Vixen in Velvet Read Online Free PDF

consulting room, and bring them refreshments. I’ll be there in a moment.”
    The girl went out.
    “ Up to the consulting room?” he said. “Are you meaning to mount stairs in your condition?”
    “Lady Clara has brought Lady Gladys Fairfax,” she said. “Did you not see her?”
    “Of course I saw Gladys. One can no more fail to notice her than one could overlook a toppling building or a forty-day flood. I pointed her out to you.”
    “I meant her dress,” she said.
    “I looked away immediately, but not soon enough. It was a catastrophe, as usual.”
    What Gladys lacked in good nature she made up in bad taste.
    “It was,” Miss Noirot said, her tell-nothing face radiant with an excitement as incomprehensible as it was breathtaking. “She needs me. I would get up those stairs if I had to crawl.”
    Blast.
    And this afternoon had been going so well, too.
    Leave it to Gladys to barge in like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.
    “What nonsense you talk,” Lisburne said. “You can’t crawl up the stairs. You’ll wrinkle your dress.”
    He crossed to Miss Noirot and offered his arm before she could attempt to stagger to the door.
    “I’d carry you in,” he said, “but if she spots us, it’ll only make Gladys sarcastic. More sarcastic. And she’ll make your afternoon disagreeable enough as it is. Are you sure you want to see her? Couldn’t you send one of those multitudes of girls?”
    “Fob her off on an inferior?” She took his arm. “Clearly you have a great deal to learn about business, my lord.”
    “And you’ve a great deal to learn about Gladys. But there’s no helping it, I see. Some people have to learn the hard way.”
    He got her up to the next floor, but retreated when he saw the open door and heard Gladys’s voice. It had reached the peevish stage already.
    He had a nightmarish recollection of the first time he’d seen her, waiting at the house after his father’s funeral. A spotty, surly, sharp-tongued fifteen-year-old girl who oughtn’t to have been let out of the schoolroom. And her father! The famous military hero, who’d tried to bully a grieving widow into betrothing her son to that obnoxious child. Lord Boulsworth had acted as though Father had been one of his officers, struck down in combat, over whose regiment Boulsworth must assume command—as though other people’s wives and sons and daughters existed merely to march to his orders. Lisburne had encountered her a few times since his return to London. Apart from a remarkably clear complexion, he’d seen no signs of Gladys’s improving with maturity. On the contrary, she seemed to have grown more like her father.
    “Sorry to play the coward and cut and run,” he said, “but I’ll do you no favors by hanging about. Clara’s well enough, of course. Gladys is another article. Let’s simply say that she and I won’t be exchanging pleasantries. Seeing me will only put her in a worse humor, if you can imagine that, and I’d rather not make your job any more difficult.”
    Forty-five minutes later
    A re you blind?” Lady Gladys said. “Only look at me! I can’t have my breasts spilling out of my dress. People will think I’m desperate for attention.”
    She glared at the three women studying her, her color deepening to a red unfortunately like a drunkard’s nose.
    She sounded furious, but Leonie discerned the misery in her eyes. Her ladyship was difficult: imperious, rude, impatient, uncooperative, and quick to imagine insult. Normal client behavior, in other words.
    At present, Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, stripped to corset and chemise, thanks to Jeffreys’s able assistance and Lady Clara’s moral support. Even so, reaching this point had been a battle. Meanwhile, Leonie’s ankle hurt, and so did her head, and neither of these things mattered, any more than Lady Gladys’s obnoxious behavior did.
    This was the opportunity of a lifetime.
    “My lady, one of the basic principles of dress is