Proof by Seduction. Courtney Milan

      She turned and swept her arm in regal welcome. “Come in. Be seated.” The men trooped in, settling on chairs that creaked under their weight. Jenny remained standing.

      “Ned, how can I assist you today?”

      Ned beamed at her. “Well. Blakely and I have been arguing. He doesn’t think you can predict the future.”

      Neither did Jenny. She resented sharing that belief.

      “We’ve agreed—he’s going to use science to demonstrate the accuracy of your predictions.”

      “Demonstrate? Scientifically?” The words whooshed out of her, as if she’d been prodded in the stomach. Jenny grasped the table in front of her for support. “Well. That would be …” Unlikely? Unfortunate? “That would be unobjectionable. How shall he proceed?”

      Ned waved his hand at his cousin. “Well, go ahead, Blakely. Ask her something.”

      Lord Blakely leaned back in his chair. Up until this moment, he had not spoken a single word; his eyes had traveled about the room, though. “You want me to ask her something?” He spoke slowly, drawing out each syllable with precision. “I consult logic, not old charlatans.”

      Ned and Jenny spoke atop each other. “She’s no charlatan!” protested Ned.

      But Jenny’s hands had flown to her hips for another reason entirely. “Thirty,” she protested, “is not old!”

      Ned turned to her, his eyebrow lifting. A devastating silence cloaked the room. It was a measure of her own agitation that she’d forsaken Madame Esmerelda’s character already. Instead, she’d spoken as a woman.

      And the marquess noticed. That tawny gaze flicked from her kerchiefed head down to the garish skirts obscuring her waist. His vision bored through every one of her layers. The appraisal was thoroughly masculine. A sudden tremulous awareness tickled Jenny’s palms.

      And then he looked away. A queer quirk of his lips; the smallest exhalation, and like that, he dismissed her.

      Jenny was no lady, no social match for Lord Blakely. She was not the sort who would inspire him to tip his hat if he passed her on the street. She should have been accustomed to such cursory dismissals. But beneath her skirts, she felt suddenly brittle, like a pile of dried-up potato parings, ready to blow away with one strong gust of wind. Her fingernails bit crescent moons into her hands.

      Madame Esmerelda wouldn’t care about this man’s interest. Madame Esmerelda never let herself get angry. And so Jenny swallowed the lump in her throat and smiled mysteriously. “I am also not a charlatan.”

      Lord Blakely raised an eyebrow. “That remains to be proven. As I have no desire to seek answers for myself, I believe Ned will question you.”

      “I already have!” Ned gestured widely. “About everything. About life and death.”

      Lord Blakely rolled his eyes. No doubt he’d taken Ned’s dramatic protest as youthful exaggeration. But Jenny knew it for the simple truth it was. Two years earlier, Ned had wandered into this room and asked the question that had changed both their lives: “Is there any reason I shouldn’t kill myself?”

      At the time, Jenny had wanted to disclaim all responsibility. Her first impulse had been to distance herself from the boy, to say she wasn’t really able to see the future. But the question was not one a nineteen-year-old posed to a stranger because he was considering his options rationally. She’d known, even then, that the young man had asked because he was at his wits’ end.

      So she’d lied. She told him she saw happiness in his future, that he had every reason to live. He’d believed her. And as time passed, he’d gradually moved past despair. Today, he stood in front of her almost confident.

      It should have counted as a triumph of some kind, a good deed chalked up to Jenny’s account. But on that first day, she hadn’t just taken his despair. She’d taken his money, too. And since then, she and Ned had been bound together in this tangle of coin and deceit.

      “Life and death?” Lord Blakely fingered the cheap fabric that loosely draped her chairs. “Then there should be no problem with my more prosaic proposal. I’m sure you are aware Ned must marry. Madame—Esmerelda, is it?—why don’t you tell me the name of the woman he should choose.”

      Ned stiffened, and a chill went down Jenny’s spine. Advice hidden behind spiritual maundering was one thing. But she knew that Ned had resisted wedlock, and for good reasons. She had no intention of trapping him.

      “The spirits have not chosen to reveal such details,” she responded smoothly.

      The marquess pulled an end of lead pencil from his pocket and licked it. He bent over a notebook and scribbled a notation. “Can’t predict future with particularity.” He squinted at her. “This will be a damned short test of your abilities if you can do no better.”

      Jenny’s fingers twitched in irritation. “I can say,” she said slowly, “in the cosmic sense of things, he will meet her soon.”

      “There!” crowed Ned in triumph. “There’s your specifics.”

      “Hmm.” Lord Blakely frowned over the words he’d transcribed. “The ‘cosmic sense’ being something along the lines of, the cosmos is ageless? No matter which girl Ned meets, I suppose you would say he met her ‘soon.’ Come, Ned. Isn’t she supposed to have arcane knowledge?”

      Jenny pinched her lips together and turned away, her skirts swishing about her ankles. Blakely’s eyes followed her; but when she cast a glance at him over her shoulder, he looked away. “Of course, it is possible to give more specifics. In ancient days, soothsayers predicted the future by studying the entrails of small animals, such as pigeons or squirrels. I have been trained in those methods.”

      A look of doubt crossed Lord Blakely’s face. “You’re going to slash open a bird?”

      Jenny’s heart flopped at the prospect. She could no more disembowel a dove than she could earn an honest living. But what she needed now was a good show to distract the marquess.

      “I’ll need to fetch the proper tools,” she said.

      Jenny turned and ducked through the gauzy black curtains that shielded the details of her mundane living quarters from her clients. A sack, fresh from this morning’s shopping trip, sat on the tiny table in the back room. She picked it up and returned.

      The two men watched her as she stepped back through a cloud of black cloth, her hands filled with burlap. She set the bag on the table before Ned.

      “Ned,” she said, “it is your future which is at stake. That means your hand must be the instrument of doom. The contents of that bag? You will eviscerate it.”

      Ned tilted his head and looked up. His liquid brown eyes pleaded with her.

      Lord Blakely gaped. “You kept a small animal in a sack, just sitting about in the event it was needed? What kind of creature are you?”

      Jenny raised one merciless eyebrow. “I was expecting the two of you.” And when Ned still hesitated, she sighed. “Ned, have I ever led you astray?”

      Jenny’s admonition had the desired effect. Ned drew a deep breath and thrust his arm gingerly into the bag, his mouth puckered in distaste. The expression on his face flickered from queasy horror to confusion. From there, it flew headlong into outright bafflement. Shaking his head, he pulled his fist from the bag and turned his hand palm up.

      For a long moment, the two men stared at the offending lump. It was brightly colored. It was round. It was—

      “An orange?” Lord Blakely rubbed his forehead. “Not quite what I expected.” He scribbled another notation.

      “We live in enlightened times,” Jenny murmured. “Now, you know what to do. Go ahead. Disembowel it.”

      Ned turned the fruit in his hand.