Josie bit her lip and forced a smile. “You’re right, Mother. Crutchkins it is.”
She saw the elderly, weasel-faced man waiting for her and tried not to lose her dinner. Lord, the man was older than her father.
He waved a bony hand covered with age spots and grinned his toothless smile.
It was going to be a long night.
WHEN SHE WAS OUT OF his sight, Stephen muttered, “And she thinks I’m an imbecile.”
Maybe he was. After all, he couldn’t stop thinking about that damned treasure. A treasure that probably didn’t even exist. How was a fantasy supposed to make him rich? Better to stick with his very real investments.
But what if the treasure was real? He’d come to Almack’s tonight with the express intent of quizzing Miss Hale on what she knew of the gold. But with his chance to talk to Josephine Hale gone, Stephen had no intention of remaining at Almack’s. The place was just as bland and proper as always. If he were an intelligent man, he would stay, dance with eligible young ladies, and find himself a woman to take the title of countess and give him an heir. But Stephen had never considered himself particularly intelligent.
He had proof of it thirty minutes later when he scaled the Hale town house. Earlier that day, he’d asked his housekeeper to talk to the Hale servants and discreetly determine which room was hers. Now he was hanging outside it, attempting to push the window open. It would be just his luck if she locked it. It would be just his luck if he fell and broke his neck going after a fairy tale treasure.
The window finally gave, jutting up so quickly that Stephen lost his balance. For one precarious moment, he hung by a single hand, and then he hooked his other arm over and crawled inside.
Josephine Hale’s room was very much what he’d expected. That was no great reflection of his knowledge of her, he’d simply been in enough young lady’s rooms to know what they looked like. This one was no different. It had a small bed with a pink coverlet, and the curtains he brushed past matched the bed. The furniture was simple, a dressing table, an armoire, and a pretty escritoire.
Nothing else was as it should be, however.
A lady’s room was to be neat and free of clutter. Josephine Hale’s looked like it had been ransacked. The bed was half-made, and dresses, petticoats, and stays littered the bed and the dressing table chair. He stepped inside the room, lowered the window, and stared at the mess. Stockings and shawls, gloves, and hats—there was hardly a space free of feminine accoutrements. He tried to push through the room without disturbing anything, but he’d taken no more than two steps before his foot crunched on a fan. Bending, he swept the fan and a pair of stockings into his arms and made his way to the dressing table.
It took only a moment of poking through the detritus there to see that it contained nothing related to the treasure. He pushed aside three brushes, two small mirrors, and a bevy of combs, along with a nest of hair ribbons, and found nothing but hairpins and the subtle cosmetics allowed an unmarried young lady.
Dumping the broken fan and the stockings on the dressing table, Stephen moved on to the escritoire.
It too was a jumble of half-begun letters, opened mail, and several books. He read the titles of a few and snorted. Obviously, Mrs. Radcliffe, Shakespeare, and Lord Byron were among Miss Hale’s favorites. No wonder the woman climbed into men’s libraries. Her reading material was appallingly loose. He stacked the books in one corner and the unfinished letters in another, and then he sifted through what remained. A few letters from her friends and one from her cousin Catherine, but nothing . . .
Wait.
Stephen pushed the letters aside and lifted the yellowed parchment. Though a low fire burned in the hearth, the light was insufficient for reading, and Stephen had to move closer to make out what was written on the parchment.
It was a map, or at least half of one. There was a coastline, wavy lines representing water, and three ovals that might be anything. At the bottom of the map was a smeared compass, and at the top of the map—what should have been the middle— was the clean rip.
Stephen stared at it. Could this be the fabled treasure map? Was this what made Josephine Hale so confident the gold actually existed? Stephen stared at it for a long time. It certainly looked authentic. Folding the map, he placed it in his pocket and continued to poke through her things. He found nothing else of interest, though, and when he next checked his watch, it was half past one. She would be home soon, and he settled back on her small bed to wait.
He was dozing when he heard her voice. He knew it was her because she had a voice one would not easily forget. It sounded almost like a song, the lilt of it rising and falling melodically with her words. And then she laughed, and he felt his heart swell. When had been the last time that he had laughed like that? Had he ever been so alive and so free? It had occurred to him earlier that her maid would follow her upstairs, and now he moved to the armoire, where he had to crouch. He was taking a chance that no one would open the furnishing. If he knew his girl, she would dismiss her maid after she’d been unlaced and undressed, then toss her dress on the floor.
He was in the armoire, the door open a sliver, when the maid and Josephine Hale entered. She was still talking animatedly about the ball and her plans for the morrow, and the maid was making small sounds of interest. A lamp was lit, and Stephen had a moment of concern when he caught the look on the servant’s face at the state of the room, but then her charge turned her back, and the woman began to unpin her dress.
“Oh, and then Mother made me dance with Mr. Southmore. Lord, he is such a bore. All he can talk about is corn. After twenty minutes, I wished I had a cob of corn to stuff in his mouth.”
“Miss!” her maid remarked, but without much heat. She was obviously used to statements like this from her charge. And then the dress was free. Stephen held his breath, hoping this was not the night Josephine Hale would choose to order her life and her room.
But she said, “Just loosen my stays, Williams, and then go to bed. I know you must be tired. I’ll clean up in here.”
The woman made a harrumphing sound but didn’t argue, and Stephen relaxed once again. Finally, the stays too were off, and the maid was waved away. As soon as the door closed, Josephine Hale dropped her dress and her stays on the floor. She loosened and dropped her petticoat as well, then bent, slipping her shoes off, and padded in her chemise to her dressing table. The table was closest to the armoire and provided him an excellent view of her.
She was far from indecent. Her shift was thick and serviceable cotton, and the light behind her revealed little. But Stephen was aroused nonetheless. It had been a long time since he’d seen a woman in only her shift. It had been a long time since he’d looked upon delicate shoulders and a long stretch of arm. It had been even longer since he’d glimpsed a woman’s ankle or pretty pink toes. The sight of so much milky white skin, once as familiar to him as his own home, was almost too much.
Inside the armoire, Stephen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Outside, Josephine Hale began to unpin her hair, allowing the hairpins to lie where they fell. Her hair was not long, and it did not fall down her back as most women’s would have. But it was curly, and when she ran one of her brushes through it, the curls uncoiled and the brown mass fell in soft waves to her chin.
That task accomplished, she removed her jewelry, taking care to put it away, and then crossed to her desk. She flipped idly through the papers and letters, seeming not to notice that they had been rearranged, and then she picked up a book and thumbed through it, looking for her page. She took two steps toward the bed, and then halted, and Stephen knew that was the minute she realized the map was missing.
Spinning away from him, she dove for the desk and began tossing papers here and there. Silently, Stephen opened the armoire and stepped out. “Looking for this?”
Chapter Five
