The Bachelor List (30 page)

Gideon took a slow breath. Wonderful eyes. They did not belong to this spinsterly dowd. So, just what game was Miss Duncan playing here? He had every intention of discovering before the evening was done.

“I haven't made up my mind on that issue,” he answered finally. “Perhaps you should try to convince me of its merits while you attempt to persuade me to take on your defense.” A smile touched the corners of his mouth and his gray eyes were suddenly luminous as they locked with hers.

Prudence hastily returned her glasses to her nose. That gaze was too hot to hold. And there was a note in his voice that made her scalp prickle. Every instinct shrieked a warning, but a warning about what? Rationally, he couldn't possibly be attracted to her, yet his eyes and voice and smile said he was. Was he playing some cat-and-mouse game? Trying to fool her into a false position? She forced herself to concentrate. She had a job to do. She had to persuade him that he would find their case interesting and—

Her mind froze. Was this part of what would make it interesting for him? An elaborate, cruel game of mock seduction? Was there some kind of quid pro quo here to which she was not as yet a party?

Prudence thought of
The Mayfair Lady,
she thought of the mountain of debt that they were only just beginning to topple. She thought of her father, who so far had been protected from the truth, as their mother would have striven to protect him. With those stakes, she could play Gideon Malvern at his own game and enjoy the sport.

She gave her skirts another fussy pat and said with a schoolmistressy hint of severity, “On the subject of our defense: as we see it, Sir Gideon, our weakness lies in the fact that we do not as yet have concrete evidence of Lord Barclay's financial misdoing. However, we know how to find that. For the moment, we have ample evidence to bolster our accusations of his moral failures.”

“Let's sit down to dinner,” he said. “I'd rather not discuss this on an empty stomach.”

Prudence stood up. “I'm impressed by your diligence, Sir Gideon. I'm sure you had a full day in your chambers and in court, and now you're prepared to work over dinner.”

“No, Miss Duncan,
you
are going to be doing the work,” he observed, moving to the table. “I am going to enjoy my dinner while you try to convince me of the merits of your case.” He held out a chair for her.

Prudence closed her lips tightly. This was the man she had met that afternoon. Arrogant, self-possessed, completely in control. And much easier to deal with than the glimpses she'd had of the other side of his character. She sat down and shook out her napkin.

Her host rang a small bell beside his own place setting before sitting down. “The club has a considerable reputation for its kitchen,” he said. “I chose the menu carefully. I hope it will meet with your approval.”

“Since you've just told me I'm not going to have the opportunity to enjoy it, your solicitude seems somewhat hypocritical,” Prudence said. “I would have been content with a boiled egg.”

He ignored the comment and she was obliged to admit that he was entitled to do so. She took a roll from the basket he offered while two waiters moved discreetly around them, filling wineglasses and ladling delicate pale green soup into fine white bowls.

“Lettuce and lovage,” Gideon said when she inhaled the aroma. “Exquisite, I think you'll find.” He broke into a roll and spread butter lavishly. “Tell me something about your sisters. Let's start with Mrs. Ensor.”

“Constance.”

“Constance,” he repeated. “And your younger sister is called . . . ?”

“Chastity.”

He sipped his wine and seemed to savor this information. There was a distinct gleam in his gray eyes. “Constance, Prudence, and Chastity. Someone had a sense of humor. I'm guessing it was your mother.”

Prudence managed not to laugh. She declared, “We are the perfect exemplars of our names, I should tell you, Sir Gideon.”

“Are you, indeed?” He reached to refill her wineglass and once again shot her that quizzical look. “Prudence by name and prudence by nature?” He shook his head. “If they match their names as appropriately as I believe you match yours, Miss Prudence Duncan, I cannot wait to meet your sisters.”

Prudence ate her soup. She wasn't going to step into that quicksand. If he was beginning to see through her pretense, she wasn't going to help him out.

“This soup is certainly exquisite,” she said with one of her prim smiles.

He nodded. “It's one of my favorite combinations.”

She looked at him, curiosity piqued once more despite her intentions to stick with business. “I get the impression you're something of a gourmand, Sir Gideon.”

He put down his soup spoon. “We have to eat and drink. I see no reason to do either in a mediocre fashion.”

“No,” Prudence responded. “My father would agree with you.”

“And you too, I suspect.” He twirled the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. Her appreciation of the white burgundy in her glass had not gone unnoticed.

Prudence realized that her façade had slipped. She said with a careless shrug, “Actually, in general I'm indifferent to such things. We live very simply, my sisters and I.”

“Really,” he said, his voice flat as a river plain.

“Really,” she said firmly, starting to reach for her glass, then putting her hand back into her lap instead.

The waiters returned, removed soup plates, set down the fish course, and left.

“Plaice,” the barrister said, taking up his fish knife and fork. “A seriously underappreciated fish. Simply grilled with a touch of parsley butter, it's more delicate than the freshest Dover sole.”

“In your opinion,” Prudence murmured, slicing into the slightly browned flesh. The addendum passed unnoticed by her companion, who was savoring his first mouthful. She took her own and was forced to admit that he had a point.

“There is no way to fight Barclay's libel action without you and your sisters divulging your identities.”

It was such a stunning change of subject, Prudence was for a moment confused. It was an attack rather than a continuation of their conversation. She blinked, swiftly marshaled her thoughts, and entered the fray. “We can't.”

“I cannot put a newspaper on the stand.” His voice had lost all trace of conversational intimacy. He pushed aside his plate. “I spent the better part of two hours reading back issues of your broadsheet, Miss Duncan, and I do not believe you and your sisters lack the intelligence to imagine for one minute that you could escape the stand.”

Prudence wondered if this was an ambush. Part of the cat-and-mouse game. “We cannot take the witness stand, Sir Gideon. Our anonymity is essential to
The Mayfair Lady.
”

“Why?” He took up his wine goblet and regarded her over the lip.

“I do not believe
you
lack the intelligence to answer that question yourself, Sir Gideon. My sisters and I cannot divulge our identities because we propound theories and opinions that, since we're women, would be automatically discounted if our readership knew who was responsible for them. The success of the broadsheet depends upon the mystery of its authorship, and its inside knowledge.”

“Ah, yes, inside knowledge,” he said. “I can quite understand that no one would speak freely to you if they knew they could be opening themselves to the ironical, if not malicious, pen of
The Mayfair Lady
.”

“I would dispute
malicious
,” Prudence said, a slight flush warming her cheeks. “
Ironical
, yes, and we don't suffer fools gladly, but I don't consider we're ever spiteful.”

“There's a difference between malice and spite,” he said.

“It's a little too subtle for me,” she responded frostily.

He shrugged, raised his eyebrows, but made no attempt to amend his statement.

Prudence took a minute to recover her composure. She knew that she and Constance had a tendency to indulge their own sharp and sardonic wit, but it was a private pleasure. Chastity was usually their only audience and even she, the gentler-natured sister, could be roused to blistering irony in the face of social pretension or arrant stupidity, particularly when someone was hurt by it. In the broadsheet they certainly made fun of such failings, but they never named names.

He spoke again while she was still collecting her thoughts. “Miss Duncan, if you cannot defeat this libel, your broadsheet will cease to exist. If, as I understand you to say, your identities are forced into the open, then your broadsheet will also cease to exist.” He set down his glass. “So, now, tell me what legal help I can offer you.”

So that was it. In his judgment they had no possibility of winning. Never had had. So it
was
cat and mouse. But why? Why this elaborate dinner just to watch her squirm like a butterfly on the end of a pin? Well, whatever the reasons, she was not about to accept his assessment meekly and go on her not-so-merry way.

Once again she took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses with her napkin. “Maybe, Sir Gideon, we're asking the impossible, but I was given to understand that you specialized in impossibilities. We are not prepared to lose
The Mayfair Lady
. It provides us with a necessary livelihood, both the broadsheet and the Go-Between. We would never get clients for that service from among our own social circle if they knew whom they were dealing with. That must be obvious to you.”

“The Go-Between . . . that's some kind of matchmaking service that you advertise. I didn't realize you ran it yourselves.” He sounded both amused and faintly incredulous.

Prudence said as coldly as before, “Believe it or not, Sir Gideon, we're doing rather well with it. You'd be surprised at the unlikely matches we've managed to make.” She said nothing further as the pair of waiters returned, did what they had to, and left them with veal scallopini on their plates and a very fine claret in their glasses.

Gideon sampled both wine and veal before he said, with a slight shake of his head, “You and your sisters are certainly an enterprising trio.”

Prudence, still holding her glasses in her lap, directed her myopic gaze at him. Immediately she remembered that this was a mistake. Whenever she took off her glasses his expression changed unnervingly. She put them back on and now fixed him with a deep frown between her brows and a hard glare behind her lenses. Everything in her expression indicated conviction and the absolute determination to deal with the impossible. “Enterprising or not, we have to win this case. It's as simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” Gideon said, nodding slowly. “I am to put a sheet of newspaper on the witness stand. Just supposing we set that difficulty aside, there is another one. Would you mind telling me exactly how you propose defending the publication's accusations of fraud and cheating?”

“I told you earlier, Sir Gideon, that we have a fairly good idea where to find the evidence.”

He touched a finger to his lips. “Forgive me, Miss Duncan, but I'm not sure that that assertion is sufficient.”

“You will have to find it so. I cannot at this point be more specific.” She sipped from her wineglass, clasped her hands on the table, and leaned towards him. “We need a barrister of your standing, Sir Gideon. We're offering a case that you should find challenging. My sisters and I are not hapless defendants. We're more than capable of acting vigorously in our defense.”

“And are you capable of paying my fee, Miss Duncan?” He regarded her now with unmistakable amusement, his eyebrows lifted a fraction.

Prudence hadn't expected the question, but she didn't hesitate. “No,” she said.

He nodded. “As I thought.”

Her frown deepened. “How could you have known?”

He shrugged. “It's part of my business sense, Miss Duncan. I'm assuming that your brother-in-law, Max Ensor, is not offering to support you.”

Prudence felt the heat again rise to her cheeks. “Constance—we—would never ask him to do so. And he would not expect it. This is our enterprise. Constance is financially independent of her husband.”

His eyebrows lifted another notch. “Unusual.”

“We are not usual women, Sir Gideon. Which is why we're offering you the case,” Prudence declared with sublime indifference to the realities. “If we win—and we
will
win because our cause is just—then we'll happily divide the damages at whatever proportion you dictate. But we cannot broach our anonymity.”

“You think you will win because your cause is just?” He laughed, and it was the derisive laugh she detested. “Just what makes you think the justice of your cause guarantees justice in the courts? Don't be naïve, Miss Duncan.”

Prudence smiled at him without warmth. “That, Sir Gideon, KC, is precisely why you will take our case. You like to fight, and the best fights are those that are hardest to win. Our backs are against the wall, and if we lose, we lose our livelihood. Our father loses his illusions and we will have failed our mother.”

She spread her hands in a gesture of offering. “Can you resist a battle with such stakes?”

He looked at her. “Were you designated spokeswoman because of your persuasive tongue, Prudence, or was there another reason?”

“We divide our duties according to circumstance,” she responded tartly, noticing only belatedly that he had used her given name for the first time. “Either of my sisters would have willingly tackled you, but they had other things to do.”

“Tackled me?” He laughed, and this time it was with pure enjoyment. “I have to tell you, Prudence, that you'd have done a better job of tackling me without the . . .” He waved an expressive hand. “Without the playacting . . . that prim smile and that ghastly dress.” He shook his head. “I have to tell you, my dear, that it's simply not convincing. Either you improve your acting skills or you give up the pretense. I know perfectly well that you're a sophisticated woman. I also know that you're educated and that you don't suffer fools gladly. So I would ask that you stop treating me like one.”

Prudence sighed. “It was not my intention to do so. I wanted to be certain you took me seriously. I didn't want to come across as some flighty Society flibbertigibbet.”