I threw one leg over, then the other to pull myself over the wall. Safe on the floor, I hugged myself. I made it and had a new appreciation for wearing breeches.
Lightning sizzled behind me. The need for speed pressed. I knelt at the door and jiggled the handle. Whether it was my pressure or luck, the door opened, and I entered the earl’s bedchamber.
Very masculine furnishings greeted me—a dark walnut bed with one single pillow.
Ashbrook wasn’t a softie, so why would he have a lot of fluffy things for his head?
The room was neat. The bed and night table of cedar smelled of polish. I tapped my fingers on the footboard.
The man who said he wanted me—I was in the place where he closed his eyes.
At night, was he sleeping? I wasn’t, too many thoughts of him, not enough of my past.
Pulse ticking up, I pulled back the bedclothes, the thick linen sheets, and peeked under the frame. Nothing, not even a speck of dust. Rounding the bed, letting my palm rise and fall with the curves of the footboard, I looked for notes or documents, but none were in the open.
Where would Ashbrook hide secrets?
After searching drawers of a tall mahogany chest, I stopped at his bare night table. The pictures above it caught my gaze—a child’s painting and a beautiful charcoal sketch of a woman with freckles.
She wore a turban to cover her hair. A ringlet of curls crowned her temples. Stunning. “Hello, Phoebe Dunn.” It could be no one else.
A sigh steamed out of my lungs. Her smile would stay in my head. With such joy on her face, there was no wondering why Ashbrook still loved her, why his heart had no room for anyone new.
The other painting was a watercolor. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was bright, streaked with pink and orange and blush red.
Again, I softened. The extremely neat man had put his daughter’s painting in a place of reverence. I could picture him smiling, fully smiling, hanging it.
Focus, Jemina. Focus.
“Where would the earl hide papers?”
Tiptoeing from his bed, I opened the door of a closet.
My mouth dropped open.
This wasn’t a tiny thing. It was a room, a room with deep shelves stacked all the way around the perimeter. Waistcoats, breeches, tailcoats of many colors—blue, green, and brown were folded flat and separated by tissue paper like ladies’ gowns. His court frills—white starched collars he wore for trials hung on hooks.
I touched one. The pleating bounced back. The smell, that sweet starch made my heart thunder like the worsening weather.
A window, large with six glass panes, exposed gray and black clouds. If it were sunny, I knew it must be beautiful to dress in here, basking in the light.
It would be wonderful to make sketches so far above the world.
Putting my thumbs together, measuring, I tried to view everything from Ashbrook’s viewpoint. A stable and carriage house mews sat farther from the house, then those gorgeous woods with the lignum vitae. That’s what the blue flowers were called. I remembered.
Focus.
With my hands still lifted, I turned back and spied a wooden box on a high shelf.
“What do we have here?”
Crossing the tapestry of red and gold threads, I reached on tiptoes to get it.
“Those are Mama’s. No touchy. Pa-Papa, doesn’t let me play here.”
As slowly as I could, I rocked back on my boot heels. “Well, we wouldn’t want to disobey.”
When I turned, a gorgeous little girl crawled to my knee. Her coloring was deeper than Patience’s, with more red in her brown skin.
