Page 11 of His Sinful Touch

“No...not yet. Why? Were you in an accident?” She leaned in a little, peering at Sabrina’s bruises.

“I’m not sure,” Sabrina replied, and Alex launched into another retelling of Sabrina’s predicament.

Megan listened with interest, but the warm sympathy that had marked the duchess’s face mingled with a certain skepticism in Megan’s eyes. Her first words when Alex finished were “If it were Con telling me this instead of you, I would be certain this was a prank.”

Alex chuckled. “No, no, I promise you, it’s not. It’s all true.”

“I’ve heard of people losing their memory after being hit in the head, which you obviously were. I’ll check with my contacts and see if they’ve heard anything.”

“Megan is a newspaper reporter,” Alex said in an aside to Sabrina.

“Really?” Sabrina looked at her in amazement.

“I was.” Megan nodded. “Now I write mostly longer investigative pieces for magazines. I’ll look into it and see what I can find.”

“Especially Newbury. That’s the departure point for her train ticket, so we’re assuming that whatever happened would probably have taken place around there. But, of course, if it was that she had been kidnapped, that could have taken place anywhere and she merely happened to escape at Newbury.”

“Kidnapped?” Sabrina gaped at him, but Megan seemed to find nothing odd in this idea and merely nodded.

“I don’t know how much I can find out about something happening in Newbury unless it was really big news, but I will ask around,” Megan told them. “And I’ll look through my dresses for something you can wear, Sabrina. Some of my dresses would be too old for you, but I’m sure we’ll come up with enough things. Anna may have left a few frocks here, as well—anything of Kyria’s, of course, would be much too long.” She whipped around and walked away in the same brisk manner with which she seemed to do everything.

“I don’t think she believed me,” Sabrina said.

“Megan has a journalist’s nose for news. If there’s anything there to find, she’ll chase it down.”

“I just hope... What if it’s something awful?” Sabrina turned to him, brows drawing together anxiously. “I mean, what if I’m a terrible person or I’ve done something reprehensible? I could be anyone—I could have run amok and started chopping people into bits.”

Alex smiled. “I think we can take the risk.”

“Those names she mentioned—Anna, and Cara, was it? Do they live here, too?”

“No. Anna is married to my brother, and they live in Gloucestershire. But they often come to visit. And it’s Kyria, not Cara. She’s one of my sisters.” He cast an amused sideways glance at her. “Odd name, I know, but my father is an antiquarian, and his particular field of interest is ancient Greece and Rome. Sadly, he insisted we all learn Greek and Latin growing up. The other thing he inflicted on us was our names. Mother put her foot down on some of the worst names, so Reed and Olivia managed to escape, and my name luckily was both normal and Greek. Poor Con, though, got stuck with Constantine. And Theo’s full name is Theodosius. His twin is Thisbe.”

“Oh, my. You have a great number of family.”

“I suppose so. Theo and Thisbe are the oldest, then Reed. Next is Kyria, followed by Olivia, and Con and I bring up the rear.”

“Two sets of twins!”

“Fortunately, we are on the opposite ends of the family, so we weren’t all young at once. Kyria has a set of twins as well, Jason and Allison. But you don’t want to hear the names of all my nieces and nephews. They’re far too numerous.” He stopped before an open door. “Here we are. This is the Caroline room.”

“Why is it called that?” Sabrina asked as she walked past him into the room. Like every part of the house she’d seen, it was spacious and richly furnished but carried the patina of age and wear that spoke of comfortable use, not ostentation.

“Oh. It’s named after some princess that spent the night here a long time ago.”

Some princess, Sabrina thought with an inward smile. That was typical of the Morelands, she was beginning to realize. They were obviously a family of great station and wealth, but they seemed oblivious to it.

“Do you like it? I’m sure Phipps could move you to a different one.” He glanced around the room, as if trying to judge whether it would do.

“Of course. It’s very nice.” It was, in fact, a little oppressive, with its heavy dark furniture and the looming tester of the bed, but there were two windows that opened on a large garden in the back—imagine that, a garden backed by an expanse of green grass and trees behind a house in London—and the bed looked wonderfully high and soft, as if one would sink into it like a cloud.

“And in a different wing from my chamber. Phipps does his best to keep us respectable despite ourselves.”

“Really? You’re a long way away?” That thought brought a little knot of nerves to her stomach.

“Not that far, really, just turn left down that hallway. But the ‘bachelor wing,’ as Phipps terms it, is suitably separate from the family and guest rooms. Mother never believed in shutting children away in a nursery, but neither did anyone want to have Con and me living too close by.”

Sabrina laughed. “You make it sound as if you two were terrors.”