It must take her ages to get the thing on. Or off. He imagined it—one at a time, each slow slide of button through buttonhole. Each one falling free with a careful manipulation of her fingers, each revealing a new inch of that fragile garment beneath.
Oh Jesus, he had to stop thinking about her like that. He’d undressed her only to the level of plain white cotton, and he was finding even that mental picture terrifyingly arousing.
“Are you looking for something?” he managed to rasp. Whatwasshe doing downstairs in the wee hours? Should she not be tucked up into her bed in the chamber beside his own?
That too was something he tried very hard not to think about, with only middling success.
“Oh no,” she said, as if by reflex.
He blinked. “No?”
“Oh,” she said—this was, perhaps, the fourth time she’d uttered the syllable—and then laughed a little. She had the loveliest laugh—warm and soft, her fingers on her throat as though the very sound surprised her. “Yes, I suppose I am. I could not sleep—I often cannot. I paced my bedroom and looked throughall the letters I have left to me, and I imagined for a moment that I could see the beginnings of a pattern—and then it all unraveled in my mind. I thought perhaps if I looked at my notes again…”
Her notes—yes. She was here for hernotes.
She’s not here for you, he informed his suddenly very alert body.
“By all means.” He pushed back from the desk, his boots scraping the threadbare wool rug beneath his feet. “Do you keep the notes here in the desk?”
“Yes.” She came toward the desk cautiously, and he noted the ridiculous things she had on her feet. Bed slippers, he supposed, with enormous tassels bobbing near the front in a rainbow-hued explosion of yarn.
He backed away from her with an unholy celerity as she approached. Lydia Hope-Wallace—with her sunset hair and her thousands of buttons and her ridiculous footwear—was altogether too much for his self-possession at two o’clock in the morning.
She was reaching for the drawers at the right-hand side of the desk when she paused, frozen, to stare at the map spread across the desk’s age-spotted surface.
Her lips parted. He waited for her to speak; it was, he’d learned, not entirely unusual for her to pause to gather herself before voicing her thoughts.
But the silence stretched, a moment and then another, and then she said his name, in a whisper that slid down his spine like a delicate fingertip.
“Arthur. You did it.”
It took him too damned long to recover from the effect of his name on her lips. God, the woman did his head in.
“I—what? I didn’t—”
She clapped a hand down on the map and looked up at him, her blue eyes lit from behind as though her emotions producedcandlelight. “You discovered where Davis has been living! How did you do it? How long have you known?”
“Lass, I didn’t discover anything.” But he found himself drawn back to the desk toward her, toward the map she was busily caressing.
Had he, somehow, ascertained Davis’s location and then simply forgotten he’d done so? Perhaps the sudden descent of blood from his brain southward had impaired his memory. Hell, perhaps he was hallucinating all of this, and Lydia Hope-Wallace was safe in her bed and not inches from him, her face aglow.
“Look,” she said, her mobile fingers no longer caressing the map so much as jabbing at it. “All of these dots—all of the ones you’ve done in blue ink, rather than black. There must be fifteen of them, all within a dozen miles of one another.”
He looked down. “These are naught but the places you wanted me to mark. The places that Davis referenced but did not name. The dry-goods store. The assembly where he learned to dance. The home of the widow known hereabouts for her, er, bountiful charms.”
“Oh yes—of course!” Her hands spread flat against the desk, and she leaned forward, her braided hair slipping over one shoulder. “Of course. You were so clever to change the color of the ink, or we might not have noticed the pattern. But it makes sense. If he was trying to keep his whereabouts a secret, it would not be the places he named that gave him away. It would be the places that he did not put a name to at all.”
He had not intended it as cleverness—it had been borne of necessity, to track the work she’d asked of him.
But she was right. He leaned toward her, bending his head into the light of the lamp to see the pattern she’d indicated.
Good God, she was canny. It seemed plain as day to him now.The line of blue dots marched up and down the River Tay, clustered above and beneath the nearby town of Haddon Grange. It was as if the letters had been encoded in a message only he could read—only he could have made sense of Davis’s offhand remarks. Only he had the stories and memories of nearly thirty years of brotherhood, pulled together and apart like magnets, attracted and repelled at the same time.
“Do you know this place?” Her fingers were long and tapered, longer than her stature properly justified. She slid the pad of her index finger along the River Tay, a few inches from Arthur’s own hand.
“Aye, I know it. ’Tis a town called Haddon Grange. There’s an estate nearby—a family we’ve known since childhood. A proper town—sometimes I go there for supplies when I don’t want to travel all the way to Perth.”
She was smiling now as she looked up at him, her expression incandescent. He had seen her smile before—could practically enumerate the instances. Several times at Georgiana and at Rupert in his presence. Once at him, when she’d caught him slipping a misbegotten cabbage dish to the degu.
