The Heiress Effect (49 page)

The quiet creak of a door opening startled
him. He turned from the window at the corresponding scritch of
floorboards. Someone had come up the stairs and entered the
adjoining room. The footsteps were light—a woman’s, perhaps, or a
child’s. They were also curiously hesitant. Most people who made
their way to the library in the midst of a musicale had a reason to
do so. A clandestine meeting, perhaps, or a search for a missing
family member.

From his vantage point behind the curtains,
Robert could only see a small slice of the library. Whoever it was
drew closer, walking hesitantly. She was out of sight—somehow he
was sure that she was a woman—but he could hear the soft, prowling
fall of her feet, pausing every so often as if to examine the
surroundings.

She didn’t call out a name or make a
determined search. It didn’t sound as if she were looking for a
hidden lover. Instead, her footsteps circled the perimeter of the
room.

It took Robert half a minute to realize that
he’d waited too long to announce himself. “Aha!” he could imagine
himself proclaiming, springing out from behind the curtains. “I was
admiring the plaster. Very evenly laid back there, did you
know?”

She would think he was mad. And so far,
nobody yet had come to that conclusion. So instead of speaking, he
dropped his cigarillo out the window. It tumbled end over end,
orange tip glowing, until it landed in a puddle and extinguished
itself.

All he could see of the room was a half-shelf
of books, the back of the sofa, and a table next to it on which a
chess set had been laid out. The game was in progress; from what
little he remembered of the rules, black was winning. Whoever it
was drew nearer, and Robert shrank back against the window.

She crossed into his field of vision.

She wasn’t one of the young ladies he’d met
in the crowded hall earlier. Those had all been beauties, hoping to
catch his eye. And she—whoever she was—was not a beauty. Her dark
hair was swept into a no-nonsense knot at the back of her neck. Her
lips were thin and her nose was sharp and a bit on the long side.
She was dressed in a dark blue gown trimmed in ivory—no lace, no
ribbons, just simple fabric. Even the cut of her gown bordered on
the severe side: waist pulled in so tightly he wondered how she
could breathe, sleeves marching from her shoulders to her wrists
without an inch of excess fabric to soften the picture.

She didn’t see Robert standing behind the
curtain. She had set her head to one side and was eyeing the chess
set the way a member of the Temperance League might look at a cask
of brandy: as if it were an evil to be stamped out with prayer and
song—and failing that, with martial law.

She took one halting step forward, then
another. Then, she reached into the silk bag that hung around her
wrist and retrieved a pair of spectacles.

Glasses should have made her look more
severe. But as soon as she put them on, her gaze softened.

He’d read her wrongly. Her eyes hadn’t been
narrowed in scorn; she’d been squinting. It hadn’t been severity he
saw in her gaze but something else entirely—something he couldn’t
quite make out. She reached out and picked up a black knight,
turning it around, over and over. He could see nothing about the
pieces that would merit such careful attention. They were solid
wood, carved with indifferent skill. Still, she studied it, her
eyes wide and luminous.

Then, inexplicably, she raised it to her lips
and kissed it.

Robert watched in frozen silence. It almost
felt as if he were interrupting a tryst between a woman and her
lover. This was a lady who had secrets, and she didn’t want to
share them.

The door in the far room creaked as it opened
once more.

The woman’s eyes grew wide and wild. She
looked about frantically and dove over the davenport in her haste
to hide, landing in an ignominious heap two feet away from him. She
didn’t see Robert even then; she curled into a ball, yanking her
skirts behind the leather barrier of the sofa, breathing in shallow
little gulps.

Good thing he’d moved the davenport back half
a foot earlier. She never would have fit the great mass of her
skirts behind it otherwise.

Her fist was still clenched around the chess
piece; she shoved the knight violently under the sofa.

This time, a heavier pair of footfalls
entered the room.

“Minnie?” said a man’s voice. “Miss Pursling?
Are you here?”

Her nose scrunched and she pushed back
against the wall. She made no answer.

“Gad, man.” Another voice that Robert didn’t
recognize—young and slightly slurred with drink. “I don’t envy you
that one.”

“Don’t speak ill of my almost-betrothed,” the
first voice said. “You know she’s perfect for me.”

“That timid little rodent?”

“She’ll keep a good home. She’ll see to my
comfort. She’ll manage the children, and she won’t complain about
my mistresses.” There was a creak of hinges—the unmistakable sound
of someone opening one of the glass doors that protected the
bookshelves.

“What are you doing, Gardley?” the drunk man
asked. “Looking for her among the German volumes? I don’t think
she’d fit.” That came with an ugly laugh.

Gardley. That couldn’t be the elder Mr.
Gardley, owner of a distillery—not by the youth in that voice. This
must be Mr. Gardley the younger. Robert had seen him from afar—an
unremarkable fellow of medium height, medium-brown hair, and
features that reminded him faintly of five other people.

“On the contrary,” young Gardley said. “I
think she’ll fit quite well. As wives go, Miss Pursling will be
just like these books. When I wish to take her down and read her,
she’ll be there. When I don’t, she’ll wait patiently, precisely
where she was left. She’ll make me a comfortable wife, Ames.
Besides, my mother likes her.”

Robert didn’t believe he’d met an Ames. He
shrugged and glanced down at—he was guessing—Miss Pursling to see
how she took this revelation.

She didn’t look surprised or shocked at her
almost-fiancé’s unromantic utterance. Instead, she looked
resigned.

“You’ll have to take her to bed, you know,”
Ames said.

“True. But not, thank God, very often.”

“She’s a rodent. Like all rodents, I imagine
she’ll squeal when she’s poked.”

There was a mild thump.

“What?” yelped Ames.

“That,” said Gardley, “is my future wife you
are talking about.”

Maybe the fellow wasn’t so bad after all.

Then Gardley continued. “I’m the only one who
gets to think about poking
that
rodent.”

Miss Pursling pressed her lips together and
looked up, as if imploring the heavens. But inside the library,
there were no heavens to implore. And when she looked up, through
the gap in the curtains…

Her gaze met Robert’s. Her eyes grew big and
round. She didn’t scream; she didn’t gasp. She didn’t twitch so
much as an inch. She simply fixed him with a look that bristled
with silent, venomous accusation. Her nostrils flared.

There was nothing Robert could do but lift
his hand and give her a little wave.

She took off her spectacles and turned away
in a gesture so regally dismissive that he had to look twice to
remind himself that she was, in fact, sitting in a heap of skirts
at his feet. That from this awkward angle above her, he could see
straight down the neckline of her gown—right at the one part of her
figure that didn’t strike him as severe, but soft—

Save that for later,
he admonished
himself, and adjusted his gaze up a few inches. Because she’d
turned away, he saw for the first time a faint scar on her left
cheek, a tangled white spider web of crisscrossed lines.

“Wherever your mouse has wandered off to,
it’s not here,” Ames was saying. “Likely she’s in the lady’s
retiring room. I say we go back to the fun. You can always tell
your mother you had words with her in the library.”

“True enough,” Gardley said. “And I don’t
need to mention that she wasn’t present for them—it’s not as if she
would have said anything in response, even if she had been
here.”

Footsteps receded; the door creaked once
more, and the men walked out.

Miss Pursling didn’t look at Robert once
they’d left, not even to acknowledge his existence with a glare.
Instead, she pushed herself to her knees, made a fist, and slammed
it into the hard back of the sofa—once, then twice, hitting it so
hard that it moved forward with the force of her blow—all one
hundred pounds of it.

He caught her wrist before she landed a third
strike. “There now,” he said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself over
him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

She stared up at him, her eyes wide.

He didn’t see how any man could call this
woman timid. She positively crackled with defiance. He let go of
her arm before the fury in her could travel up his hand and consume
him. He had enough anger of his own.

“Never mind me,” she said. “Apparently I’m
not capable of helping myself.”

He almost jumped. He wasn’t sure how he’d
expected her voice to sound—sharp and severe, like her appearance
suggested? Perhaps he’d imagined her talking in a high squeak, as
if she were the rodent she’d been labeled. But her voice was low,
warm, and deeply sensual. It was the kind of voice that made him
suddenly aware that she was on her knees before him, her head
almost level with his crotch.

Save that for later, too.

“I’m a rodent. All rodents squeal when
poked.” She punched the sofa once again. She was going to bruise
her knuckles if she kept that up. “Are you planning to poke me,
too?”

“No.” Stray thoughts didn’t count, thank God;
if they did, all men would burn in hell forever.

“Do you always skulk behind curtains, hoping
to overhear intimate conversations?”

Robert felt the tips of his ears burn. “Do
you always leap behind sofas when you hear your fiancé coming?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly. “Didn’t you hear?
I’m like a book that has been mislaid. One day, one of his servants
will find me covered in dust in the middle of spring-cleaning.
‘Ah,’ the butler will say. ‘That’s where Miss Wilhelmina has ended
up. I had forgotten all about her.’”

Wilhelmina Pursling? What a dreadful
appellation.

She took a deep breath. “Please don’t tell
anyone. Not about any of this.” She shut her eyes and pressed her
fingers to her eyes. “Please just go away, whoever you are.”

He brushed the curtains to one side and made
his way around the sofa. From a few feet away, he couldn’t even see
her. He could only imagine her curled on the floor, furious to the
point of tears.

“Minnie,” he said. It wasn’t polite to call
her by so intimate a name. And yet he wanted to hear it on his
tongue.

She didn’t respond.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” he said. “If
I don’t see you downstairs by then, I’ll come up for you.”

For a few moments, there was no answer. Then:
“The beautiful thing about marriage is the right it gives me to
monogamy. One man intent on dictating my whereabouts is enough,
wouldn’t you think?”

He stared at the sofa in confusion before he
realized that she thought he’d been threatening to drag her
out.

Robert was good at many things. Communicating
with women was not one of them.

“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “It’s
just…” He walked back to the sofa and peered over the leather top.
“If a woman I cared about was hiding behind a sofa, I would hope
that someone would take the time to make sure she was well.”

There was a long pause. Then fabric rustled
and she looked up at him. Her hair had begun to slip out of that
severe bun; it hung around her face, softening her features,
highlighting the pale whiteness of her scar. Not pretty,
but…interesting. And he could have listened to her talk all
night.

She stared at him in puzzlement. “Oh,” she
said flatly. “You’re attempting to be kind.” She sounded as if the
possibility had never occurred to her before. She let out a sigh,
and gave him a shake of her head. “But your kindness is misplaced.
You see,
that
—” she pointed toward the doorway where her
near-fiancé had disappeared “—that is the best possible outcome I
can hope for. I have wanted just such a thing for years. As soon as
I can stomach the thought, I’ll be marrying him.”

There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice.
She stood. With a practiced hand, she smoothed her hair back under
the pins and straightened her skirts until she was restored to
complete propriety.

Only then did she stoop, patting under the
sofa to find where she’d tossed the knight. She examined the
chessboard, cocked her head, and then very, very carefully, set the
piece back into place.

While he was standing there, watching her,
trying to make sense of her words, she walked out the door.

Want to read the rest?
The Duchess War
is
available now.

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The Heiress Effect

The Countess Conspiracy
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