As for himself, he scarcely looked at anyone buther, his gaze catching and holding on her face. It was a bright face, vivid and expressive, with sharp, intelligent eyes and a quick, mobile mouth.
Or it had been, until Stoneleigh got ahold of her.
She looked neither left nor right, but kept her gaze on her plate, her expression dull, and her shoulders slumped as if she’d grown too weary to hold them straight. She was doing her best to hide her distress, but she wasn’t much of a dissembler. She was making a poor job of it, but Stoneleigh chattered on and on without waiting for her to reply, and without seeming to find anything amiss.
Which for him, there wasn’t.
No, it was all going rather well forhim. Never mind if Miss Thorne was wilting before their very eyes, like a flower crushed under a boot heel.
A peculiar pang pierced Jasper’s chest, and everything else—the mishap with Sampson, his ruby earrings, the blackmail, and his newfound understanding of Miss Thorne’s deplorable circumstances all faded to the back of his mind.
The gentlemen lingered over their port for a blasted eternity, but when at last they filed into the drawing room to join the ladies, Jasper made a point of hanging back. When he passed Miss Thorne, he paused long enough to drop a small, folded note into her lap.
She startled and jerked her head up, her gaze meeting his.
“Tonight,” he whispered, and passed by her without looking back.
CHAPTER11
Meet me in the billiards room once the house is quiet to discuss the earrings.
He’d signed it simplyM, but even that scrawled letter wasn’t necessary, as it wasn’t likely Prue would soon forget the sound of the Duke of Montford whisperingtonightto her when he’d passed by her in the drawing room this evening.
If it hadn’t been for the note, she might have thought she’d imagined the whole encounter, for he took no notice of her at all after he’d tossed it into her lap. The evening had spun into an endless eternity, but Montford hadn’t looked her way again, not even once.
She may as well have been invisible.
Not that it mattered. Why, she’d hardly even noticed it, and in any case, he might have spent the whole of the evening gazing into her eyes, and she still wouldn’t have met him in the billiards room tonight. Of course, she wouldn’t. Only the most naïve, credulous sort of female would agree to meet an unscrupulous scoundrel of a duke in a deserted billiards room in a remote part of the house, and at night, no less!
Then again, shehadattempted to blackmail the unscrupulous scoundrel of a duke, so perhaps it was too late to get missish about a clandestine meeting. Either way, it hadn’t stopped her from unfolding and refolding the note so many times the seams of the paper were beginning to tear.
The house was quiet, with everyone long since slipped into slumber, dreaming the dreams of the innocent. But notshe. No, not she, for all that she was exhausted from that torturous dinner. She should have gone straight to her bed, but instead here she was, still in her dinner gown, perched on the edge of the chair in front of her dressing table with Montford’s note clutched between her fingers, eyes wide open and her stomach in knots.
But then, she wasn’t innocent, was she?
She’d stolen a pair of ruby earrings from a duke, attempted to blackmail him, and hidden the whole sordid tale from Franny. She was far from innocent, and now she was obliged to face the devil, and beg his pardon for her sins.
The devil, or the Duke of Montford. Same thing, really.
Even now he might be downstairs in the billiards room, watching the door, waiting for her to appear. A shiver tripped down her spine at the thought of his long, lean figure sprawled in a chair, because Montford never simply sat, but always sprawled, his muscular legs in their tight breeches stretched out in front of him, dark eyes half-closed and his full lips twisted into that familiar smirk, the firelight behind him casting his flickering shadow against the wall . . .
Oh, dear. She was becoming overwrought.
Perhaps it would be best just to get the thing done instead of sitting here fretting about it. She may be a thief, a liar, and a blackmailer now, but she drew the line at spinelessness.
She tossed her cloak over her dinner gown, then with one furtive peek outside her bedchamber door, she crept into the hallway. Her gaze skittered left and right as she made her way down the stairs, but there was no one lurking in the dim corridors, and not a soul to be seen on the staircase or in the entryway.
Not Montford, nor anyone else.
She paused as she reached the last step, shivering in the chill, and pulled her cloak tighter around her neck. The silence was so thick it made her ears ring. Perhaps Montford had changed his mind?
But as she made her way down the hallway toward the billiards room, an odd clicking sound made her pause. It sounded like . . . yes, there it was again, the click of a cue striking a billiard ball, and then the muted roll of the heavy ivory ball over the thick baize.
Someonewas awake, then.
She tiptoed closer and peeked around the edge of the open door. The room was dim, lit only by a few sconces and the banked fire in the grate, but there was enough illumination for her to see the Duke of Montford leaning over the table in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat.
He’d been a trifle out of temper this evening—or, if one wished to be truly accurate, he’d been as irritable as a snarling dog, snapping at everyone who ventured to address him. When he wasn’t biting his dinner companions’ heads off, he was glowering at Lord Stoneleigh, those dark brows of his lost under that thick lock of hair that lay over his forehead. More than one guest at the table had looked askance at him, most particularly his grandfather.
