The Scarlet Ninja was setting fashion trends, even though everyone thought she was a he.
“Sorry, Dad,” she murmured, glancing out the window into the uncharacteristically clear night sky, as if he might be looking down at her from heaven. Spring weather was wet, wet, and more wet, but she’d planned this little outing for the one night this week that the meteorologists had promised would be dry. So unpleasant to plan impossible heists in the pouring rain, after all.
The expected knock came, and she heaved a sigh. “I’m not decent, Hopkins, please go away.”
The door opened and the man who was the nearest thing to a grandfather she’d ever had walked in, carrying a tray. “I prefer indecency in both women and foreign films. Chocolate?”
Fiona sighed again and tried not to grit her teeth at the sight of his perfectly combed silver hair and his perfectly proper black suit. It was after midnight, for heaven’s sake. “I don’t have time for chocolate. And I’m not a little girl anymore, whom you must coddle out of her nightmares. You should be in bed, wearing your lovely pajamas that Madeleine gave you for your birthday. You look like a butler, Hopkins.”
“I am a butler, Lady Fiona,” he responded, exactly as he had a billion or so times since they’d started this verbal dance more than twenty years ago, when her father died. “I was your father’s butler, may he rest in peace, and before that your grandfather’s butler, may God rot his vicious soul.”