Gilded Lily Read Online Free PDF Page B

you shouldn’t dance with me. It’ll stain you indelibly.”
    â€œAre you socially unfit in some way?”
    â€œQuite ruined, I’m afraid. Not in
that
way, mind you,” Freddie reassured him, though she wasn’t sure why it suddenly mattered to her. Lord Barnabas Smith-Grenville’s opinion of her, good or otherwise, was irrelevant. “But I’m hopelessly odd, you see. I used to do quite well on the marriage mart. There were proposals and so forth, and though I never accepted, that only heightened my allure. Then at the end of last Season I made a critical mistake and let boredom overcome me at one of these things. I don’t do well with boredom.”
    â€œYou fell asleep?”
    â€œI was caught in the host’s study, fondling his big inclinometer.”
    Barnabas coughed into his hand, a charming blush spreading up his cheeks. Or rather, she observed, a red mottling spread there. It was objectively unattractive, regardless of how she might view it subjectively. A grown man blushing like a schoolboy shouldn’t charm one.
    â€œI . . . I’m afraid I don’t see.”
    â€œA mariner’s astrolabe. And I wasn’t so much fondling it as reassembling it.”
    â€œAh. Which suggests that at some point prior you had—”
    â€œDisassembled it, yes. Because it was broken. It had a clever display function, a set of powered number wheels to show the latitude and longitude findings, with translucent glass number panels so they could be backlit for use in the dark. On a submersible, say. But the connections on those things are fiddly and tend to jostle loose when the inclinometer is running. I found the thing on his desk with a note to his man of business attached, saying, ‘Bin this rubbish and refuse the bill.’ But it wasn’t rubbish; I could clearly see the problem was just a question of tightening a few things up. My real mistake was deciding to replace the copper wire to the bulb fixture with silver. Too time-consuming.”
    He seemed to consider this for several moments, then asked a question she wasn’t expecting. “You happened to have silver wire about your person at a ball? Just in case you ran across a piece of broken equipment , or . . . ?”
    Freddie reached up, touching the blossom-strewn curl that draped down upon her shoulder. “I happened to have silver wire in my hair. It spiraled from the crown of my head down around the loose curls, and between the strands were crystal flowers. It was lovely. Until I cut it out, of course, to use in the inclinometer.”
    â€œOf course. I see.”
    â€œNow you see.”
    His lips tightened in what she supposed might be sympathy but was likely either disapproval or another suppressed smirk. “One mistake, and you paid for it with your reputation. Clearly not fit to marry, the sort of girl who takes her hair down and strips a man’s inclinometer to its parts the minute her chaperone’s back is turned.”
    She didn’t know him well enough to know whether to laugh, but she found herself wanting to see
him
laugh. Or scowl, or do anything other than smile blandly and look polite. “Yes. Well. At least I wasn’t spotted in the mechanic’s stables, flat on my back on a crawler, sliding under a carriage to investigate a faulty steam pump.”
    â€œIn a ball gown? As if you could. Preposterous!”
    â€œNo, I mean at least I wasn’t caught, the time I did that. The gown was ruined beyond repair, of course. I went straight to my carriage and home afterward and everybody just assumed I’d left the ball early with a headache. As I said, I’m not good with boredom. But I am usually quite good at not being found out.”
    The emotions she’d been looking for on Smith-Grenville’s face appeared like magic, a series of impressions that flicked from sudden insight through “surely not” to