Lady Adventuress 01 - His Wayward Duchess (29 page)

Sylvester
didn’t know what to say, and yet he felt he ought to say something. “You were not invisible. I saw you, did I not?” The moment the words left him, however, he realised that she deserved better.

Holly snorted softly in the dark.
“Only because I spoke to you of houses. Else you wouldn’t have paid me any mind at all.” Her voice was distant now and closed off.

Strathavon t
angibly felt the sudden lack of closeness, though she still stood right next to him, her warm arm against his. He wanted to tell her of how he had glimpsed her in the park, looking defiant and so alive that she had entirely stolen his breath away, but he didn’t get the chance.

“Here we go. The lights are out. Bang on the mark.” Her voice sounded cool.
“There’s a gap in the fence just there that we should be able to squeeze through.”

Her plain dark dress made her little more than a shifting shadow and Strathavon followed carefully in her wake.

He did his best to ignore common sense, which told him just how undignified it was for the Duke of Strathavon to go sneaking through the undergrowth.

Holly crossed the street, and ducked into the narrow alley on her right, waiting for him to catch up.

She stood before him in the pale lamplight a moment, taking in the house from this new angle. She looked enchanted and lovely, the light gently caressing her pale cheeks. Strathavon could not but admire the artfulness of his lady duchess.

He could not imagine what his life would have been if he hadn’t seen her in the park
, or if she hadn’t spoken to him of houses that night. Would he have wed some languid heiress instead? It didn’t bear thinking about.

The
y found the servants’ door unlocked as promised, and Holly wasted no time opening it and peering inside. She motioned for the duke to follow her, her soft boots making no sound as they crossed the scullery at the back of the house and made their way into the upstairs environs.

There was not a soul to be seen – Holly supposed that Lady Charlotte m
ust have taken most of her household with her to the country, or else they had taken advantage of her absence to retire early.

“Are you certain you know what you’re about?”

“Very! But hush – it is just through that door on the left.”

They froze when the door creaked faintly, and then Holly quickly pulled the duke inside, shutting it behind them.

“What if the emeralds aren’t here?” Strathavon asked. The question seemed really obvious now that he was sneaking through a dark house like a common burglar.

“La,
Your Grace, then we’ll have to hold up the carriage.”

While Strathavon tried to decide whether that was a joke, Holly slipped inside
Lady Charlotte’s wardrobe, which had been the powder room when it was still modish to wear one’s hair
poudree
. She proceed straight to a jewellery box that rested on a polished table.

“I think we had better risk
some light,” she whispered, producing a candle stub and a tinder box from her pocket.

The candle caught light and the room was illumined in a pale orange glow.

There were several large chests, a wardrobe and an eerie mannequin on which was displayed a magnificent gown of silver net and satin.

Holly glanced around the room before returning her attention to the box, firmly reminding herself that this was no time to lose her nerve.

“Be so good as to hold this, Sylvester?” she said, handing him the candle carefully, to avoid dripping any wax.

The ebony box was
approximately the size of a miniature chest and decorated in a pattern of flying birds. It was also locked. Holly picked it up and looked at it a moment, before reaching beneath her dreadful cap to remove a pin.

A chestnut
strand fell free, framing her face as she inserted the pin into the lock with a look of intense concentration.

Strathavon moved carefully to the door to listen for any approaching footsteps.

He wondered what Max would have said if he could have seen Sylvester just then. Holly was more trouble than his brother and Avonbury combined.

He fought the urge to check his fob watch to see how long they had been in the house –
not very, he thought, and yet it felt like hours.

At last he heard a soft
click, and a triumphant exhalation from his wife as she opened the box, hurriedly rifling through pearls and diamond bracelets.

She found the emeralds and lifted them high to catch the candlelight, producing their exact replica from the pocke
t of her dress. The resemblance was remarkable. Holly seemed satisfied with the comparison, because she dropped the paste emeralds into the box, and clicked it shut.

She had just fastened the Avonbury emeralds around her own neck, carefully locking the clasp and tucking the necklace into her demure
fichu, when the unmistakable sound of footsteps on a wooden floor sounded outside.

Without further thought, the duke snuffed the candle, and snatched Holly around the waist, hiding them both behind the mannequin.

At the last moment, he snatched the white cap from her dark hair, crumpling it into his fist.

They were so close together that he could feel the beating of her heart and the soft warmth of her pressed against him. Unnecessarily, the duke tightened his hold, pressing her
body flush against his.

The door creaked open, le
tting in a thin sliver of light that quickly grew fatter.

A face peered in.

“I’m certain I saw light in here.” A young man’s voice. Perhaps a footman.

“Light!” scoffed a
woman. “There was no light, Ben, you imagined it.”

“It was
flickering there under the door.”

“What did you
think, old Maltby had come up here to try on gowns while the mistress is away?”

“She certainly acts like lady of the house, Jenny, my sweet,” the young man murmured.

“Yes, my love, but she’s not here now, nor the mistress, and I won’t waste time in this creaky old room. I do believe you promised me a kiss, Ben.” The girl sounded impatient now.

“
Aye, that I did!”

“Then come away f
rom there, and let’s on our way.”

With a last uncertain look around the dark room, Ben did as his young lady instructed and the two intruders were once again all alone in the dark.

Holly buried her face in Strathavon’s lapel to stifle what appeared to be an onset of giggles.

He wondered if she was suffering a bout of hysteria brought on by nerves.

“Imagine. Saved by the amorousness of a trysting footman,” she whispered, when she had regained some of her composure.

“Yes, well. I daresay w
e had better leave before someone else comes along.”

Reluctantly, Holly stepped out of
the circle of her duke’s arms.

“It’s alright, we can always pretend we’re another trysting pair – you’ve crumpled my cap enough that it will be
very believable,” she said, in a low voice that implied things the duke felt she really oughtn’t have known to imply.

With a sigh, he followed her out of the room.

They made it back to the scullery without further adventure, though the duke came close to knocking over one of the stocking-airers that hung along the wall.

When they had cleared the fence and the undergrowth to find their horses just where they’d left them
, Holly threw her arms around the duke.

“Oh, wasn’t that just perfect! What great fun
. I knew we’d come about!”

“Certainly a very memorable night.
But I do not see why you had to leave the replica.”

“
Easy enough! It was so that Lady Charlotte knows she’s been had, of course.”

“I’m afraid I do not follow.”
Strathavon wondered if he would ever fathom the mysteries of the female mind.

“It’s very simple. The real emeralds will go back to Avonbury and his aunt will wear them to the opera next week, for all of London to see. She may even mention to her particular friends that these are her sister’s as her own are being cleaned.”

“Do go on.”

“You see, if we had simply taken the stones, it would have looked like a plain old burglary, and that’s no fun at all. But as it is, Lady Charlotte will come back and one of two things will happen. If she is shrewd
, as I suspect she must be to play her vindictive game, she will notice that her emeralds are paste, where they were the genuine article before. Ladies are very good at noticing a fake. She will know that if she wears them, she will look absurd for owning an imitation of the Avonbury stones, because other ladies will know them to be paste too. But she will hardly be able to complain about the real ones, because that would sound even more contrived. All the while, she will know that she was outfoxed.”

“And if she doesn’t notice?”

“Then she will wear them and look ridiculous – and learn her mistake soon enough. Either way, it will be a victory,” she finished, going over to untie her horse.

Avonbury chuckled darkly at her. “You are a veritable devil, my dear. The mind boggles.”

“Come on, then. We’ve a whole park to explore.” Vaulting into the saddle from a nearby tree-stump, she took off again.

The duke leapt into his own
saddle to follow. It all felt like a peculiar dream.

At last, Holly hopped off her horse and secured the r
eins to a low branch on the shore of the Serpentine. A second later, the duke followed suit.

Holly
gravitated towards an empty pavilion and looked out over the little river.

“It’s rather a lovely piece,” she said, producing the necklace out of her
fichu, to examine it again.

“It is a very old thing,” Strathavon agreed. “They say the emeralds were given to the family by the Conqueror himself
and remounted early in the eighteenth century. I wonder what Charlotte will make of your little prank.”

“S
he will be livid, my dear Sylvester. You can be very sure of that. There is nothing like wearing a replica of someone else’s jewels for absolute social mortification.”

If there was a note of dark glee in Holly’s voice, the duke
chose wisely not to comment on it.

“And do you often indulge in such midnight masquerades?” the duke asked with a studied carelessness.

“Alas, this was my first adventure of this nature.”

“Ah. I would never have been able to tell,” he said, in a surprisingly warm tone of voice.

She basked a moment in the unmistakable compliment that had been paid.

“I
t’s fortunate that the rumours of your attachment to Lady Charlotte are unfounded, else you would be the greatest cad for breaking into her house.”

“Rumours,
” the duke said dryly. “That is absurd. By no means have I ever considered myself as an attaché to her.”

“I am glad.”

It was in that moment that His Grace the Duke of Strathavon knew without the least shadow of a doubt that he yearned for nothing more than the love of his duchess. It was truly a terrifying thought.

And yet, it was impossible to feel any indifference towards the lovely,
vibrant woman before him. If he were honest, Strathavon did not even bother making the attempt.

H
e found that, despite his better judgement, he neither could nor would desert her banners – Holly seemed to know it too, and take amused delight in it.

*

When they got home, they found that neither one of them could bring themselves to go up to bed just yet. There was something breathless and unspoken lingering between them, and they were both trying to pretend they hadn’t noticed it.

Having put the emeralds securely into the drawer of his desk, the duke took a seat and regarded her quietly a moment. She was still wearing the frightful black dress, and yet it did not in the least detract from her charm.

“Well, my dear, you can drive a carriage like a reckless youth, you don’t mind dragging stray cats and people into the house, and you haven’t the least qualms about pilfering emeralds and impersonating housemaids. What other dreadful secrets have you been harbouring?”

Holly was perched on the settle, occupied with examining
a travel guide to English Ruins, which had arrived from the circulating library just that morning.

She looked up at him innocently.

“Secrets?”

English ruins were a subject which Holly found to be surprisingly relaxing.
She was intrigued at the thought of visiting a few in the summer.

Verity had waxed poetical about
Corfe Castle especially, calling it a place of high romance.

Just then
, though, Holly’s attention was all on Strathavon, his lean body stretched out in his armchair like a waiting panther.