Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
The following day, after their mutual agreement to avoid one another publicly, Jillian found herself grappling with a wholly unexpected and thoroughly vexing emotion: disappointment.
It was absurd. Illogical in the extreme.
She was not supposed to prefer Miles Fairfax’s company.
She was not supposed to notice its absence.
And she certainly was not supposed to wonder—quite as often as she had—that perhaps he too felt the same uneasy disquiet she did when forced back into polite indifference.
The realization unsettled her more than anything else that had transpired between them in recent days. Their lives, once comfortably distant in shared disdain, had begun to twist in ways she hardly recognized.
Late-afternoon light slanted through the tall windows of Fairhaven House, turning the great hall gold and rose as preparations for the annual Christmas scavenger hunt unfolded at a pace that felt ominously organized.
Footmen hurried with wicker baskets filled with rolled parchment clues tied with red ribbons.
Guests clustered in excited groups, speculating loudly about the difficulty of this year’s riddles.
Lanterns were already being lit along the corridors—an unusually early step—which suggested someone expected participants to need light long before dusk.
Jillian had learned, over the course of this increasingly ridiculous holiday, that premature lantern-lighting at Fairhaven almost always signified meddling. Usually romantic meddling.
She had hoped to escape unnoticed to the library for a few stolen minutes of calm before the chaos began, but she had taken no more than two measured steps in that direction when Arabella Hartington appeared beside her wearing an expression of artificial sweetness so unconvincing it bordered on parody.
“Lady Jillian,” Arabella said, folding her gloved hands with improbable delicacy. “Might I speak with you a moment? Just the two of us?”
The fine hairs at Jillian’s nape lifted instantly. Arabella attempting contrition was a spectacle entirely at odds with nature. Even so, refusing her would likely cause a scene, and Jillian had no intention of granting her that satisfaction.
“Of course,” she replied, though she infused her tone with a polite wariness. “If you intend to apologize for the unfortunate mishap with the biscuits again, I shall try to be gracious about it.”
A laugh bubbled out of Arabella—a strange, strangled thing that bore no resemblance to actual amusement. “Nothing so silly as that. I wished only to apologize for yesterday’s awkwardness.”
Awkwardness was a charitable term. Wildly inaccurate, but charitable.
Jillian nodded, feigning acceptance while mentally preparing for whatever trap Arabella and her mother had conceived. “Then let us put it behind us.”
“How wonderful,” Arabella chirped, relief a little too bright in her eyes. “Will you walk with me for just a short moment? If Mama sees us talking she will become overset, and I do not wish to distress her.”
There was no dignified way to refuse without escalating matters. Jillian inclined her head to signify reluctant agreement and followed as Arabella led her down one of the older, lesser-used wings of Fairhaven.
The temperature dropped perceptibly as they walked, the corridor narrowing, the floorboards creaking in a manner that suggested no one had bothered to maintain this section in years.
Portraits of long-dead Fairfaxes lined the walls, their expressions growing more severe with each successive generation.
“I behaved poorly,” Arabella said at last, her voice pitched low as they approached a narrow anteroom at the far end of the passage. “Mama was distressed, and when she is distressed… well, we are all distressed.”
Jillian smothered a sigh and mustered a smile. “I assure you, I understand.”
“I spoke rashly.”
“It is forgotten,” Jillian said, though she could not rid herself of the prickling sense that something was about to go very wrong. “Truly.”
Arabella stopped beside the open doorway, smiling at Jillian with a look that should have been pleasant but succeeded only in looking vaguely predatory.
“Then we may begin again with perfect goodwill,” she declared.
Before Jillian could respond, Arabella stepped backward into the corridor, seized the iron handle—
—and slammed the door.
The bolt scraped home with dreadful finality.
“Arabella!” Jillian lunged forward, grasping the latch with both hands. “You open this door at once!”
No miracle occurred. Arabella’s footsteps retreated rapidly, her silence more damning than any excuse she might have offered. The little viper had locked her inside.
Jillian pressed her forehead against the ancient wood in a desperate attempt to gather herself.
She resisted the powerful urge to employ a word that would have mortified Aunt Gertrude into premature burial.
Arabella had evidently decided that removing Jillian from the scavenger hunt was the most efficient way of diverting Miles’s attention toward herself. It was petty. It was foolish.
And it was also, Jillian discovered when she slowly turned around—
—catastrophically miscalculated.
Miles Fairfax stood several feet away near an old tapestry-covered wall, snow dusted on his shoulders, his hair ruffled from the wind and from what looked suspiciously like long minutes spent pacing. He stared at her with a mixture of incredulity and aggravated resignation.
“Oh,” Jillian breathed. “Of course you are here.”
Miles’s brows lifted in a show of elegant irritation. “Of course. Because Fairhaven, the Hartingtons, and God Himself have evidently conspired to ensure we cannot spend more than half an hour apart.”
Her pulse wavered. “What, pray, were you doing in here?”
“Hiding,” he said with perfect dryness. “From Mrs. Hartington. I was searching this wing earlier when I heard her voice at the end of the corridor and slipped in here before she rounded the corner.”
Jillian stared at him, aghast. “You were avoiding her?”
“Desperately.”
“And she was…” her breath caught, “…already preparing something.”
“Yes,” he said grimly. “They intended for you to be locked in this room, Jillian. There’s no wood for the hearth. The matches and tinder have been taken. And the windows have been forced wide. I firmly believe they intended for you to freeze here.
Jillian groaned and turned toward the blocked door once more. “This is a disaster.”
“If we are discovered together,” Miles continued, joining her at the threshold, “it will be worse than a disaster.”
She swallowed, her breath trembling. “There will be expectations.”
“Unavoidable ones.”
Their gazes collided in the dim light, and a warmth—unsteady, dangerous—slid through her chest.
“We must get out,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied, though he made no immediate move.
He stepped forward at the same moment she turned back toward the room, and their bodies brushed—her shoulder against his chest, his breath warm against her cheek, the space between them shrinking so quickly that she had no time to recover.
Her voice thinned to a whisper. “Miles…”
“Do not,” he murmured, though his meaning was terribly unclear. Do not speak? Do not move? Do not tempt him further?
She turned slightly, just enough that her cheek nearly grazed his. Their eyes locked, and it felt as though the air around them thickened, pulled taut, waiting to snap.
He looked at her with an expression she had never seen from him before—uncertain, conflicted, drawn unwillingly toward something he could not rationalize.
Then, abruptly, he tore himself away, stepping back with a muttered curse, every inch of him taut with control.
“We must focus on the bolt,” he said hoarsely.
“Yes,” she whispered, though she still felt breathless. “The bolt.”
They tried. They truly did. But the room held them fast, indifferent to their efforts, as though conspiring with Fairhaven’s meddling spirits, the aunts or even the Hartington’s themselves.
And the silence that grew between them—warm, charged, dangerous—felt more revealing than any confession ever could.
For the first several minutes, Miles attempted—against all odds—to think only of escape. It seemed the proper thing to do, the gentlemanly priority to cling to while trapped in a small locked room with a woman whose mere presence had, of late, proved alarmingly destabilizing..
He had come into this wing working the various clues of the scavenger hunt.
He’d entered that room, hiding behind the tapestry to avoid Mrs. Hartington after he’d heard prowling the passage earlier.
She’d been muttering with suspicious purpose while a footman carried half a dozen lanterns behind her.
Miles had no interest in being cornered by her or hearing another of her long-winded lectures about Arabella’s virtues.
So he had retreated into this unused room, intending only to wait until the coast was clear.
He had not intended Jillian Hale to be dragged into his sanctuary by flagrantly villainous design.
He should have known better. Fairhaven had made a sport of orchestrating their proximity.
Now here she was—flushed, indignant, and astonishingly lovely in the dim light—and Miles felt control slipping in ways that frightened him more than any scandal could.
Her presence unsettled him. Always had. She asked sharp questions, pushed every button he possessed, and had the infuriating ability to see straight through him even when he wanted to remain inscrutable.
And in York… in York she had unraveled him so completely that he still woke remembering the sound of her breath against his neck.
Now, in the stillness of this forgotten room, with dusk creeping in and cold seeping through the walls, he became acutely aware of every inch of space she occupied.
She was bent over the bolt, her fingers trembling slightly as she lifted the wooden pole they had found. He moved next to her, reaching to steady the other end, and as they adjusted their grip their hands brushed.
It was nothing. But it was also far too much.
She stilled. He stilled. Their heads turned in the same instant.
Her eyes lifted to his.
Something deep inside him—something he had suppressed for years with near-military discipline—strained toward her.
If he kissed her, it would feel inevitable.
If he touched her, it would feel like a promise.
If someone found them this way, it would be the end of everything they knew.
He forced himself to step back. It felt like ripping out a vital piece of himself.
“We must focus,” he said, his voice rough.
She nodded, though her expression remained flustered, her breath uneven.
They spent the next stretch of time attempting increasingly desperate escape strategies. None worked. The bolt refused to budge. The panels would not shift. They were trapped.
As the minutes passed and the room darkened, Miles found himself increasingly aware not only of the danger to Jillian’s reputation but of the far greater danger to his self-control.
Because offering for her, should they be discovered, would not feel like duty.
It would feel like surrender.
And that terrified him more than anything Arabella Hartington could devise.