“I…” The blonde faltered, looking suddenly uncertain. “Not precisely. And you?”
A strange response, Miranda thought, uncertain of how she ought to answer the same question herself. “Not precisely either.”
The blonde’s smile faltered. “How interesting.”
“Indeed.”
They stared at each other for a tense moment.
“I do hope you won’t mention seeing me here,” the woman said, breaking the silence. “It wouldn’t do for anyone to know I am present at such a gathering, you see.”
Miranda offered her a wry smile. “Once again, we find ourselves in similar circumstances. I would appreciate your secrecy as well.”
“That is easily promised. I haven’t any notion of who you are.”
“Nor I you.”
“Well, then.” The woman beamed at her. “I shall forget our paths ever crossed, and you may do the same for me.”
Miranda inclined her head. “Of course.”
The blonde made to move past her in the hall but hesitated suddenly, biting her lip. “Are you…staying in this wing of the manor house?”
This was dangerous territory. Miranda wasn’t certain how she ought to answer. The woman had yet to explain who she was or why she was wandering in this particular hall herself.
“You need not answer,” the woman hastened to say. “Curiosity is one of my downfalls, or so I’ve recently been told by a very overbearing and frustrating arrogant oaf.”
There was such feeling in those words that Miranda found her own curiosity heightened in turn. For the second time, she wondered just who was this beautiful young lady, who claimed to benot preciselya houseguest?
“You sound quite provoked by the gentleman in question,” Miranda observed politely instead of asking the questions she yearned to blurt.
It was no business of hers.
Even if the woman had come in search of Rhys, what hold did Miranda have upon him? She had no intention of becoming his mistress, and last night, he had returned her to her own room as if he were a kindly guardian tending to a wayward ward. He had rubbed her feet, fed her dinner, and closed the door in her face.
The reminder was rather lowering—and just what she needed.
“Dukes are the most conceited, smug, supercilious beings,” the blonde was saying with an air of authority that Miranda thought newly perplexing. “Particularly when they think they know better than you do, even if the opposite is true.”
“I cannot say I would argue with the smugness,” Miranda commiserated, thinking of Rhys and his insistence that he would have what he wanted from her.
As if her agreeing to be his mistress were a foregone conclusion.
“You must know m—” the other woman began, and then paused, seemingly correcting herself as she continued “—the Duke of Whitby.”
Even more odd.
What had she been about to say?
And how could Miranda answer without implicating herself?
She was weighing her response when the blonde’s blue eyes suddenly went wide. “Oh heavens, what a silly goose I am! I’ve forgotten something that’s very important. If you will excuse me?”
The mysterious lady didn’t even await Miranda’s response. And, adding to her perplexing behavior, she whirled on her heel and rushed past, disappearing down the servants’ stairs. In the next breath, Rhys rounded a bend in the hall, grinning broadly when he saw her.
“If it isn’t just the lady I was looking for,” he announced, sounding pleased with himself.
Miranda had failed to hear his arrival, but now she couldn’t help but wonder if the woman in the hall had, and if that had been the reason for her hasty retreat. If so, that certainly made the mysterious blonde’s behavior even more curious. But what did it prove?
