The Hidden Heart (19 page)

Jessica glanced up and saw that he was watching her. She turned away, propelling Gaby and Miss Pargety up the stairs with her. Both of them were full of questions, Gaby about all the details of what had happened and Miss Pargety about whether there was someone in the house waiting to harm her. Jessica did her best to reassure Miss Pargety, going into her room with her and looking all around, even in the wardrobe and under the bed, to prove that there was no one hiding there.

“Just lock your door now, and you will be fine,” she told her.

She left and heard the click of the key in the lock after her. Gaby was somewhat harder to satisfy, but Jessica managed to answer enough questions to hold her for the moment.

“I have to get back downstairs to talk to the duke. I will know much more after that,” Jessica pointed out.

“All right,” Gaby agreed somewhat reluctantly. “But you have to promise to tell me tomorrow.”

“I will. Now lock your door again. Promise.”

Gaby nodded and Jessica left, waiting in the hallway until she heard the key turn in the door. Then she hurried across the hall to her own bedroom, closing the door and whipping off her dressing gown and nightclothes. They were soaked from the snow and clung chillingly to her legs. She dressed with haste, throwing on stockings, a petticoat and a warm woolen dress, afraid that Cleybourne might go to bed before she had a chance to talk to him. She did not bother to put up her hair. She knew that she probably looked like a wild woman with it down around her shoulders and curling everywhere, but she didn’t care. She wanted to find out exactly what had happened earlier.

After lighting a candle from the embers of her fire, she stepped into the hall and glanced toward the duke’s room. No light showed beneath his door. She hoped that meant he was still downstairs. She hurried down the stairs toward his study. Several of the sconces were lit in the hallway leading to the study, and there was ample light in that room.

When she reached the doorway, she found Cleybourne standing in the center of the room, looking about him. She noticed that he, too, had apparently changed into dry clothes. He turned at the sound of her approach and looked unsurprised to see her.

“I thought you’d be back,” he said simply, then returned to his survey.

A small table had been overturned, the things that had been on it now lying beside it on the floor, and a few papers had fallen from his desk. Several pictures were askew, and the doors of a low cabinet stood open, revealing the face of a safe.

“There is where I found him,” Cleybourne said, gesturing at the low cabinet. “We struggled, and I think that is when the table got overturned and the things fell off my desk. Nothing else seems disturbed.” He waved a hand toward one of the pictures. “Looking for the safe, I think.”

“That would make sense.” Jessica eyed the cabinet. “What do you think he was looking for?”

Cleybourne shrugged. “I have no idea. Something in the safe, or something he thought would be in the safe.”

“A common thief, do you think?”

“Perhaps. But not, I think, a thief from outside the house.”

“It would seem unlikely,” Jessica agreed. She had thought the same thing herself. “It would be much easier to break in if one did not have to struggle through deep snow. It must have been someone in the house. But who?”

“I don’t know. I am not even sure about his size. It was so dark, and he had something over his face. I think he was slighter than I, shorter, but not a great deal.”

“That description would rule out Mr. Cobb.”

Cleybourne nodded. “I don’t think it was he, although otherwise he would certainly be my first suspect. But, as I said, it is all supposition. I cannot be sure.” He bent down to close the cabinet. “Why were you down here?”

“Oh. I heard a noise. It awakened me. I wasn’t sure what it had been, so I looked out into the hall and saw someone slipping furtively down the stairs. Apparently that was you.”

“Yes. I couldn’t go to sleep. I kept hearing noises—doors opening and closing. I swear, I think half the people in this house were slipping in and out of their rooms tonight. Finally I went out in the hall to investigate, and I saw a light downstairs. I was curious, so I extinguished my candle and went downstairs. He must have heard me because by the time I reached my study, the light had been doused. I saw him crouched here by the safe, and I charged at him. We struggled, but he got away…and the rest you saw.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“I don’t know. Baxter and the other servants checked all the rooms. He just reported to me when I came back down here. Everyone was in his or her room. They saw no wet and discarded clothes lying about. Whoever it was got rid of them somehow or hid them well enough that the servants didn’t see them.” Cleybourne grimaced. “It’s a damnable thing. I am certain that it must be someone in this house, but I have no idea who.”

“It seems particularly odd—given the other intruder.”

“Yes. Too coincidental. I would think it was the same person, but I was sure that was Vesey, trying to take Gabriela away from here. Why would he break into my study? What could he hope to find in there?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he might think that if he took the papers making you Gabriela’s guardian…”

“But it would still be in the original will, which has already been filed and read.”

“Yes. I cannot see how it would do him any good. Besides, he has always seemed like too much of a coward to break into one room, let alone two. I would not have thought he had the courage to do it.”

“Neither would I. And I warned him after the first incident. I told him what I would do if he tried anything else. It does not seem like him to have crossed me in the face of a clear warning. He is a fool, but he has a good sense of self-preservation.”

“I would have thought so. But perhaps he is desperate enough to try anything. The General did tell me that he would put nothing past him, no matter how despicable. And he told me once that Vesey was on his last legs financially. He said he owes a great deal of money.”

“So I have heard. He would not care about his creditors, but he is an inveterate gambler. He would be very eager to pay whatever gambling debts he had, else he would be cut off from his games. His is an expensive lifestyle, and Lady Vesey is as profligate as he—and she lost what she thought would keep her in clothes and jewels when she lost Devin last summer.”

“Well, I suppose there is nothing more that we can do about it tonight,” Jessica said reluctantly. She looked at him. “I ought to clean that wound, you know.”

He cast her an amused glance. “Are you a doctor, then, as well, Miss Maitland?”

“No, but I have tended a few cuts and bruises in my time—both as a governess and as a soldier’s daughter.”

“All right. I will admit your expertise,” he said with a faint smile. “Baxter brought a tray of things to apply to it, but I wanted to check things out down here first. The dressings are upstairs.”

He turned out the lamp, and they went upstairs, using the candle Jessica had brought with her. Cleybourne strode down the hall to his door and opened it. Jessica, beside him, hesitated for an instant. She had rarely been inside any man’s bedroom—certainly no one’s besides her father’s or the General’s. It seemed far too intimate a place to be alone with a man.

Cleybourne lit the lamp on the table beside the door. Jessica squared her shoulders and walked into the room. There was nothing wrong with her being here to tend to his cut, she told herself; she refused to be missish about such a silly thing.

Baxter had left the tray of bandages and pots of ointment on a low table beside a chair. Cleybourne walked over to it and sat down so that she could reach the cut. Jessica wet a cloth in his washbasin and squeezed it out, then began to wipe away the crusted blood on his face.

It made her feel strangely breathless to stand this close to him. She looked at his cheek, where she was washing away the blood, refusing to look into his eyes, but she knew he was watching her. She put a hand under his chin to steady his head as she dabbed at the blood, and her fingers trembled slightly at the brush of his stubble-roughed skin on her fingertips.

She cast about quickly in her mind for something to say, some subject to take her mind off the fact of her touching him. “What if it were not Vesey? Why would any of the others have broken into your study?”

“To steal something, I would presume. It seems the most likely reason.”

“But they could not run away with what they stole,” Jessica pointed out. “The snow is too deep outside. They must have known they would get caught.”

“It makes little sense. Perhaps they were looking for something very small. But what? And none of them were here before. Only Vesey. The whole thing makes no sense.”

Jessica rinsed out the washrag in the basin, then began to clean the cut itself. Cleybourne flinched and let out a sharp, short noise. “That is a wound, you know, not a spot of dirt.”

“I am aware of that,” Jessica retorted acidly. She added a little hesitantly, “I am sorry I hurt you.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Don’t tell me you are having pangs of guilt.”

“No, of course not. I did not mean to do it. And I—well, I am very sorry, though.” She frowned a little worriedly.

He cut his eyes toward her. “I should probably let you suffer over it, but I won’t. Your apology is accepted. I don’t believe your blow would have knocked me out if he had not already hit me with a paperweight while we struggled in the study.”

“No wonder you were so woozy after I hit you.”

Cleybourne looked up at her. It occurred to Jessica then how close she was standing to him, how alone they were—and where they were. He was so close to her that she could feel the heat of his body, his head only inches from her breasts. Less than two feet away from her on the other side was his bed, wide and ornate, dominating the room. Her mind went involuntarily to his kisses the other night, to this evening, when he had leaned against her in his momentary weakness, his arm warm and heavy around her shoulders. Jessica could not deny that she had been stirred both times.

If she bent a few inches, her lips would be on his. She recalled quite clearly how they tasted. Abruptly she pivoted, going to the tray that Baxter had set on the small table.

“What are these pots?” she asked, though she had to clear her throat and ask it again when her first attempt to speak cracked.

Reluctantly Cleybourne pulled his gaze from her face and looked at the small pots. “Something to put on the cut, I gather. Miss Brown makes them from herbs. Woundwort?” He shrugged. “I’ve used whatever they’ve slapped on me for years and seem none the worse for it.”

“All right.” Jessica opened one pot and smeared a dab of the gooey dark jelly inside it on Cleybourne’s cut. Then she applied the dressing plaster and wound a bandage diagonally around his head to hold it.

Cleybourne glanced in the mirror. “I look as if I had been in a war,” he said critically.

“It is a difficult place to bandage,” Jessica pointed out a trifle defensively. “At least leave it on for the night.”

She washed her hands at the basin and dried them. She should leave now, she knew. There was no further reason to stay.

“Your Grace—”

“You could at least call me Cleybourne, now that you have knocked me in the head. I think we are past titles, don’t you?” He stood up, his eyes on her face. “It might even be all right to use first names.”

Jessica’s chest was suddenly tight; it was hard to look into his eyes this way and still remember to breathe. “I—it—it would not be proper.”

“And you are always so proper.” His smile was slow and warm. It licked like fire along Jessica’s nerves. “You have called me a coward and a fool, if I remember correctly. ‘Richard’ seems mild compared to those.”

He raised his hand to her cheek. His touch was light, his skin searing in its heat. His gaze went to her mouth, his eyes darkening with passion, and his thumb softly traced the curve of her bottom lip. “Jessica.”

Jessica’s knees went weak. This was what they meant, she thought, when they said someone swooned with ecstasy. It was this constricted airless feeling in the chest, the trembling all over that made one buckle at the knees, the fire in the stomach turning everything below it into flames—and all because of the overwhelming nearness of one person. How could her name on his lips affect her so?

Why did she feel as if the world might end if she did not have his kiss?

His face loomed nearer, and she closed her eyes, engulfed by a thrilling, terrifying eagerness. Then his mouth was on hers, and it was even sweeter than her memory, more tantalizing. Soft, then hard, seeking, then demanding, the pleasure intensifying and spreading with every moment.

Jessica let out a soft animal moan and pressed herself up into his hard body. There was a need in her that she had not known existed until now, a need so intense it was almost frightening. She wanted him to love her, to know her, to claim her with his mouth and hands and body.

Richard wrapped his arms around her tightly, his body jolted with passion at her unfettered response, and he pressed her even harder into himself. He could not remember when he had last felt this wild, this needful. He wanted to sink into her, to thrust deep into her until there was nothing else but this pleasure, no thought or feeling but her.