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“Tomorrow,” Honoria soothed, her voice gentle. “You can worry about it tomorrow.” She took Lydia’s cold hand in hers and carefully led her away from the ballroom. “Tonight, you can mourn.”

Chapter 9

Tonight you can mourn.

When Honoria said that, she probably didn’t expect that tonight would extend into tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

It’s been ten blasted years; why haven’t I moved on?

It had been so much easier to pretend she had when she barely caught glimpses of him. When she heard nothing about him except the little snippets she deliberately sought out. And it had definitely been easier to pretend he was miserable, angry, and lonely when he wasn’t betrothed.

You are the only one I’ll ever love.

Those words, coming from an eighteen-year-old boy’s mouth, had seemed like a dream come true all those years ago. Now they rang hollow.

Lies. All lies.

Perhaps he hadn’t lied then.

Perhaps he had been just as naive as she. Lydia shook her head, sinking deeper into the comfort of her leather chair.

None of it justified what he had done.

She would allow herself to mourn the love lost, but she wouldn’t allow herself to mourn him. He was the reason for all her troubles. He was the reason her life had turned out this way. And now, fate had handed her the perfect chance for revenge. She’d be damned if she didn’t take it.

Lydia jumped out of the chair and stalked out of the house, grabbing her cloak on her way out and wrapping it about her shoulders.

She couldn’t steal the jewel off his person; that much was obvious. But since he was betrothed now, she deduced that he would have given the jewel to his new bride, just as he had given it to her all those years ago. And stealing the jewel off a stranger would surely prove easier, wouldn’t it?

There was only one tiny problem.

Lydia didn’t know where Art’s new betrothed resided. She assumed it was Miss Prescott. After all, that was the only woman she had witnessed him dance with. And that fact only hurt more, because she was a commoner, and that was the exact reason he’d used for breaking off their young betrothal.

She saddled her horse and quickly mounted it, spurring it toward Mayfair.

She knew how to get that detail, though. There was bound to be some correspondence between Thorn and the Prescotts. Their deal couldn’t have been struck in one evening.

Since she couldn’t get Art’s fiancée’s location by conventional means, she would get it the way she got everything else in life.

She would steal it.

As Lydia reached Grosvenor Square, she tethered her horse behind a hedge several houses down from Art’s townhouse and made the rest of the way on foot. She kept to the shadows as she moved closer to his house, glad for the dark night and her black cloak to disguise her.

She reached Art’s townhouse in no time. While circling the building, she went through the floor plan in her mind. If she wasn’t mistaken—most of her time serving the marquess had been spent at his country estate, so her memory wasn’t perfect—this, the room right above her head, was where the marquess’s study was located. But both its windows were frustratingly out of reach, with no trellis or convenient architectural features to aid her climb.

No matter. She walked farther along the wall until she found the trellis leading up to the edge of a neighboring window. It would take some careful maneuvering, but she could reach it and then make her way to the study from inside the house. She wasn’t certain what room lay beyond that window, but first floor rooms were rarely if ever reserved for nighttime activities.

Lydia climbed the trellis, using the wall for balance as she stretched to grasp the windowsill. Pulling up, she managed to peer inside. From her vantage point, the room seemed narrow and empty. The majority of the room was cloaked in darkness, but she saw enough to deduce that it was not a sleeping chamber, based on the fact that there was no bed.

Lydia pulled out her knife and forced the latch open. Clamping the blade between her teeth, she eased the window up and rolled inside in one smooth motion. She landed softly on the balls of her feet and glanced around her surroundings.

She had been wrong. This room was not empty at all. What she had thought was a narrow room was merely a corridor between two massive bookcases, filled with leather-bound volumes.

Of course, a library! How could she have forgotten?

The realization sent an unwelcome pang through her chest. After all, it had been in a Wakefield library—though not this one, but the one in the country—where she had first discovered her love of books… and him.

She walked to one of the bookshelves, running her fingers along the leather spines and inhaling their familiar, musty scent. There were so many books. Lydia paused, looking around. There had never been this many books in either of Wakefield’s houses, had there?