A Rogue by Any Other Name
Impossible.
He stood, moving to look over her shoulder. “That’s what it says.”
She shook her head, placing one long finger on the tabulation line. He noticed the tip of the finger was slightly crooked, leaning a touch to the right. “You’ve written one hundred twelve thousand, three hundred, forty-five and seventeen pence. You—” She looked up at him, eyes owl-like behind her spectacles as she took in his height and his bare chest. “You—You’ve lost a quid.”
He bent over her, deliberately crowding her and enjoying the way her breath caught at his nearness. “That is a six.”
She cleared her throat and looked again. “Oh.” She leaned in and checked the number again. “I suppose you’ve lost your handwriting skills, instead,” she said dryly, and he chuckled as she reached for a pencil and repaired the number.
He watched, riveted to the callus at the tip of her second finger, before he whispered low in her ear, “Are you an accounting fairy sent in the dead of night to check my figures?”
She leaned away from the whisper and turned to look at him. “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon,” she said, matter-of-factly, and he had an intense desire to take her spectacles from her face and kiss her senseless, just to see what this odd young woman would say.
He quashed the desire.
Instead, he smiled. “Sent in the dead of day, then?”
She blinked. “I am Philippa Marbury.”
His eyes went wide, and he took an enormous step backward, knocking into a hat stand and turning to rescue it before realizing that he absolutely could not be standing in his office, in a gaming hell, shirtless, with Bourne’s sister-in-law. Bourne’s betrothed sister-in-law.
He reached for a shirt. It was wrinkled and worn, but it would do. As he searched fruitlessly for the opening in the linen, he backed away again. Farther.
She stood and came around the desk toward him. “Have I upset you?”
Why didn’t the shirt have an opening? As a last resort, he held the clothing in front of him, a shield from her enormous, all-seeing eyes. “Not at all, but I do not make a practice of having clandestine meetings with my partners’ sisters, half-nude.”
She considered the words before tilting her head to one side, and saying, “Well, you were asleep, so you really couldn’t have prevented it.”
“Somehow, I doubt that Bourne would see it that way.”
“At least give me an audience. I came all the way here.”
Cross knew he should refuse. Knew, with the keen sense of a lifelong gambler, that he should not continue this game. That it was unwinnable. But there was something about this young woman that made it impossible to stop himself. “Well, since you came all the way here . . . how may I be of service, Lady Philippa?”
She took a deep breath. Released it. “I require ruination. And I hear you are an expert in the subject.”