Betina Krahn (15 page)

He broke off the kiss and lurched back a step. He had just been kissing Madeline Duncan for all he was worth. And—sweet heaven—he’d been enjoying it.

Madeline was somewhat slower to react. She lowered her eyes in confusion and discovered she was standing in a circle of discarded undergarments. The sight cleared away the haze of pleasure from the fact that there she stood, in a heap of her own unmentionables, being kissed to abandonment and back by the very man who was supposed to be objectively supervising her business.

How in infernal blazes had she gotten into such a mess?

She stumbled aside, smoothing her tunic and her shattered composure; he wheeled away and jerked his vest and his self-possession back into place. When they turned to face each other across the corner of the bed, they were both uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Finally Cole snatched up a bodice from the floor and dangled it from one finger.

“So this is your Ideal product.” The curl of a nostril made his opinion of it plain. “Have your workers seen this?”

She stooped to rescue the rest of her fallen foundations. “I do not make a practice of showing my undergarments to my workers, Lord Mandeville.” The fact that she was showing her most intimate apparel to
him
suddenly struck her full force. She suffered a brief and nasty vision of his report to Sir William:
“Miss Duncan showed me her undergarments, and I found them sorely lacking. Especially in fabric.”

“So, then, none of them have actually seen these contraptions,” he concluded. “And what will they think when they learn they are here to produce female bosom binders and fast drawers?”

Bosom binders and fast drawers
. One minute he was kissing her, the next baiting her, she thought, and she honestly didn’t know which she found more contemptible.

“They will think the garments are … refreshingly sensible,” she declared.

“Refreshingly sensible?” He hooted a laugh and eyed the bodice hanging from his finger. “Harley Ketchum and his herd of young stallions will find these lacy bits … 
sensible
?”

“They won’t be lacy.… And naturally they will appreciate
the freedom in my designs,” she insisted, welcoming the renewed anger she felt.

“Are you certain?” He inched forward. “Certain enough to put it to the test?”

“Of course.”

“All right, then, call a meeting of your ‘exemplary’ workforce. Show them the garments you intend to produce and let’s see their reaction.”

Stretching to her tallest, she defiantly held his gaze.

“Very well,” she conceded. “Seeing a bit of democratic management in action might do you a world of good. I shall call a meeting as soon as they are settled in, and let
them
prove how wrong you are.”

With a sardonic smile, he gave her a nod and strode from the room.

Collecting the rest of her undergarments, she vented her annoyance by throwing them onto the bed. Impossible man. In the midst of tossing her divided skirt onto a nearby chair, she suddenly recalled the guarded depths of his eyes and halted, staring fiercely into that memory.

She had glimpsed something there within him, something fleeting and light-shy, something he hadn’t wanted her to see. Something behind the walls he had erected. Behind the intellectual pride, the cultivated condescension. The rampant skepticism. Hunger. Conflict. Pain.

She straightened.

For the first time since their meeting, she wondered why he had such antipathy for her project, sight unseen. Why was he so determined to believe the worst of her and her workers? Why was he so eager for her to fail?

And why was she having these wretched weak-in-the-knees and ache-in-the-chest feelings at the idea that Cole Mandeville might have some hurt buried inside him?

The last thing she needed just then was a soft spot for the hardheaded cynic bent on bringing her to her knees.

That evening Cole retired early to his cramped loft and tried by the light of a smoky tallow lamp to read one of the journals he had brought with him from London. But as the noise from the tavern increased, his concentration grew steadily worse. Finally he gave up reading and doused the lamp.

Strident male voices battered the planks of the floor and the meager door as the patrons below indulged in ale, cards, and dice. Three times Cole sprang up off his pallet, meaning to storm downstairs and demand some peace. The first time he bumped his head, the next stepped barefooted in the middle of the empty dishes on the tray by the door, and the third time, the noise abated abruptly as he reached the door. Giving Cravits an envious look, wishing now that he had accepted the valet’s offer of a sleeping draft, he crawled back onto his lumpy straw mattress. As he lay tossing and turning, the name “Charlotte” wafted up to him and he realized that some of the voices—the younger ones—belonged to the four Ketchum offspring.

Growing desperate, he rolled off the pallet and rummaged about in his trunk for a bottle of Scotch whisky. But the liquor served only to stoke the heat already smoldering in his belly. Somewhere in the midst of that slurry of voices and tavern noise he heard a reference to “Miz Duncan.” Immediately he stilled and strained to hear, now thwarted by the very drop in noise level that he had longed for moments earlier.

He scowled at a burst of laughter from below, conjuring up a dozen possible contexts for Madeline’s name being bandied about in such a setting; Miss Duncan’s deep pockets and crazy notions … Miss Duncan’s generous nature and extreme gullibility … Miss Duncan’s scandalous trousers and penchant for talking openly about ladies’ corsets and drawers. Perhaps they knew more than it seemed, and her titillating undergarments were indeed the topic of the hour.

Even worse possibilities struck. They could be discussing
her admirably displayed thirty-eight, twenty-four, thirty-six … her fire-kissed hair and enormous blue eyes … her wet-satin lips … her tempting skin … her empty and beckoning bed.

Lips? Bed? Such salacious possibilities would occur only to someone who had direct experience with her measurements, had touched her hair, had tasted her lips and felt the welcome in her.

Cursing softly, he lurched up and headed for the door. But as he stomped down the ladder into the smoky, beer-laden atmosphere of the tap room, the main door flew open and in charged Harley Ketchum, his jaw set like stone and his eyes blazing.

“Jus’ like I thought!” Harley bellowed. “Helpin’ old Fritz tonight, are ye?” he demanded, glaring at the table where his offspring sat with their hands full of cards and tankards of watered rum.

“Now, Pa—” One of Ketchum’s strapping sons dropped the pasteboards and sprang to his feet, wiping his hands nervously on his thighs.

“We can explain,” one of the others began as the remaining brothers scrambled to their feet as their father approached.

“There be naught to explain—I got eyes!” Harley roared. “Here in this den of iniquity, swillin’ rum and sportin’ and gamblin’ like the devil’s own spawn!” He overturned the bench they had been sitting on and it smacked the floor with a bang, setting loose a flurry of motion as the other patrons scurried out of the way.

“But, Pa, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with a jot o’ ale now an’ again,” the one who looked to be the eldest protested. “Till Ma died, you took a nip right regular yerself.”

The wrong thing to say, apparently. Harley flew into a rage, quoting both Scripture and his staunchly Methodist wife as he declared judgment, decreed punishment, and proceeded to carry it out. Overturning tables and breaking crockery, he
stalked, seized, and duly thrashed each of his hulking, wayward sons.

Cole retreated back up the ladder and sat on his sour, lumpy bed in the darkness, enduring the howls and grunts and the miscellaneous sounds of breakage that seemed to go on forever.

By morning he was hollow-eyed, ravenous as a regiment of regulars, and desperate enough to try anything for a decent bit of sleep and a palatable meal. By half past seven he had roused poor Cravits and innkeeper Netter, had dressed and packed, and was marching across the green to Madeline’s comfortable brick house. He would see whether he could bully some hospitality out of her.

He pounded on the door with the heel of his fist until the panels vibrated. When the door was opened by a stout woman in somber garments, his righteous anger propelled him straight past her into the entry hall. There he braced, announced that he had come to stay, and demanded to see Madeline straightaway.

“So sorry, your lordship,” the woman said with a beatific smile. “Madeline—Miss Duncan—has already gone to the factory this morning.” She looked at the baggage in Cravits’s and Netter’s hands. “She is an incorrigibly early riser, always up with the sun.”

“How typically unladylike of her” was all he could think to say.

“I have your rooms all ready, your lordship.”

“You—you have?”

“I’ve been expecting you.” She smiled and nodded. “And I imagine you’ll be wanting a bit of breakfast. We have plenty of kippers, eggs, and scones with marmalade and pear honey. Oh, and coffee. Unless you’d prefer tea of a morning.” She raised her brows in question.

Cole wondered whether he was hallucinating. He said faintly, “Coffee will be fine, Mrs.… Mrs.…” His mouth was watering prodigiously.

“Davenport. I am Madeline’s housekeeper and longtime friend. Now, if you and your gentlemen will just follow me.”

Beaumont Tattersall came rushing into the sample room at half past nine with his face flushed from running up three flights. “It’s here, Miss Duncan. The cloth—”

Madeline looked up from the design she had been working on with Endicott. Dropping the pencil she held in her hand, she headed for the steps, Tattersall and Endicott at her heels. As they passed through the offices and sewing room with Tattersall relating what was happening, Emily, Maple, and Charlotte Thoroughgood, Daniel Steadman and engineer Fritz Gonnering fell in behind and followed them down the three flights of steps to the shipping area.

There, several heavy trucks were being unloaded, their cargo rolled bolt by bolt down a specially prepared ramp into the receiving room. The dust, the scent of newly dyed cloth, and the musty smell of the room filled Madeline’s senses as she waited, clasping her hands to keep from rushing over to help Harley’s sons roll the massive bolts aside as they came thundering down the wooden incline.

When she could bear the suspense no longer, she chose a bolt well out of the way of the unloading and began to tear away the heavy brown wrapping. To her confusion, what met her eyes was the sight of dark blue woolen cloth where there should have been pristine knitted cotton. She tore through the rest of the paper, then stooped to examine the end of the bolt. Poking and prodding, she managed to insinuate her finger between the tightly wound layers just enough to feel the soft wool.

Beaumont, too, was staring at the fabric in bewilderment. “It’s woolen. How can that be?” he said.

Fritz was peeling back the paper covering on another nearby bolt, and she hurried over to see what he discovered.
It was the same blue woolen. Her eyes were wide with alarm as they attacked a third bolt, then a fourth.

It was all the same, every last roll. Dark blue woolen. Fine-quality cloth to be sure, but entirely the wrong stuff for ladies’ unmentionables.

“We ordered
cotton
—Lawrence and Haviland’s finest, softest cotton knit!” she exclaimed, suspended somewhere between despair and outrage. “And they sent us—Lord, I didn’t think they even produced woolens in Manchester!”

“Here is the answer,” Beaumont said, approaching with the bill of lading in his hands. “The shipment came from Lawrence and Haviland—of
Leeds.
” He scowled. “Apparently there’s been some sort of mix-up … and the order was sent to Leeds instead of Manchester. They’ve sent us forty master bolts of their best woolen jersey.”

Knitted woolens. Those massive bolts that only moments before had made Madeline’s heart race with anticipation now made it sink with distress. Forty bolts of wool that would make women’s tender parts—

“Well, well, what have we here?”

It was Cole Mandeville’s voice, of course, cutting through the dusty air and through her assembled staff, who stepped aside at his approach. He made a deliberate detour to give the fabric in one of the opened bolts a considering stroke before reaching her. “This is your textile? A bit chafing for intimate lady-wear, isn’t it?”

It was times like this that she regretted not acquiring a huge, insanely protective dog. One with a taste for noble shins.

“It appears we have just experienced our first ‘oops.’ ” Madeline conceded coolly. “They’ve sent us the wrong fabric. The mistake will be set right, but it will involve an adjustment in our schedule.” She paused, looking over that growing sea of unwanted woolen. “We will simply find a way to minimize that delay.”

Madeline was suddenly conscious of her employees looking
on anxiously. This was their first crisis, the first real test of her leadership. It had to be solved by combining their strengths and ideas—a true community effort—if her idea of worker participation in the company was to have any meaning.