Dawkins’s words, all shadow, no light. Lord Ashborough’s eyes and hair were, well, darker than was strictly just, dark enough that her pulse quickened ever so slightly under the force of his scowl. He looked more menacing than she had intended. The real man was more… She hardly knew what word to apply. Sensual? Seductive?
Realizing she was in danger of lapsing once more into caricature, she turned the paper over and prepared to begin again, only to discover that she had made her sketch on the back of Mr. Dawkins’s letter. With a shake of her head, she put aside the drawing and took up a clean sheet of foolscap. Mustering her neatest hand, she wrote:
Mr. Dawkins,
I thank you for your very kind words about The Wild Irish Rose. I shall begin the revisions you have requested immediately.
C. Burke
Pulling a tattered copy of her manuscript from her writing desk, she prepared to set to work. But not before tucking the publisher’s note into her bodice like the billet-doux it was.
Chapter 3
Given the weather, Cami could only assume that her plan had curried the Almighty’s favor. Three fine days in early spring were unheard of—especially three fine days in a row. Yet here she was in Hyde Park beneath a blue sky smudged only by picturesque puffs of cloud, walking four steps behind Felicity and Lord Ashborough.
She walked alone, but she did not mind in the slightest. Although the park was crowded, this was almost as good as a solitary stroll, a pleasure that had been denied her since coming to London. Such moments—among people, yet apart from them—were a writer’s bread and butter, the food on which she fed her imagination. She loved to observe the fashions, the mannerisms, the way the afternoon sunlight turned the rippling surface of the Serpentine into a diamond-crusted path. She breathed deeply and drew in the scent of grass and new leaves and delicate flowers—and underneath those brighter notes, the musky smell of decay and manure and coal smoke that gave the spring air its piquancy.
Under ordinary circumstances, she might have whiled away the time dreaming up new stories, a plot to pair the elegant, fair-haired gentleman with the mousy governess who watched him surreptitiously when her eyes should have been on her charges; another to match the lady wearing too much rouge, trying desperately to look young to her circle of admirers, with the balding but sincere older gentleman who hung back just a bit from the brilliant rays of her wit. Whatever else its failings, London did not lack characters.
But today her attention was focused squarely on the most interesting character of all.
The Marquess of Ashborough walked with his hands crossed behind his back. He had not, to Cami’s surprise and Felicity’s evident relief, offered Felicity his arm. In fact, he kept himself ever so slightly apart from his companion—perhaps to avoid being poked in the eye by the ferrule of her parasol, which Felicity had a habit of twirling nervously. Thanks to that confection of muslin and lace, Cami could not see her cousin’s face; she could only imagine her expression, seeing it refracted through Lord Ash’s attention.
To overcome the slight distance between their bodies, his head was tilted perpetually toward Felicity’s, so much so that Cami began to suspect he would end the day with an uncomfortable crick in his neck. He moved with grace, despite the awkward posture necessitated by walking beside someone so much shorter than he; his stride was easily twice the length of Felicity’s, yet Cami observed no hitch in his gait, no restraint in his movements. He listened far more than he spoke, nodded encouragingly now and then, and if his smile could not precisely be called genuine, she saw no trace of the lupine in it either. He seemed determined to put her cousin at ease.
With eager fingers Cami reached for the little notebook she had once worn on a chain around her neck, forgetting for a moment that her brother had put a stop to it the day she had wandered into the roadway while scribbling and was nearly struck by a passing hack. She would just have to save her notes on these encounters for the privacy of her room.
But before she could commit to memory the way Lord Ashborough’s gray duster rippled over the breadth of his shoulders, like sheepskin over a wolf’s back, she saw Mr. Fox at last hie into view, walking—correction: being dragged along by—four large dogs, and the blood in her veins turned to ice.
“Foxy!” Lord Ashborough called and tipped his hat to his friend.
The gesture of greeting drove the dogs wild. Three pulled harder in his direction,
