No laughing eyes, no smirking lips. He appeared…sorrowful.
“They have gone,” he said simply.
Aideen drew away – as did the feeling of contentment.
Briefly, she considered asking why he had just kissed her but didn’t want to hear some drawled retort about halting her tongue, wasn’t willing to lose that last remnant of warmth, still tingling her skin.
In silence, they rounded the ornate screen, and she wondered at his reasons for being in this chamber.
Was Lady Gibbon a spy as well? She wondered until the moment he opened the wardrobe.
“And whose initial areyoulooking for?” he asked quietly.
She gawked at the neat boxes. “I… I don’t understand.”
“Lady Gibbon likes to blackmail members of the ton and anyone else beneficial. Usually for trifling reasons, like attending her dreary balls, but occasionally she turns up something useful. What does she hold over you, Miss Aideen Quinlan?”
“Not me. A friend of mine. You must promise not to–” She stopped herself. How foolish. This man was a spy for the Crown – he didn’t care for the poems of a child. Abruptly, she felt small. No match for a duke of the realm. “Initial G for Greenwood. There are some poems.”
Riffling through the stuffed box, he raised a brow, tilting the paper towards an alabaster nymph clutching a candle. “I frolicked upon the heath with my beloved shepherd?”
“Er. That does sound like them, yes. There are four in total.”
His brow rose ever ceiling-wards as he handed her the scrawled papers.
She waited whilst he riffled through boxes inscribed with S and P, stuffed some papers in his coat, and then neatly placed them back in their slots, closing the wardrobe door on the sleeping secrets.
“I trust you will keep silent about tonight, Miss Quinlan?”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
How polite they both were. She longed to ask what emotion he’d felt behind that screen but sensed the Duke of Restraint was back – unyielding and withdrawn.
The hideous candelabra’s glow cast a lustre upon his hair, and she realised that unlike her own cold-toned black locks, the duke’s held a deep redness – warm and rich, such a dichotomy to his icy visage.
He hustled her to the door and, after checking the way was clear, instructed she turn left towards the staircase.
Nodding her compliance, she watched as he straightened his tailcoat and then strode in the opposite direction. No worded goodbye or brief smile – he just walked away.
But as the duke disappeared silently into the shadows, Aideen turned and tiptoed back into Lady Gibbon’s bedchamber.
Temptation beckoned to find anything she could within the box marked R of that wardrobe of secrets, but instead she crossed the room, peered behind the elaborate screen and grabbed the ebony cane left propped there against the wall.
Perhaps she wasn’t the only one feeling a little out of sorts.
Chapter Four
Never judge a rogue by its cover.
The Cooper’s Arms heaved with brawlers, scantily clad doxies and the occasional young buck looking to lose his purse, but Rakecombe ignored them all and tucked into his rabbit pie, the best thing he’d eaten all week.
Hunger did make the best sauce.
Despite his grumbles, Mother still refused to dismiss Monsieur Dupont, asserting the chef needed to settle in, and he ruminated as to whether Dupont was in fact a devotee of Napoleon, poisoning the British aristocracy from within their own homes.
Little did those French know, however, that the men and women of this little island had cast-iron stomachs – growing up on boiled vegetables and incinerated beef.
He reached for his cane but clenched air; ’twas akin to losing a limb.
