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Daniella, get in this coach. At once!”
    The two gentlemen watched as the coachman drove off.
    â€œOur Miss Foster is going to get an earful all the way back to Portman Square,” Darby said once they turned to continue their walk. “And it won’t be her first, I’d imagine. What an odd little creature. Not a drop of guile anywhere—honest, forthright and apparently amused even as she clearly wants to help the countess. Society will have her for lunch, you know, even here, in the Little Season.”
    â€œOr she’ll have all of Society at her feet,” Coop countered, realizing he was none too happy with his conclusion. “The ton has often embraced the eccentric, and she certainly at least qualifies as an Original.”
    â€œOh, she’s more than that, old friend. I’ve just realized she managed to remove the chapbook from my pocket.”
    â€œShe what?” Coop turned to look at the flagway, hoping the chapbook had simply fallen to the ground once more. It wasn’t there, just the broken heel of Dany’s right shoe, which he quickly retrieved. “My God. Forward, cheeky and a pickpocket. What do you think we’ve gotten ourselves into, Darby? I won’t help with an elopement, and neither will you, if that’s what this is about. Oliver’s a friend.”
    â€œAnd as our friend, we have offered our services to his wife, or at least to find out what’s going on so that we might warn him. It’s probably all a tempest in a teapot, anyway, knowing women, and easily put to rights, whatever her problem. If nothing else, it should serve to take your mind off your blackmailer for a few hours.”
    Coop frowned. “Nothing will take my mind off the bastard,” he said, but as they wisely hailed a hackney to take them back to the Pulteney for what Darby had called “a wash and a brush-up,” it was thoughts of Daniella Foster that most occupied his mind.
    He had originally come back to London to find himself a wife, there was that.
    But surely not someone like Daniella Foster; he was too levelheaded to go that particular route, no matter how great the initial attraction. Wasn’t it enough his mother was also more than an Original?

CHAPTER FOUR
    I T WAS QUIET in the Portman Square drawing room now that the countess had retired to her bedchamber, led there by the promise of tea and freshly baked lemon cakes. She’d run out of complaints and threats, anyway, emptied her budget of Things Ladies of Good Breeding Do Not Say or Do and thrown up her hands in defeat when her sister grinned and asked, “So, are you breeding, Mari? You’ve been rather overset lately. Perhaps you haven’t been counting?”
    Having successfully routed her sister at last, Dany looked across the room, to where her maid, Emmaline, had been told to take up residence on a chair positioned close by a front-facing window. There were two reasons for that. One, Emmaline would be able to watch out the window to alert her mistress when one of the carriages stopped in front of Number Eleven, and two, the carriage traffic would help muffle voices while Dany and the gentlemen spoke.
    Oh, and a third: young unmarried ladies needs must be chaperoned at all times or else the entire world just might disintegrate into cinders, or some such calamity. Of course, were that true, Dany would have destroyed the world at least six times over by now. And that was just this year.
    In any event, Emmaline was discreet. She’d kept many a secret for Dany over the years, either out of affection or because she’d be sacked on the spot for having allowed any of her mistress’s daring exploits, many of which had necessarily included her cooperation. Dany preferred to believe it was affection.
    She glanced at the mantel clock, mentally calculating the time between their departure from Bond Street and now, and pulled the chapbook from her pocket. The thing was thin of