While Anne set the final hairpin in place, Jocelynn looked down at her lap, where her hands lay folded. They were perfectly still. She marveled at that, because everything inside her was anything but still.
Beneath the layers of cerulean silk and the rigid whalebone of her bodice, strapped high against her inner thigh by a leather sheath that Albyn had fashioned to imitate a pearl diver's rig, the knife waited.
She could feel it with every breath. The hard edge of the hilt pressed into her leg when she shifted, the faint tug of the strap when she moved too quickly. She'd practiced drawing it in the privacy of her chambers until the motion felt as natural as reaching for a hairpin. That had been another reason for the armor-like design of her dress. The 'tessets' of cerulean fabric not only masked the shape of the knife, but they also concealed the slit she'd cut in their folds to allow her to draw the knife without removing the dress.
