Wicked Becomes You(29)

“Forbade you?” He looked amused. “Do you always listen to what others tell you to do? Seems rather conventional, to me.”

“I am a fledgling free spirit,” she said with a shrug. “My wings are still sprouting. But you’re quite right; I shall endeavor to ignore you completely in the future.” When he laughed, she added, “Even if you do persist in following me about in this brotherly mode.”

He laughed and sat up. “Brotherly? Brotherly? What lies have my sisters been telling you? I believe the last time I was properly brotherly, it was 1876, and Belinda had just skinned her knee.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “Do you need me to inspect your knees, Miss Maudsley?”

She lifted her chin. “My knees are quite fine.”

“Ah, good to know.” He laid his index finger on the carafe of burgundy sitting by her glass, drawing an idle path through the collected condensation. “One hopes they’ll remain so,” he said, “for I suspect you have very pretty knees, and running off can be dangerous. One tends to slip.”

She watched his hands. His fingers were long and elegant, well suited to musical instruments; she had seen them stroke piano keys with exquisite finesse. Apparently they could just as easily pummel a man until his jaw broke—or so people liked to whisper, when neither he nor the unfortunate Mr. Reginald Milton were in the room. As for Lady Milton, Reginald’s mother, she thought Alex the devil incarnate. But probably even she would admire his hands, so long as she did not know to whom they attached.

Gwen looked to her own fingers, knotted together limply in her lap. They were stubby, the hands of a washerwoman, not even figuratively: her paternal grandmother had been a scullery maid at an estate of the Roland family. She did not advertise this fact when supping with Baron and Lady Roland, of course.

The next time she saw them, perhaps she would mention it. “I do not ‘run off,’” she said firmly. “I am twenty-three years of age, you know. I suppose you could say that I have the right to simply go—when and wherever I please.”

“Admirable philosophy,” he murmured. His nail tapped the carafe. “You may want to try it sober, at first.”

She frowned. He glanced past her and jerked his chin. This somehow managed to draw the approach of the waiter, a skinny lad who wore his sandy hair parted horizontally, brushed forward over a set of enormous, winglike ears.

Alex’s request for une bock seemed to delight him. “Boum!” he cried, and blew away again.

Gwen scowled. Her order had not merited such enthusiasm.

“Have you had a falling out with Mrs. Beecham?” Alex asked idly.

She looked at him blankly. “What? Of course not. Only last night we went to the Opera to see a show.” She grimaced. “Rather tragic, in fact.”

“Grim play, was it?”

“Oh, not at all. But neither she nor I could make sense of the French—this colloquial variety is dreadfully confusing—and then we ran out of small change for all the pourboires. It wasn’t our fault at all! The attendants in the cloakroom insisted on installing us in the seats with these rickety little footstools that used up all our coins. So when the ouvreuse came around to sell a playbill, we tried to deny her. Only apparently she was not asking a purchase so much as demanding it, and she made an awful scene. Such rudeness!” She shook her head. “I told Elma I shan’t go back. And I mean it, although she will try to convince me.”

He laughed. “She was not concerned about the opera so much as your refusal to accompany her on calls.”

“I thought she was napping.”

“Yes, but she briefly deigned to lift one of the cucumber slices.”

Gwen sighed and picked up her wine. A sip for courage, perhaps. “Elma has a hundred friends here and wishes to visit all of them. She has made a list, in fact, and it goes on for three pages, organized by location: today she works her way through the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Tomorrow, it is Rue de Varenne and Rue de Grenelle. Twelve, fifteen families at a time.” As the wine went down, she did her best not to grimace; the warmth of the sun had soured the burgundy. “At any rate, I count it a favor to leave her be. Everyone will want the latest gossip from London, and since I am the gossip, she could hardly share it with me by her side.”

“Very generous of you,” he said dryly. “Where have you been going, then?”

She tried out a one-shouldered shrug, the sort that he favored. All it did was awaken a cramp in her neck. “All the places one might think to find an Englishman in Paris.”

The waiter reappeared with a tall glass of beer. She wanted to try one, and she was finished with disguising her desires. She said to the boy, “Une canette, s’il vous plaît.”