Lauren Willig by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose Page A

the public record, all an outsider would know was that Lord Richard, guest at the same house party, had at one point been the Purple Gentian. That was all. And while that might tend to suggest that there might be something more going on than hunt the slipper, it wasn’t enough to implicate Jane or inform one of much of anything at all.
     
     
Almost all my revelations—the missing bits that enabled me to decode Vaughn’s terse notations of his activities—had come as a result of a particular set of privately owned papers. The Selwick papers, to be precise.
     
     
Oh dear. Selwick. Colin. Me. Him. Dinner.
     
     
All systems accelerated to red alert. Oh God, what time was it? I had been in the basement for what felt like years, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours, could it? There were no windows down there, just those plain whitewashed walls. For all I knew, it could have been anytime between noon and midnight.
     
     
“I’ve often thought,” mused Dempster, in uncanny echo, “that the answer must lie in the Selwick papers.”
     
     
Oh, damn, damn, damn. I needed to take a shower, and pick an outfit, and shave every part of my body that could possibly be shaved, whether he was going to see it or not. In short, all the requisite predate preparations that men never notice, anyway, but without which we can’t make it out of the door of the apartment.
     
     
“Do you know what time it is?” I asked abruptly.
     
     
Dempster was taken aback, but the influence of the old school tie prevailed. “Six o’clock.”
     
     
I had been there for five hours? Thank goodness he had interrupted me, or I might have turned into an archival Rip Van Winkle. I could picture Colin standing there…slowly turning old and gray…while I moldered away forgotten in the basement of the Vaughn Collection, just transcribing one last document. Of course, he wouldn’t be standing there all that while. Some other lucky woman would undoubtedly snatch him up in the meantime. Intelligent Englishmen with decent dental work don’t come along every day.
     
     
“Will you excuse me?” I blurted out. “I really have to run. I have a dinner engagement—lost track of time—really don’t want to be late.”
     
     
“And it’s a Saturday night,” Dempster finished for me, looking less stiff than I had seen him. He really wasn’t a bad-looking man once he dropped the posing. If you liked that sort of type. “Don’t worry. I’ll put these away for you.”
     
     
“Are you sure?” I began shoving my personal effects pell-mell into my bag before he could change his mind. “That would be beyond kind of you. Thank you.”
     
     
“I’m assuming you’ll be back?”
     
     
“Absolutely! First thing on Monday.” I grinned at him. “And I promise not to make you clean up my mess next time.”
     
     
Sweeping my bag onto my shoulder, I wriggled out of my chair, all but overturning it in my haste.
     
     
Dempster edged gingerly off the table so as to cause the minimum creasage in his Savile Row slacks. “There is a fee.”
     
     
“A fee?” Swiveling back around, I tripped over the pointed toe of my own boot. Had I missed the small print somewhere?
     
     
“Coffee,” Dempster elaborated, looking far too pleased with himself. I suppose it wasn’t every day that he got to send a girl staggering.
     
     
“Uh, sure. Coffee.” He’d made me lose precious minutes for that? “That would be great. I’ll look forward to it.” I paused in the doorway just long enough for a haphazard wave. “Bye!”
     
     
The faint echo of “next week” followed me up the white-walled stairs. Fortunately, I knew the type. It wasn’t my personal attributes that spurred him on, it was the prospect of an informed audience as he trotted out all his pet theories about the Pink Carnation. There would be no need to invoke the specter of an invisible boyfriend to ward him off.
     
     
Unless, by that point, it wasn’t an invisible