Page 23

They opted not to search his private chambers when the creaking of the floorboard and the giggling suggested the bedroom hallways to be as crowded as Covent Garden.

She was not going to be discouraged, she told herself as they snuck back outside. She had barely begun her search, after all.

She knew better than anyone that what you saw was not always what you got.

Chapter Nine

When the sun emerged, the afternoon offered a host of new entertainment: horseback riding, walks to the nearby ruins, flirting by the river.

Clara chose the library. Not just because it would be empty.

Mostly empty.

Bram had been serious when he said she ought not to go anywhere alone. He stuck to her like a particularly devoted suitor. At least to anyone else’s eyes. Anyone who had never met her before.

Really, as a ruse, it needed work.

Bram did not seem inclined to worry about what the others were thinking. His only concern was that she not be left on her own anywhere the marquis might happen along. As if the Marquis of Eastbourne even remembered her name, or gave her a second glance except to wonder when he had invited her. She was not the type to attract his attention. Hence her being here in the first place. She really should not have to explain this again.

The library did not offer any secret family histories or locks that fit her mysterious key. It offered a quiet Scotsman who kept glancing out of the window. A tea tray sent by the housekeeper. Several family Bibles with names inscribed. Two chapbooks written by the Nightingale tucked into a corner. Clara hid a smile.

The Wallflower and the Wastrel. Ravished by the Rakehell.

Some of her most risqué work. An article had even been written on how The Wallflower and the Wastrel was a symptom of the problems ruining decent society and causing women to faint in libraries across the country.

Clara had added a fainting woman in the next book, found on the floor of the library and revived by a brawny professor wearing spectacles. It was her best-selling book to date. Kitty had added four gold griffins to her bookshop walls and bought her sister a new parasol with the profits.

When Bram turned in her direction, Clara shoved the books back behind a huge, dusty dictionary of Latin phrases. Still, nothing worth noting on the marquis and nothing at all on Heloise or her connection to the family.

Clara was not inspiring great confidence as the new weapon in the Spinsters’ arsenal.

Until…

By chance entirely, she reached for a large tome on the wildflowers of Hampshire and a scrap of parchment fell out. The handwriting was precise, careful.

“What have you found?” Bram asked, angling his body so no one could see what she was doing should someone join them accidentally. It was unlikely, as this was not a house party that centered around books, but Bram was wary, aways on alert. It would have served him well as a captain, that quiet watchfulness, the certainty that he could handle anything that came his way.

“A letter,” Clara said. “Please help me,” she read aloud, her throat going dry. “I don’t know when my father met the marquis and I don’t know why he chose him as my guardian, but I want to go home. He says he will send me to France on a vacation to see the art there, but I do not believe him. There is something wrong in this house. From a Miss Blanche Yarwood.”

“Who is Miss Yarwood?” Bram asked.

“Who indeed.”

Girls go missing at Eastbourne Hall.

*

Bram watched as Clara’s posture changed again. She was a fascinating mosaic of moods and secrets chasing across her body like it were a canvas. She reminded him of the sky over the sea, constantly shifting and changing. Or like the water below, flashing green, silver, black. You never quite knew what waited beneath the delicate surface. He couldn’t help but watch her. She made being landlocked bearable.

He hated having her inside this house with hidden pleas for help hiding in the books and a marquis in a fine blue-velvet coat expecting everyone to bow and scrape before him. He wanted her far from here. But since that was not going to happen, he would have to make do with watching over her. No one else did, even in London. It made him clench his back teeth to the point of cracking.

Why were the bloody English such idjits?

She slipped the letter into the sleeve and moved to another shelf. “I should have thought of it earlier,” she murmured. She read the spines, the sun touching her blonde hair and making it glow like moonlight.

“Done what?” he asked, his voice rougher than he liked. He had been at war for many long years, a captain accustomed to cannon fire, blood in the water, wounds festering, and was now being undone by a slip of a woman who had no idea the effect she had on him. Sometimes he caught her blushing when she looked at him, those pale cheeks touched with a light pink that traveled down her neck. He ached to chase it down the neckline of her plain dresses with his tongue.

He knew better than to want what he could not have. She was fine porcelain, and he was clay.