Free Mistress at Midnight by Sophia James Page B

with quickly. Was there no end to her worries today? She was pleased when Kerslake left and a rare silence enfolded her.
    She did not feel like working, fidgety nervousness making her stand, a prickling feeling raising the fine hair on her forearms. She was still at the window a few moments later when a knock on the door took her attention. Thinking it to be Kerslake, she opened it, but it was not him, and the air that she had just breathed in congealed at the back of her throat.

Chapter Seven
    M rs Aurelia St Harlow stood before him, a swathe of scarlet silk in her hands and wearing the same black dress Stephen had seen her in every time he’d met her.
    ‘You?’ Her voice could not have been more shocked, her mismatched eyes widened and fearful. ‘What are you doing here?’
    Hawkhurst had to smile at that because the question was exactly the one he was about to ask her and because there was no earthly reason why a well-to-do lady should be lurking in the run-down buildings on the back streets of the Limestone Hole warehouses.
    Save one.
    ‘You work here?’ Everything had just gota whole lot harder and the mission he had been sent on by the Service was in danger of being compromised entirely. His glance took in the bolts of fabric and the squares of colours and designs that littered a large wooden table in the middle of the room. Ledgers were piled up five high in a bookcase beside it and further off in one corner a dog stood chained to the wall, his teeth bared in grisly defiance.
    ‘Down, Caesar!’ The animal crouched uncertainly at her command, flecks of spittle around its jawline. Stephen got the feeling that if it could forsake its chains it would be at his throat in an instant; much like its mistress if the look on Aurelia St Harlow’s face was anything to go by.
    ‘A nice pet,’ he drawled and stayed where he was.
    ‘Protection,’ she returned, the anger in her eyes boding badly. She neither asked him inside nor shut the door to keep him out.
    An impasse. The sky solved the situation by suddenly opening, rain scudding in the wind towards them across the line of brick buildings drenching everything, and she allowed him through. The dog rose again onits haunches at his movement forwards, a low growl filling the room.
    ‘He is not used to visitors.’
    ‘I will stand by the door, then.’
    ‘It might be wise.’ When she smiled briefly the lines of worry melted into radiance and he drew in breath. God, Aurelia St Harlow’s beauty held a sensuality that always surprised him and, doffing his hat, he placed it in front of his tight trousers, the effect she had on his anatomy singular and strong. Irritation mounted.
    ‘I cannot remember my cousin delving into silks.’
    ‘That is because he didn’t.’
    ‘You are saying this is your doing?’
    ‘My father’s family have manufactured silk buttons for a hundred years. It is in the Beauchamp blood.’
    ‘And he approves?’
    The quick tilt of her head worried him. She looked momentarily disappointed.
    ‘Women these days are less likely to seek authorisation from the men around them, Lord Hawkhurst, for there is a new movement afoot that allows for women’s emancipation. My late husband would have been more than horrified at any such thought, butthere it is; I can work in any field of industry that I am competent in and no one can stop me.’
    ‘Indeed?’ The idea was beginning to occur to him that she was the most fearless female he had ever met. He could not even begin to imagine ladies such as Elizabeth Berkeley and her ilk secreting themselves in such a dangerous part of London with an animal who probably had feral wolf in its bloodlines.
    A grimmer thought also surfaced.
    Could she be the one sending information to France through the textile channels from England? His agent had been most specific that this office was the one from which the package of coded information had first come. He changed his tack entirely.
    ‘Cassandra Lindsay was