“Oh,” Jillian breathed. “Of course you are here.”
Miles’s brows lifted in a show of elegant irritation. “Of course. Because Fairhaven, the Hartingtons, and God Himself have evidently conspired to ensure we cannot spend more than half an hour apart.”
Her pulse wavered. “What, pray, were you doing in here?”
“Hiding,” he said with perfect dryness. “From Mrs. Hartington. I was searching this wing earlier when I heard her voice at the end of the corridor and slipped in here before she rounded the corner.”
Jillian stared at him, aghast. “You were avoiding her?”
“Desperately.”
“And she was…” her breath caught, “…already preparing something.”
“Yes,” he said grimly. “They intended for you to be locked in this room, Jillian. There’s no wood for the hearth. The matches and tinder have been taken. And the windows have been forced wide. I firmly believe they intended for you to freeze here.
Jillian groaned and turned toward the blocked door once more. “This is a disaster.”
“If we are discovered together,” Miles continued, joining her at the threshold, “it will be worse than a disaster.”
She swallowed, her breath trembling. “There will be expectations.”
“Unavoidable ones.”
Their gazes collided in the dim light, and a warmth—unsteady, dangerous—slid through her chest.
“We must get out,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied, though he made no immediate move.
He stepped forward at the same moment she turned back toward the room, and their bodies brushed—her shoulder against his chest, his breath warm against her cheek, the space between them shrinking so quickly that she had no time to recover.
Her voice thinned to a whisper. “Miles…”
“Do not,” he murmured, though his meaning was terribly unclear. Do not speak? Do not move? Do not tempt him further?
She turned slightly, just enough that her cheek nearly grazed his. Their eyes locked, and it felt as though the air around them thickened, pulled taut, waiting to snap.
He looked at her with an expression she had never seen from him before—uncertain, conflicted, drawn unwillingly toward something he could not rationalize.
Then, abruptly, he tore himself away, stepping back with a muttered curse, every inch of him taut with control.
“We must focus on the bolt,” he said hoarsely.
“Yes,” she whispered, though she still felt breathless. “The bolt.”
They tried. They truly did. But the room held them fast, indifferent to their efforts, as though conspiring with Fairhaven’s meddling spirits, the aunts or even the Hartington’s themselves.
And the silence that grew between them—warm, charged, dangerous—felt more revealing than any confession ever could.
For the first several minutes,Miles attempted—against all odds—to think only of escape. It seemed the proper thing to do, the gentlemanly priority to cling to while trapped in a small locked room with a woman whose mere presence had, of late, proved alarmingly destabilizing..
He had come into this wing working the various clues of the scavenger hunt. He’d entered that room, hiding behind the tapestry to avoid Mrs. Hartington after he’d heard prowling the passage earlier. She’d been muttering with suspicious purpose while a footman carried half a dozen lanterns behind her. Miles had no interest in being cornered by her or hearing another of her long-winded lectures about Arabella’s virtues. So he had retreated into this unused room, intending only to wait until the coast was clear.
He had not intended Jillian Hale to be dragged into his sanctuary by flagrantly villainous design.
He should have known better. Fairhaven had made a sport of orchestrating their proximity.
Now here she was—flushed, indignant, and astonishingly lovely in the dim light—and Miles felt control slipping in ways that frightened him more than any scandal could.
