Valerie looked wounded. “I thought you said it was splendorous,” she protested, picking up the swatch.
“I was being sarcastic.” The lie came entirely too easily, born of a need to keep from mentioning how special that moment had been to her. “This fabric offends me.” It had been blasphemous to have—even in error—applied the same word she had for dancing with Wayland to a material such as the one her friend encouraged her to have made into a proper dress.
“There’s hardly anything scandalous about peas,” her friend pointed out. “Well?” Valerie gave it another shake, waggling her eyebrows like she was one of those vendors hawking their wares on the streets.
Together, they stared with a renewed interest in the satin.
Annalee looked at the fabric dubiously. Perhaps Valerie was correct and she should consider an entirely different aesthetic for her wardrobe. Particularly one that couldn’t or wouldn’t attract the looks that crimsons and blacks and golds invariably did. Simultaneously, she and Valerie cocked their heads in opposite directions, eyeing the fabric still. Why, attired in a shade such as this, it was a certainty that absolutely no one would lust after her or look at her.
That was, look at someone in such a shade of green for any reasons beyond horror.
She sighed. Mayhap that was the very reason she should consider it, then.
“Hmm?” Valerie caught her eye and gave the bolt a little shake.
With reluctant movements, Annalee stretched her fingers toward it, then promptly drew them back. “I can’t do it. I just . . . cannot wear that.”
“You’re trying to be proper,” Valerie persisted.
Yes, but the line had to be drawn somewhere. “I’m trying to be proper, not”—Annalee swept her fingers in a little circle, gesturing in the direction of the item in question—“put myself through any self-flagellation.” Good God, this was going to be even harder than she’d anticipated. All of this. Removing her flask from her reticule, she uncorked the desperately needed spirits.
Valerie stared pointedly at the silver flask, and Annalee returned the object in question to her bag.
“This is different.”
“Drinking spirits in one of the most posh, well-respected modiste’s?” Valerie promptly dropped that hideous fabric. “This I have to hear.”
“Well,” Annalee began in the elevated tones she’d used years earlier, when she’d been a girl instructing her brother and Wayland on some point that they’d needed to know, “it is simply that . . . we are”—she stretched her arms wide—“alone. Uh . . . with the exception of the modiste.”
Again, they looked to the still dawdling shopkeeper.
The modiste tensed her mouth.
Valerie tipped her head in the young woman’s direction. “And the only reason we’re alone is because we drove everyone away.”
“And because of that, I’m certainly free to indulge in a bit of whiskey.”
“And it’s also the reason you should be of a mind to pick a fabric like—”
“You are nothing if not tenacious.” With a laugh, Annalee claimed the material once more from her determined friend’s clutch. “No.”
Valerie glanced about for the still tarrying shopkeeper. “You know we’re only moments from being thrown out, don’t you?”
Pouting, Annalee helped herself to one of the decorative feathers from the table. “Ah, but I do not know that,” she said, wagging that pink scrap in her friend’s direction. “Because Madame Bouchard is in a pickle. She doesn’t want to have me sully her steps, but also, she recognizes that I’m the daughter of one of her greatest, most free-spending patrons. And as such, she won’t throw me out.” She tapped her friend on the nose. “Yet.”
Eventually the woman would get around to it. Eventually, all the respectable sorts tired of her. But Annalee rather suspected Madame Bouchard would come over, grant her the quickest of quick appointments, and rush her off.
“She is upset that we’ve driven off all her patrons.”
And that she’d women of Valerie’s and Annalee’s reputations in her shop.
The bell tinkled at the front, followed by the click of an opening door. Annalee lifted a finger. “Not everyone.”
Valerie rolled her eyes. As they resumed their stroll down the aisles, her friend collected a swath of brown muslin. “This?”
“Egad, noooo. Brown? Valerie.” Annalee lamented her dearest friend’s very terrible taste. She did a search of the table and then widened her eyes. Quitting the other woman’s side, inexorably pulled to the very end of the table at the farthest end of the aisle, Annalee stopped. With reverent hands, she reached for the shimmering scarlet silk and lifted it closer for inspection. That slight movement sent the material rippling, and the light streaming through the shop windows played off the fabric, giving it a glossy sheen that added radiance to—
“No.”
Annalee jumped and clutched the scarlet silk protectively to her chest. “But—”
“No,” the other woman repeated more emphatically. “It’s red.”
Her friend guided her hands back down.
Annalee turned a pout on Valerie. “You are no fun.”
“Which is why I’m the perfect person to help you with this particular decision.”
With a last sorrowful look, she laid the article down. “I’ll have you know it’s more a shade of scarlet. Not exactly the same as red,” Annalee mumbled as they continued their quest.
Valerie fingered the lace fringe of a pale-yellow muslin. “Hmph,” she said, her gaze not on that fabric but on the front of the shop. “It is tiresome,” she remarked.
Annalee chuckled. “There is much tiresome about modistes and Polite Society. You have to be more specific, dear.”
“It’s just that she’s still debating whether to serve you, and yet she’s rushed off to provide assistance to a man and his mistress, so mayhap she’s not as respectable as all that.”
A man and his . . . ?
Endlessly intrigued, Annalee looked to the front of the shop and froze, her heart thumping funnily in her chest. For the pair on the floor now, speaking with the modiste, were no wicked woman and her protector. It was . . .
“Wayland?” she whispered.
She felt Valerie’s questioning stare.
After all, she’d have to be looking at the other woman to have seen it. As it was, all her focus was entirely reserved for the broad-muscled figure conversing with Madame Bouchard.
What brother bothered to accompany his sister to a place as tedious and miserable as this one?
Between being oblivious to her relationship with Wayland and returning from the Continent all those years earlier and finding his sister the talk and scandal of London, Annalee’s own brother couldn’t have been bothered to defend her honor. Nor, for that matter, would she have ever wished him to do something as foolish as duel because of her. He’d been more of a friend, even when they’d been children, treating her as one of “the lads,” as he’d called the three of them. He’d enjoyed her company when she’d been fishing and shooting and racing him and his best friend. But neither had Jeremy been the manner of devoted brother who’d go about escorting her to fittings.