Page 58 of A Princess By Christmas

“Je, thank you.”

“Thelady,” Dromio drawled, and a salacious smile lit his face as the footman retreated. He waggled his eyebrows in Marek’s direction. “You surprise me, Brendan,” he said. “I’d begun to think you were a eunuch.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Go on, then. Far be it from me to stand in the way of a man’s pleasure. But don’t let anyone see you. You shouldn’t bring your paramour here.”

The color flooded back into Marek’s face. Dromio was stupid and vulgar, two things he despised in a man. “She is not—”

It didn’t matter what he said—Dromio was already walking away. Marek bit back a sigh of exasperation and turned toward the entrance of the hotel.

Mrs. Honeycutt was standing on the walk with a female companion, and the two of them looked terribly out of place among all the gentlemen coming and going from the hotel. She was bundled up in a heavy wool cloak, a scarf around her neck and a bonnet firmly on her head. But he could see that her cheeks and the tip of her nose were pink with cold. And as he walked toward them, he could see the happy smile that bloomed on her face. Remarkably, Marek could feel that light power through him.

“Mr. Brendan!”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Honeycutt.”

She beamed at him for a moment, then remembered her companion. “May I introduce my friend, Miss Poppy Dumont?”

Miss Poppy Dumont, a thin woman with auburn hair and a hat worn slightly askew, was smiling with great anticipation, almost as if she expected him to do something remarkable, like turn a cartwheel. She dipped a curtsy.

“Miss Dumont.”

Miss Dumont unabashedly looked him up and down. “How do youdo,Mr. Brendan?”

An enthusiastic greeting, he noted. “I am well, thank you. Mrs. Honeycutt, is something wrong?”

“Not at all!” she said cheerfully. “Things are positively right, isn’t that so, Poppy?”

“Right as they can be, I’d wager!”

“I’ve come because I have something for you,” Mrs. Honeycutt said. She withdrew her hand from a fur muff. She was clutching an envelope, and by the bend of it, she must have been clutching it for a time. He could see his name plainly written across the front of it.

“What is this?”

She laughed. “Read it!” She handed it to him.

Marek opened the envelope and withdrew a single card of heavy stock. It was an invitation to a gathering at the home of the Earl of Iddesleigh. The invitation proclaimed there would be a tree to be trimmed in the spirit of Christmas, and Christmas pudding would be served. Lord, she’d done it. He looked up; she beamed at him. “You can come, can’t you?”

Could he? “What of Lord Dromio?”

“Ah. The problem, you see, is that the tree will take up some room, so we must limit the number of guests.”

That presented a bit of a problem, as Marek didn’t quite know how to absent himself from Dromio’s company for a Saturday evening without a proper explanation. He didn’t know how to accept an invitation to a gathering like this if Dromio wasn’t also invited.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she said, as if reading his mind.

Marek looked at the invitation again.

“Lord Douglas has already sent word that he’d be delighted to attend.”

“Did he!” Miss Dumont said, her eyebrows lifting with surprise. “I hadn’t heard he’d come down to London.”

“Do none of you read my gazette?” Mrs. Honeycutt asked her.

“I’ve read every one of them,” Miss Dumont insisted. “Mostof them,” she amended. “And those I haven’t read are stacked by my bed.”

Mrs. Honeycutt shook her head and turned her attention to Marek. “Anyway,Mr. Brendan, will you come?”