The Undoing of Daisy Edwards (A Time for Scandal) by Marguerite Kaye Page A

asked.
    No response.
    ‘Or what your name is?’
    ‘I need to go home,’ she said.
    Her voice was husky, but her pronunciation was quite clear.
    ‘If you’ll tell me where that is, I’ll take you.’
    A vacant look. I could have left her. She was nothing to me. Of course, Grace wasn’t nothing to me. Speaking honestly, though, it wasn’t for Grace that I put my arm around her. There was something—broken, fragile, lost?—in the woman’s face that I recognised. She staggered against me as I helped her along the corridor that smelt—mostly—of bleach, while she smelt of something much more exotic and infinitely feminine, which my contrary body liked a lot.
    ‘Do you have her bag, her effects?’ I asked Constable Durning. But he shook his head. No hat, no coat, and there were obviously no pockets in that slinky dress she wore. She began to slither down to the floor. ‘I don’t even know her name,’ I said, fumbling for a douceur.
    The policeman pocketed my note expertly. ‘Very funny,’ he said.
    Her legs gave way and I caught her, hefting her over my shoulder. I must have looked confused, because the constable stopped smirking. ‘You really don’t recognise her?’ he said, looking quite incredulous. ‘Surely you must? She’s one of the most famous women in London. On of those actress sisters, Daisy Edwards.’
    Daisy
    I thought at first I was dreaming, only my dreams usually brought me out in a cold sweat, had me falling and falling, or running, or landing with a crash, and this one—I lay there, eyes tight shut, trying to find the right word, but not trying too hard, because I didn’t want to wake up.
    This dream made me feel safe.
    As soon as the word popped into my head, I realised that if I was thinking about it I couldn’t be asleep, and I stopped feeling safe—if that’s really what I
had
been feeling—and my heart took up its usual just-awake hammering and my eyes flew open, and then my heart just about stopped as it became clear that safe was the last thing I was.
    No matter how many martinis I had, I had never before failed to get myself home. This definitely wasn’t home, and I’d had—I counted—two, three martinis at most, which, to someone who had grown as accustomed to them as I had in the last few years, was practically nothing.
    I tried not to move, though all my instincts were to run, but he seemed to be asleep, the man I was in bed with—and I really, really didn’t want to wake him up. He was lying on his back, his face turned away from me, towards the wall. He had on a shirt and trousers. And I…
    The jet beads that looked so fantastic on the black lace insets of my gold Lanvin dress were digging into my back, but I was still wearing the thing. And everything else. I wiggled my toes. Everything, save for my shoes.
    So he hadn’t even tried. I felt curiously insulted, which was strange, because
that
was the last thing I wanted. Though as I leaned over just the tiniest fraction to take a look at him, I was taken aback to discover my body and my mind didn’t quite agree.
    He wasn’t handsome, not in that classic, smooth way of Douglas Fairbanks or Rudolph Valentino. It was difficult to tell his age, but I reckoned he must be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. Dark brown hair that looked as if it might wave if it weren’t so short. A swarthy complexion, and even in his sleep there were lines furrowing between those thick brows. A strong nose. A strong face. He looked like a hard man, or he would, were it not for that mouth with its full bottom lip and its intriguing little curl at the corners.
    I eased back, the better to take a measure of his body, without really allowing myself to register that’s what I was doing. A sprinkling of hair at his throat, where his shirt was open. A strong body to match his face. Muscled. He was the kind of man you’d see in one of those films of Poppy’s striding across the screen to scoop the heroine up in his arms. You’d be