Free Betina Krahn by The Unlikely Angel Page A

had either. And it was even less likely that his opinion of her and her venture had improved in the intervening two weeks.
    Strangely, his ire wasn’t the only thing she remembered. She had never been one to recall faces well, but for some reason she could recall every line, every curve, every shading and texture of his. In the quiet of her room at night, in the privacy of her inner thoughts, she also remembered the curious and somewhat worrisome tingling she had experienced as he loomed over her. It wasn’t merely the excitement of verbal combat or of the passionate defense of her strongly held beliefs. It was something else, something she had never experienced before. Something alarmingly personal. And feminine.
    All the more reason for her to see that his lordship’s stay in St. Crispin was unexpectedly brief She had to get rid of him. It was the only sensible thing to do. And in order to get rid of him, she had decided, she would have to convince him that both his oversight of the Ideal Garment Company and his presence in St. Crispin were unnecessary.
    To that end, she had plotted a strategy along two separate but complementary fronts. She planned to convince him of her sound management and the ability of her employees by demonstrating the progress they had made in clothing designs, the manufacturing process, and the factory itself. Only the most narrow-minded and vindictive of men would refuse to see the good that was happening here. Despite the animosity between them at their first meeting, she hoped that Lord Mandeville’s professional objectivity was worthy of Sir William’s high opinion of it.
    Her secondary strategy addressed his presence in the village. A man of his elegance would no doubt find St. Crispin’s meager accommodations difficult. With a little help they might become altogether intolerable.
    Looking up, she found herself a short distance from the front doors of the factory. She paused. As always, her worries and cares began to fall away at the sight of the tall brick-and-limestone building and the freshly lettered sign over the main entrance identifying it as THE IDEAL GARMENT COMPANY .
    The factory was simply the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, a dream in the making. The large windows on the first and second floors still awaited a coat of paint, and the roof, which had suffered moisture damage during the years of neglect, still had holes here and there. The entry yard needed a great deal of stone to make it passable in wet weather, and there was a good bit of cleaning and painting to do all around. But such exterior flaws were easily remedied, minor compared to what had been accomplished inside the building.
    Rolling up the sleeves of her blue smock, she headed inside and up to the offices, stepping carefully around the defective boards in the stairs, which were due to be repaired any day now. As she strolled through half-finished cutting tables, envisioning them piled with layers of cloth and surrounded by cutters and apprentices, she was startled by a snarling sound from a nearby stack of lumber. Investigating, she discovered a man sprawled on his back on top of a pile of boards, snoring furiously.
    It was Fritz Gonnering, her German-born engineer. Her first impulse was to awaken him, but then she spotted the dark circles under his eyes and the pallor beneath the stubble on his face.
Exhaustion
. He had probably been working into the wee hours again. He had designed a system of pulleys and shafts to run an entire factory of cutting and sewing machines from a single coal-fired engine and now was laboring night and day to install and perfect it. Madeline shook her head, suffering a pang of conscience at how hard he was working.Then she hurried on through the cutting rooms and up the back stairs to the offices.
    Proceeding past the clerks’ desks and the door to the superintendent’s office, she headed straight for the sample room. It was here, in this spacious area flooded with light from