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“Must you?”

“I wasn’t lurking! I was walking,” she said. “Anyway, I already told you I’m invisible.”

“I see you very clearly, Lady Clara.”

What did that mean? Anything? Should she ask? Ignore it?

If she did ask, would they have to talk about last night? Would she have to listen to him tell her that it was just a fleeting moment, more to do with the atmosphere than with her? Or worse, that his honor required some sort of forced relationship between them? That he regretted it? She would rather it meant nothing at all.

Or even worse yet, would he say nothing? Because she was small and pale and they were in a place where everything and everyone glittered?

Back to the task at hand. Safer for her heart.

Pride. She’d meant pride, of course.

“Where are you going?”

Right round the maypole if she continued to chase her thoughts in this fruitless manner. Better to chase a missing chaperone and a key with no lock. “I was going to the nursery.”

“Alone?” His tone was so stern and disapproving, she considered saluting.

“With you, clearly.”

He grumbled under his breath as he stalked after her. “Why are we here?” he asked when they stepped onto the nursery floor. “There have been no children in this house for some time.”

“I know,” she said, noting the wooden rocking horse in the corner, the bed, and the rest of the furniture draped in white cloths. Dust motes danced lazily in the air, and light streamed through the narrow windows. There was a chalkboard hanging on one wall still bearing a drawing of a hedgehog with a sword. He was fighting a mighty dragon who appeared to be more interested in his cup of tea. He wore spectacles.

Beyond that was a sitting room much better suited for a debutante. It was simple, perhaps hastily done, but pretty. Mint-green chairs, lace curtains, scrolled tables. A chest that was at least two hundred years old but recently painted with doves. Black, naturally.

Clara went straight for it. “I found out from my lady’s maid that this was where Sybil and Heloise actually stayed.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We were otherwise occupied.” She meant with the party, not the bit where he lifted her skirts in his big, tattooed hands and she writhed against him helplessly. She’d even dreamed of it a few hours later. She cleared her throat. “Isn’t it curious that I was told when we arrived that their rooms were in the family wing?”

No wonder they had felt so soulless and smelled of lemon polish, like guest rooms without occupants.

She opened the chest, peering inside. Drawing pencils, watercolor paints, a deck of cards, a basket of half-finished needlepoint. Nothing that locked, nothing that explained the mysteries piling up around them. She dropped the lid, disgruntled.

Bram prowled through the rooms, much like she imagined he would have prowled the deck of a ship, the wind in his face, his curls tangling at his brow. How many storms had he sailed into? How many battles had he faced, cannons and swords and muskets? He had so many scars, many far too long to be the result of those dreaded splinters. She shivered.

“Are you spooked?” Bram asked, faintly amused.

“By an empty nursery?” she shot back. “Hardly.” It would be ridiculous to tell him she worried about him, the him of two years ago, five years ago. Phantom battles. Did the war haunt him as it haunted so many others?

She turned her attention to the shelves, still holding old books on mathematics and Latin and the lives of the great painters of the Renaissance. Not to mention stodgy old poetry no one bothered with anymore. Sybil had left no clues there.

Bram looked at the books in her hand, around the room again. “My sisters never had a governess. Is this what it was like for you?”

“A little,” she replied. She’d had a nursemaid, a governess, and her mother. Rules and more rules. And then her father, scrambling to undo them all whenever he could, for his amusement. It was not a comfortable house. “How many sisters do you have?” she asked, instantly consumed with curiosity.

“Two, both younger than me. My father tutored them.”

“And you?”

“I went to the naval academy.”

“Was your father also in the navy?”