Chapter 2
“Appetite, once indulged, does not readily return to obedience. It is therefore best not to encourage it.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, after seducing Roderick, the footman.
* * *
Nicholas cleared his throat.
The woman searching his bedchamber jumped approximately four inches into the air.
A more satisfying result than he had anticipated.
She spun around so quickly, the scarlet ribbon swung out from the back of her neck.
The candle swayed in her hand, sending shadows lurching across the walls and ceiling and back again before settling.
She peered up at him, not at all fearful that she had been caught. It was quite unmanning to be so irrelevant to her peace of mind. Then she squinted, tilting her head. “You are not Italian!” she exclaimed, her tone accusatory.
Nicholas regarded her from his position against the pillows. “No,” he agreed. “I am not.”
“Everyone here is Italian.” She said it as though this were an established fact of Grimsfell Hall, like its draughts and its stopped clocks, and his failure to conform to it was a personal slight to her specifically.
“The men who arrived last month. People in the village said …” She stopped.
Reassessed. “I was given to understand the party at Grimsfell was Italian.”
“There are Italians,” Nicholas said. “There is also me.”
She stared at him for another moment. Her head was still tilted, the candlelight catching the gold of her hair and the wire frames of the spectacles that sat, he now observed, considerably farther down her nose than any spectacles had a right to sit and still be serving their purpose.
Then his eyes were drawn once again to the scarlet ribbon on which they were threaded.
Vivid, incongruous, the shade of a woman who had strong opinions and had located this one small arena in which to express them.
The endearing flash of feminine vanity disappeared beneath her fair hair at the back of her neck.
She showed no indication of being alarmed. She showed no indication of intending to leave.
Well, this is unprecedented.
He had been, over the course of his life, discovered in a remarkable variety of compromising positions. The universal constant of those experiences had been that the guilty party was unsettled when caught.
This occasion appeared to be the exception.
He pushed back the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed, carefully, as if about to conduct an operation that had potential consequences.
Keeping his left leg moving smoothly. Not allowing the right to drag.
Not reaching for the cane that leaned against the night table, because reaching for it would tell her something and he was not prepared, in the first thirty seconds of this encounter, to tell her anything at all.
He rose to his full height in the dark and stood still.
She had to look up at him. Most people did.
He had always been tall, even when everything else about him had been going to ruin.
Angelo’s ruthless campaign of feeding him actual meals at actual intervals had, in the past several months, begun to replace what the drink had taken from his frame.
He was not quite what he had been at twenty.
He was far more than he had been at Christmas.
He was aware, in the manner of a man who has gone without female attentions for long enough to notice its restoration, that her gaze had dropped from his face.
To his shoulders.
To his chest.
Lower, to where his nightshirt ended at mid-calf and left the rest of him to the cold air and her observation.
She paused there. Not a swift, summarizing glance, but a moment of genuine arrested attention before her eyes drifted up.
He became, with some inconvenience, acutely aware that the linen was thin.
Considerably thinner, in the candlelight, than it had seemed when he had put it on.
Do not, he thought. And then, immediately after, Do.
He folded his arms and stared down at her.
Months of sobering up. Of physical torture to bring his damaged leg back to painful life.
Then he had had to read his dead mother’s poisonous journals and her terrible thoughts about her youngest son.
Him. Which had been quite a blow to his self-esteem.
And now a beautiful woman. Other than his cousin Molly and his new physician Lady Trafford, who had begun to treat his injury, the only woman he had spent time with in months was alone with him in his bedroom.
The universe had a peculiar sense of timing. He had long suspected it.
“Who are you?” she said. Then, with the frankness of someone who was accustomed to saying whatever entered her mind without extensive editing, added, “His valet?”
Nicholas blinked. It was oddly humbling to be mistaken for a servant. But if it made her more comfortable, more likely to tell him who she was and what the hell she was doing in his bedchamber, he supposed he could bear it.
“You mean for Lord Trenwith? Sort of,” he replied in a noncommittal tone.
She accepted this with a small nod, apparently finding it sufficient.
Her spectacles slid a further fraction of an inch toward the end of her nose.
She did not seem to notice. She was already scanning around the room again.
Not with the furtive anxiety of a person who had been caught.
But with the systematic attention of a person who had been interrupted and was calculating whether she might reasonably continue.
“I was searching for the manuscript,” she said, as though this explained everything, and from her expression, it clearly did.
“The Malory. The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table. The original, handwritten. I know it was purchased at the Danbury auction in January, and I tracked it here. I searched the study first, then the library …” She paused.
“The library is very full. It will require more thorough attention.”
The library, Nicholas thought, with a lurch of worry. Where we have been laying out Matteo’s journals on the table each morning.
He had a sudden and vivid image of her. Systematic.
Unhurried. Reading what she found with those pale blue eyes.
He felt a relief he was prudent not to let cross his face.
They would have put the journals away. Gabriel was meticulous about it.
Every evening, back into the Room of Science, hidden within the secret chambers.
The viscount’s past work for the Crown made him especially vigilant.
“So you searched the library,” Nicholas said, his voice even, “found little that interested you, and moved on to the private bedchambers.”
“I had to start somewhere,” she said, with a shrug that struck him as so comprehensively unbothered that he experienced a momentary uncertainty about whether he was still asleep. “I did not find it in the obvious places, so I was being less obvious.”
“At three o’clock in the morning.”
“People are asleep at three o’clock in the morning.” She tilted her head again. “Usually.”
“Usually,” Nicholas agreed. “Yes.”
And the way she stared at him then was most unsettling. Like she was seeing him alone, and not any of the identities attached to him. Which was disconcerting in itself.
For the first years of his life, he had been little Nicholas Scott, the youngest and mostly forgotten son of a baron.
Then, after his fall from a third-story window, he had been injured Nicholas Scott. Recovering from his broken leg with a limp and mostly forgotten by a mother obsessed with appearances and by a doddering old man for a father who barely remembered he existed.
Then he had grown into carousing Nicholas Scott. The disappointing baron’s son who sneered at life and avoided contemplation of anything meaningful with hard spirits and … other distractions.
Then a few months ago, during his elder brother’s troubles with the murder accusation, he had abruptly shifted to sober Nicholas Scott.
Convalescing youngest brother of a baron who had brought only trouble to the Blackwood name.
Who had even been accused of attempted murder by his own nephew, Marco, while receiving overdue treatment for his bunged-up leg.
And really the truth was, Nicholas had no concept of who he actually was. What he wanted to do. Who he wanted to be. Which was why he was here helping Lorenzo pursue his quest. But he was not exactly a vital piece of the puzzle.
“I am …” he began, not sure how the sentence ended, “… Nick Scott,” he finished, quirking a crooked smile and suppressing any urge to elucidate.
It was oddly freeing to not associate himself with any of those past labels and to simply present himself on his own merit.
No association with the Blackwood barony.
No Scott family scandal. No dead mother.
No previously unknown nephew who was heir to his eldest brother.
No five-page inventory of his failures, which various acquaintances had taken turns pressing upon him over the years.
Just Nick. In a nightshirt. At three in the morning. Being burgled by an attractive woman with spectacles tied to a scarlet ribbon.
Stranger things had happened to him. Marginally.
She appeared to be reassessing him. He could watch it happening.
Her gaze moving over him again. Shoulders, chest, lower.
With that frank, unselfconscious attention.
He told himself it was scholarly. Purely observational.
The same way she had regarded his bookshelves.
He almost believed it. Then her eyes stayed somewhere south of his sternum for just a beat too long, and he stopped believing it entirely.
His groin, for its part, had never believed it at all, and was threatening to inconveniently make its presence known through what he was grimly aware was very thin linen.