For some reason he found this insulting. Will raised an eyebrow. “I suppose you thought I wore an ankle-length nightshirt and a cap?”
“Not acap.” Phoebe laughed. “But definitely a nightshirt.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” he said crisply.
“I never said I was disappointed,” she murmured and moved deeper into the room.
Will pressed the curtain even tighter across his hips as this strange mixture of humiliation and arousal coursed through him. He cleared his throat in an attempt to sound somewhat controlled. “Would you mind telling me what you’re doing here? And why you didn’t use the front door?”
Phoebe glanced at him over her shoulder. “At this hour? I was trying to be more inconspicuous to protect my reputation,” she explained, though it sounded like she was teasing him. “I thought you’d approve. Besides,” she added as she began studying his room. “I didn’t know you’d be naked.”
Will let out a cough. “Yes, well.” He didn’t finish the thought. She had moved to the large bookshelf in the corner that held various knickknacks, and Will suddenly felt evenmorenaked—if that was possible.
“You have an awful lot of poetry books,” she observed.
Good. Poetry. A completely innocuous topic they could discuss whilst he hid behind a drape.
“I fancied myself an heir to the Romantics at one time.”
She threw him a scandalous look. “Even Lord Byron?”
“In my younger days,” he admitted. “I’m not proud of it.”
Then she gave him a smile that made the drape feel even more inadequate and he had to clear his throat again. “Would you mind handing me my dressing gown?” He pointed to where it was slung over the back of a chair near her.
Phoebe tossed it to him. Then returned to her perusal of the bookcase to give him a bit of privacy. Will knotted the dressing gown tighter than usual. She seemed remarkably at ease while standing in a man’s bedroom in the wee hours of the night.
“Do you make it a habit of climbing through windows?” Lord, he hated how priggish he sounded.
“No,” she said measuredly and continued to scan the shelves. “Only with you.”
His heart seemed to miss several beats, but before Will could respond to this admission, Phoebe came to an abrupt halt. Something had caught her eye. As soon as she reached toward the right-hand corner of an upper shelf, Will remembered and his heart came stuttering to life.
Dammit.
She pulled down the pencil drawing slightly yellowed with age and stared at it for a long moment while Will’s stomach became well acquainted with the floor. He had completely forgotten about the drawing.
“I didn’t know you kept this,” she said, her voice understandably full of astonishment.
Will swallowed. This… would be difficult to explain. It was a relic from that long-ago summer. Alex and Phoebe had come tovisit him and Cal one evening and they all sat in the back garden enjoying the long, later hours of daylight.
In just a few weeks Will would learn about the dukedom, but that evening he was blissfully unaware of what fate lay in store. Instead it was Phoebe, with her long hair and sly wit, who kept his attention. Cal was always sketching in those days. His fingers never seemed to stop moving, and as they all chatted he drew. First a blooming shrub, then a happy little mouse dressed in a suit, and finally Phoebe in all her sun-kissed summer glory.
When he showed her the finished portrait, she immediately declared her chin too sharp and made Cal put it under the sketch pad out of her sight. But later, after the sisters had left and Cal had gone inside, Will went back for it. He thought it a marvelous likeness. Cal had expertly rendered her heart-shaped face, which Will thought was perfectly proportional, along with the mischievous gleam in her eye.
“I liked it,” he said simply, for that was the truth.
She let out a short, baffled laugh and ran a finger along the edge of the yellowed paper. “I was so embarrassed when Cal showed this to me, though I can’t remember why now.”
“It is a very good likeness.”
Phoebe began to turn toward him and paused. “I barely dared to hope back then that you… you saw me like that.”
The firelight danced along her profile, illuminating the delicate slope of her nose, her parted lips, and, yes, her perfectly pointed chin.
“I’ve always seen you, Phoebe,” Will breathed. It was a relief, in a way, to say the truth aloud.
As she met his gaze, Will was beyond grateful to see the desperate hunger in her eyes. His was probably worse.
