“Irony?”
“Yes. I can see I must explain Barringer to you. Though he is an earl and displays the pretense of being a gentleman, he is not. For all the high-minded airs he puts on, he is notoriously immoral in his private life. Barringer publishing etiquette books is like the devil giving a morality lecture.”
No hint of a smile, no appreciation of the irony crossed her face. “Your private life being such an excellent moral example, there would be no such irony if you published etiquette books?” She gave him no chance to reply to that. “In any case, Lord Barringer is not publishing my work as a book. I shall be writing a column for his weekly periodical, the Social Gazette. And though matters of etiquette will be of paramount importance in my dialogue, it is not the only topic I shall be discussing.”
Before she had even finished, Harry had already figured out what Barringer was up to. “He’s hired you to thumb his nose at me, of course. He loathes me, and knowing how much I depend upon you, he is enjoying the notion of stealing you away from me. A column allows him to flaunt his victory on a weekly basis.”
“I don’t suppose it’s possible his decision has nothing to do with you? That he has decided to publish my writing because it’s good?”
“Barringer wouldn’t know good writing if it bit him. He went to Oxford.”
She did not find that amusing. “The fact that you belittle Barringer’s ability to appreciate good writing does not surprise me. But I am baffled by how you can denigrate my writing as not being good when you haven’t even read it!”
Harry had the feeling he was digging himself deeper into a hole with every moment, but he wasn’t going to lie to her about her work in order to extricate himself. “I read enough of it to know I wasn’t interested in publishing it.”
She rose to her feet, implying their conversation was at an end. “Then it shouldn’t bother you in the least that Lord Barringer chooses to do so.”
“That is not what bothers me.” He also stood up. “What bothers me is losing my secretary, a secretary who had no experience, no references, not even a letter of character when she first came to me, but to whom I gave the chance to prove her abilities.”
She gave an indignant huff. “How generous of you.”
“Damned right it was generous. Who else would have hired you? Who else would have paid you the same wage as a man? Who else would have given a mere secretary yearly bonuses at Christmas and Saturday afternoons free? No one. Barringer wouldn’t, that’s certain.”
“And in exchange for your so-called generosity, I have fulfilled my duties in exemplary fashion for five years! You’ve nothing in my conduct with which to find fault.”
“Nothing? You up and resign, having given no indication you were dissatisfied with your position, having told me nothing of your discontent. You accept employment with my fiercest competitor, a man who despises me and would love nothing better than to worm confidential information out of my former secretary.”
“No one worms anything out of me, I can assure you!”
“And,” he went on, paying no heed to her words, “you commit this disloyalty without even having the good manners and sense of etiquette to give the customary fortnight’s notice of your departure.”
For the first time, Miss Dove had the grace to look a bit ashamed of herself. As well she should. “I regret that circumstances forbade my giving notice.” She turned and walked away. “I can only say,” she added over her shoulder as she paused by a window, “that my actions were dictated by the certain knowledge you will have no trouble replacing me.”
“Replace you? Woman, have you not yet comprehended why I’m here? Haven’t I made it plain enough? I don’t want to replace you. I want you to give up this notion of writing silly etiquette stuff for Barringer and come back to work for me where you belong.”
“What I write is not silly!” She whirled around, and her chin came up. The sun glinted off her hair. “Since you are speaking plainly, so shall I. What I write is important and useful, and I will not allow you to disparage it. As for where I belong, I have decided that it isn’t working for you! And who could blame me? I have been a loyal, reliable employee, doing everything required of me and more, but in return I have been rewarded with nothing but more work.”
“And generous pay,” he shot back.
She ignored that. “You have piled task after task upon me, yet you have never spared a moment to discuss my writing, you have taken advantage of me at every opportunity, even going so far as to require me to buy the gifts you give your mistresses!”
“I asked it. I never required it. And if it was such an objectionable part of your duties, you should have said so.”
“You have never appreciated me nor any of the many things I’ve done for you and for Marlowe Publishing,” she went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “All you have done is take me for granted. Well, I have had enough!”
Harry’s frustration faded into bafflement as she unleashed this torrent of criticism upon him. Never before had she shown a shred of anger, or any other emotion, for that matter. This was not the Miss Dove he knew. This was not the compliant secretary who had been gliding in and out of his line of vision half a dozen times a day for five years now, who followed his instructions and obeyed his orders with cheerful acceptance, no questions and no complaints. This was certainly not the Miss Dove who always behaved with efficiency, exactitude, and propriety. This was someone else altogether, someone he did not recognize.
He studied her, and something about the way she stood in the shaft of sunlight through the window caught his attention. “Miss Dove,” he said in surprise, “you have red hair.”
“What?” She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your hair is red. I never realized that before. I always thought it was brown, but it’s not. In the sunlight it turns red.”
She frowned at him, looking thoroughly vexed. “I know the color of my hair, thank you. What on earth has that to do with anything?”
Somehow, he’d managed to offend her yet again. “No need to get touchy about it,” he assured her. “Some people don’t like their red hair, I know, but you needn’t worry. Yours isn’t a violent sort of red. It looks brown, but when you stand in the sun, it goes all coppery and shimmery. It’s…” He paused, feeling as if he’d just discovered something rather extraordinary. “It’s very pretty.”
She was not pleased by the compliment. She actually seemed insulted. “Oh!” she cried, hands balling into fists at her sides, “you are the most manipulative man I have ever known! And the most insincere.”
“Insincere? What, you don’t believe me?”
“Of course I don’t! It’s too convenient a compliment to be a true opinion. Besides, you only like women with black hair.”
She saw his surprise and gave him a look of triumph in return. “Hah! You see? I know you, Lord Marlowe. The five years I’ve been in your employ have given me a complete understanding of your character. I know you like the back of my hand, so trying to get around me with compliments is useless. You dole out flattery as if you are handing out candy to children. It’s all meant to charm, or to soothe, or to get what you want, or to help you wriggle out of unpleasant situations. Why others fall prey to such tactics, particularly women, is beyond my comprehension, but I am not such a fool as that.”
Red hair, and a temper, too, he thought, amazed. He hadn’t known she possessed either. “I have never thought you a fool.”
“‘You’re a treasure, Miss Dove,’” she quoted him with scorn. “‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Miss Dove.’ Do you really think such innocuous flattery ever made me feel valued or important? It didn’t,” she said, answering her own question before he could do so. “But now you want me to come back, so you’re using flattery as a tactic, as if a compliment about my hair ought to impress me enough for that!”
Impressing her hadn’t even occurred to him. It was true that in his private life he happened to have a certain susceptibility to women with black tress
es, but that didn’t make his comment about Miss Dove’s hair insincere. It nettled him that she thought so.
Harry opened his mouth to set her straight, but she didn’t give him the chance. She sucked in a deep breath and went on. “Besides, you’ve lied to me before, so why should I believe anything you have to say?”
He stiffened at those words. He was not a liar, and no one had ever dared accuse him of being one. “I do not lie, Miss Dove. Despite your assessment of me and my motives, I do not give false compliments, only ones I genuinely believe. I concede to being manipulative—I doubt I could succeed in business if I were not so—but I do not lie.”
“Equivocate, then. Is that a better way of putting it? You didn’t even know Mrs. Bartleby was my pen name, and it’s right on the title page of every manuscript I’ve ever given you!”
“Is that what this is all about?” Now he knew the identity of Mrs. Bartleby, but at the moment, having his curiosity satisfied on that point was hardly gratifying. “Good God, I don’t read your title pages. Why should I? When you hand me a manuscript, I know perfectly well who wrote it.”
“Title pages aside, if you had actually read my work, you would still have known who Mrs. Bartleby is. You led me to believe you have read my manuscripts, but you have not!”
This was becoming ridiculous. “I told you, I have read enough of your work to form an opinion. That’s all any publisher does. Unless it sparks his interest, he doesn’t read it all. If we read everything we receive all the way through, we should never get any work done. And having been employed by a publisher five years now, opening all the unsolicited writing I and my editors receive, you ought to know that.”
“What I know is that you will never publish any of my writing because you cannot look at it objectively. You are too closed-minded.”
“I am not closed-minded!”
“I have finally come to accept that flaw of your character,” she continued with blithe disregard for his denial, “and I have taken my writing elsewhere, to someone who respects my work. Someone who respects me.”
“Respect?” The implication that he did not have respect for her was an insult to his character that made Harry truly angry. “If you think Barringer has a shred of respect for you or your writing, you are deceiving yourself. To be blunt, you’re not of his class, and Barringer is one of those pompous asses that abound in this world who care about distinctions of that sort. He’s a snob and a hypocrite.”
“He had some equally flattering things to say about you.”
“I’ll wager he did.”
“Things which my own observations of you over the years only served to confirm.”
“What observations? You claim a full understanding of my nature, but if that were true, there would be nothing that blatherskite Barringer could say about me with which you would agree. You believe you know me? Obviously, you do not know me at all, Miss Dove.”
“And if you think I will come back into your employ only to tolerate more of your denigration of my work as silly, you do not know me, my lord!”
Harry stared at her, noting the flush of outrage in her cheeks, the red glints in her hair, and the clenched fists at her sides, and his own anger faded as quickly as it had come.
Five years of having her in his employ, with each of them assuming those passing years had given them a thorough knowledge of the other’s character. She thought him insincere and a liar and God only knows what else. He thought her cool, dispassionate, compliant, and—truth be told—somewhat inhuman. Both of them, it seemed, had been wrong.
“I want you to leave.”
Interrupted in the midst of these realizations, Harry didn’t quite catch her words. “I beg your pardon?”
She stalked over to him and stuck her chin up looking him square in the eye. “I said, leave.”
What else about her had he missed? He studied her face, not as if it was the one he saw nearly every day, but instead, as if they had never met before.
Her eyes were hazel. He already knew that, but what he hadn’t known until now was that the gold flecks in them seemed to snap like sparks when she was angry. Until now, he hadn’t really noticed the freckles sprinkled over her nose and upper cheeks like so much pixy dust, or that there was a faint, star-shaped scar on her cheekbone. Until now he hadn’t realized that her brown lashes were light at the ends, as if the tips had been dipped in gold.
“Are you hard of hearing?” She brought her hands up between them and pushed with all her might. When he didn’t comply, she pushed him again. “I said, go away!”
He outweighed her by a good five or six stone, at least, so all her shoving didn’t move him an inch. He continued to look at her in this new way, seeing her as he’d never seen her before. To his surprise, he found himself enjoying the view. She was not a beautiful woman, but right now, with rosy color in her cheeks and those sparks in her eyes, she was a sight any man would appreciate. Miss Dove was very human indeed.
Seeing that her attempts to force him out were useless, she stopped. “Depart this instant, Lord Marlowe,” she ordered. “If you don’t, I shall fetch the police. They have a station at the corner.”
Knowing she would be unmoved by any more words about how much he valued her, he decided it was time to negotiate. “I’ll increase your wages. Say to ten pounds a month?”
“No!” She pushed him again, and this time he allowed it, knowing he would gain nothing by doing otherwise.
“Twenty,” he said. That was exorbitant pay for a secretary, but he could afford the expense.
“No.”
“Thirty. And I’ll give you all of Saturdays off, not just afternoons.”
“No, no, no!” With each refusal, she pushed him closer to the door. “This is not about days off. It’s not about money.”
“What is it about, then?” he asked as she paused by the settees and grabbed his hat. “Your hurt feelings?”
“No.” She slammed the hat on his head with one hand as she continued to propel him backward with the other. “This is about me and what I want. I want to be a writer, not work for you.”
“I am not accepting your resignation.”
“You have to accept it.”
He took off his hat and held it to his heart. “What will it take to get you back?”
She made a sound of thorough exasperation through her teeth. “Do you never give up?”
“Not when I want something. I’m rather obstinate that way. Since you claim to know me so well, you should know that.”
“Then we have something in common, my lord, for I, too, am very obstinate.”
He had to tell her the truth about Barringer. It was only right. “I beg you to be sensible. As my secretary, your future is secure, while this venture with Barringer is doomed to fail. He’s facing—”
“I don’t want a secure future,” she interrupted, “and I shall not reconsider! I’ve had enough of being sensible to last a lifetime. And I don’t believe I will fail. There are a great many people who are concerned with good manners, though you are obviously not one of them.”
“You do not understand the circumstances under which Barringer has offered to publish your work. I’m not surprised that he didn’t enlighten you, but you need to know—”
“He’s not you. That’s the only thing I need to know.” She stepped sideways and opened the door. After a quick glance in both directions, she looked at him and waited.
When he did not move to depart, she gave an aggravated sigh and returned to stand in front of him. She flattened her hands against his chest, crushing his hat, and began pushing him out into the corridor. “I shall finally be a published writer, which is what I have always wanted to be. Barringer will make pots of money and score off you, just as you say he wants to do. Our venture will be a raging success.” She came to a stop on the threshold, breathing hard from the exertion of getting him out the door. “But the best part of all is that I shall never have to buy another gift for one of your horrid mistresses!”
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She started to shut the door, then stopped. “And Mr. Pigeon is not fat!” With that parting shot, she shut the door in his face.
He stared at the closed door, unable to quite believe what had just happened. He was supposed to have come here as the benevolent employer, giving his misguided secretary another chance. She was supposed to have regretted her impetuous decision. She was supposed to have thought things over, and upon such reflection, come to her senses. She was supposed to be back at her desk tomorrow morning. Instead, he’d had a door slammed in his face, and his compliant, sensible, efficient secretary was now working for the loathsome Lord Barringer.
Harry rubbed a hand over his eyes and began to wonder if, like Alice, he had just stepped through a looking glass into a world where everything was upside down and topsy-turvy and nothing was what it seemed.
One thing, however, was very clear. Miss Dove was unaware of Barringer’s financial situation and had no idea that her fate was to be back in Harry’s employ in very short order. Barringer was good at putting up a show of prosperity, but Harry knew the earl was being pressed by creditors at every turn. He would soon be forced to sell the Gazette, and when Harry bought it, his plans to make the newspaper more entertaining did not include an etiquette column.
He’d tried to tell her all this, but she had refused to listen. Twice she had interrupted his attempts to explain. She had also insulted his manners, accused him of lacking respect for her, and called him a liar. Such behavior, damn it all, couldn’t be acceptable in anybody’s etiquette book.
Harry decided not to make any further attempts to enlighten her. Let her find out the truth about her new employer for herself. When she did, he’d be there, happy to offer her back her former post and willing to let bygones be bygones.
Harry reshaped his flattened hat, put it on his head, and started down the stairs. Perhaps this entire episode was for the best. Perhaps Miss Dove would finally see that etiquette books weren’t worth writing and they weren’t worth publishing. People didn’t want to read about how to behave. They wanted to read about how other people were misbehaving.
And Then He Kissed Her Page 7
