How could she yearn after the man who had destroyed Dorothy? Was she victim to the same fatal weakness as her half-sister?
Carefully she inched open the door to the marquess’s apartments. Although he was safely ensconced in his library, her heart skittered with fear that somehow he was in two places at once.
She stepped into dark, cavernous space. She closed the door and raised her candle to reveal a sitting room, as masculine in décor as the marchioness’s was feminine. Flickering light glanced across a leather couch and two armchairs beside a cold hearth. Piles of books teetered on heavy mahogany tables. She’d lay money there wasn’t a novel among them. Light glinted off decanters on the sideboard.
James Fairbrother’s presence was palpable, as though he stood right behind her. The muscles across her neck and shoulders knotted until she told herself to settle down. He was downstairs. She was safe, at least for now.
She pushed open the door from the sitting room and entered a short corridor. Shelves lined the first room off the hallway. She inhaled to calm leapfrogging nerves, then wished she hadn’t. When had the marquess’s scent become so familiar? Her senses expanded with pleasure as she recognized sandalwood soap and clean, healthy male. Riffling through the clothes he wore on that strong, hard body seemed unforgivably intimate, and she fumbled the door shut with a loud click that made her heart jolt with alarm.
Desperately listening in case someone came to check on the noise, she stood motionless.
Nothing.
She sucked air into starved lungs. Nell didn’t take easily to deceit. Sneaking around and eavesdropping and telling lies went against her character. Another reason to leave Alloway Chase sooner rather than later. Much more chicanery and she’d be a wreck.
The next door revealed a bathing room of a luxury beyond anything she’d imagined when her world was confined to Mearsall. At last she found proof of sensual self-indulgence. The marquess presented a restrained façade to the world. Something at Nell’s deepest level insisted that beneath that proper exterior lurked a man who appreciated pleasure.
The thought of James Fairbrother standing naked in this blue-tiled magnificence heated her blood. She couldn’t help seeing him as he doused himself with water, stroked soap along his wet skin, lounged in the huge bath.
This time, although she closed the door carefully, panic nipped more sharply. Her invasion of the marquess’s rooms inflamed her senses in a way that appalled her.
One door remained.
Only her piercing need to run away made her proceed. If she failed at this hurdle, she was likely to fail altogether.
As she opened this last door, her hands shook so violently that her candle cast wild shadows over the walls. She felt like Bluebeard’s bride breaking into the locked room. A discomfiting thought, as the nosy girl came to a nasty end in that tale. At least she did in the pragmatic version told around Mearsall’s firesides.
The bedroom was so enormous that the candle’s light didn’t penetrate its far reaches. A fire burned in the grate, but the flames left most of the room in shadow. The room was circular with tall windows facing three directions. She must be in the castle’s west tower. Quietly she closed the door behind her.
The huge four-poster bed sat on a dais, curtained in gold brocade. The ceiling was so high it dwarfed even this lofty structure. The covers were turned down, ready for the marquess’s powerful body. Nell shivered with a dread that, she was ashamed to admit, included a dollop of forbidden excitement.
If she’d felt like she infringed the marquess’s privacy elsewhere in these apartments, here where he slept, he could be standing at her elbow. A book lay open on the nightstand as if he’d just laid it down. A shirt draped across a chair. A black velvet dressing gown as soft as panther fur spread across the base of the bed, waiting for its owner to shrug it over his long body. She could picture him wearing it as he enjoyed a last brandy before sleep.
The image of Leath as his real, animal self, not the civilized man he presented to the world, was painfully vivid. Here it was easy to envision him with a lover. Not a girl he tumbled to scratch an itch, but someone he wanted. Perhaps even… loved. Nell released a soft gasp of distress when she realized that the fantasy woman in Leath’s arms bore her face.
Enough. She swallowed to control her queasiness. She didn’t have long. And she couldn’t waste it on nonsense.
Recalling Lady Mary’s “ghost,” she crossed to the windows to check that the curtains were closed. Then she set her candle on a small table and surveyed the room.
This vast, idiosyncratic chamber was full of interesting nooks and coffers. Fertile ground for her search. She leveled her shoulders and stepped toward a large studded chest near the hearth with the year 1676 picked out in heavy iron nails.
Then the unthinkable happened.
The door opened and his lordship strode in.
Nell caught her breath and held it as if somehow that made her invisible. Her queasiness changed to cramping horror.
Shock flared in his face then his gaze narrowed on her. He couldn’t be nearly as appalled to see her as she was to see him.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” Thick black brows lowered over deep-set eyes. He was dressed informally. A loose white shirt and breeches with boots. He looked utterly terrifying.
Nell held her breath so long that it hurt when she exhaled. She felt dizzy with lack of air, stabbing dread, self-disgust.
Curse him, what could she say? What could she do? She faltered back, although there was no escape. Leath’s formidable form blocked the only door. She should have thought of some excuse for being in his room. But what excuse could there be?
She dipped into a wobbly curtsy. “My lord.”
His furious gaze didn’t waver. “Just what are you up to, Miss Trim?”