“Of course,” he murmured. Then he sighed. “I take it, I’m to hole up in here until you and your mother depart? We wouldn’t want her to see me and get the wrong idea, would we?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Teddy flicked thecurtains aside to watch as the coach carrying his wife and her mother lumbered down Marine Parade.
It still rankled she had eschewed his offer to accompany her to London to deal with her father’s illness. Something about her rationale for keeping him a secret, though logical, did not sit right.
He eyed his sketch book, charcoal, and pencil. He did not have the inclination to sketch. Nor did he wish to swim. And he’d already read the paper front to back.
He was bloody tired of being an invalid, living in this gilded cage. Especially now. It felt cavernously empty with Georgina gone. Hell.
Show no chink.
He’d felt her absence when she visited her friends. How in God’s name would he manage with her gone for days? And how had he allowed her to become so vital to him?
Show no chink.
Jamming a hand through his hair, he trotted down the stairs. With no real destination in mind, he let himself into the receiving room. Georgina’s lair. He prowled the chamber, finally making his way to the sofa where he’d taken to sitting so he couldobserve her at work, sitting and scrawling in her notebooks, posture ramrod straight, prim as any governess—until her silvery eyes lit on him and turned molten, like the very sight of him enthralled her.
Damn, but her love was addictive. Like the purest nectar, it drew him to her as surely as the tides.
His father would laugh, if he knew. The earl scorned suchvulgar exhibitions of sensibility,especially if he caught so much as a glimmer from Ted.
“By God, never carry on like an ignorant peasant, ever willing to make a spectacle of himself, Theodore. You are a future earl. You’ve never once glimpsed me fawning over the countess, have you? No, and you never will. No one appreciates an abundance of unguarded sentiment. It’s repulsive—and screams of weakness.”
The hair on his nape stood on end. He remembered. He remembered his father.
He closed his eyes. Tried to call up something else—and drew a blank.
He surged to his feet. Glanced around the chamber seeking something, anything, familiar.
And then his gaze fell on Georgina’s desk. The connected cabinet was open. Georgina had forgotten to lock it with the arrival of her mother.
He considered, briefly, resisting the call of that forbidden font of material. Georgina’s private notes and God knew what else. She had made it abundantly clear her desk cabinet was off limits.
Nevertheless.
He crossed the chamber, slid behind the desk, and lowered onto her chair. Then he reached into the cabinet and withdrew each of the notebooks contained therein.
He opened what appeared to be the oldest of the books and began to read.
An hour later, having pilfered several of her notebooks, he couldn’t decide if he was more confused or angry. Georgina’s stories,so far as he could tell, were primarily based upon the two of them.
She’d dared to tell the world their private stories. The birthday when she was yet a girl when he’d bestowed on her a single pink rose—and thereafter she decided to make it her signature scent. The fountain where he’d kissed her, precipitating their courtship. Their midnight assignation in the garden, prior to their dash to Gretna Green. The kiss he’d stolen aboard the skiff, under the trees.
Oddly, though, the stories, as she’d written them, seemed to have undergone several different versions before she settled on the one that matched the events as they’d taken place. All save the one with the rose. The fountain, in her first draft, was not located at the country home of a party hostess, but at a London address. The stolen kiss on the skiff, conversely, had happened, on Georgina’s first imagining, on a lake at a summer house party.
“May I ask what it is you think you’re doing?”
Teddy jerked upright to find Danvers looming.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.”
Teddy snorted in derision. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
Danvers’s dark gaze flicked over the open notebook, and the ones which he’d already skimmed. “It looks like you’re invading Lady Arlington’s privacy.”
