“Aye,” he said, releasing her fingers with some effort so that he might flip through the cards. “But still, it gives us some idea of where to look next. If we cannot make out his direction, perhaps the de Younges will know more.”
“Perhaps so.” She returned to the drawers, bending again, and from his vantage above her, he could see the line of her bodice, the sweet swell—
Ah. No. He could remove his gaze from her person, resume looking at the letters, and at least pretend not to be wild with lust over the redheaded Englishwoman who had come topropose marriage to his brother.
Somehow that protestation had grown rather distant over time. He tried to call it back.
“The rest of the drawers seem to be empty,” she said, “aside from some blank foolscap.”
He dropped the cards on the corner of the escritoire, having assured himself that there was nothing more to be gleaned from them. “Have the paper out.”
She did as he bade, though she directed a small frown in his direction. “You needn’t be so high-handed, you know. And I already looked through them—the sheets are blank.”
He made a small sound in his throat and then he picked up the paper and took it to the window, holding it at an angle in the dusky light.
“Oh,” Lydia said, and the approval in her voice was clear. “I would never have thought—do you see anything? Any impressions in the paper?”
Of course she would grasp what he was about. He already knew she was clever as hell, on top of being openhearted, sympathetic, alarmingly organized, and so brave and loyal it made his chest ache.
He was so flustered by her nearness that for a moment he thought he’d imagined what he saw on the foolscap, pressed deep by the impression of a pen.
But no. He’d not imagined it. He lifted the paper, tilted it against the light.
Lydia, it said.
And then—again and again, scratched out and restartedmessily across the page:I’m sorry. I don’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry.
The soft sounds of Lydia’s breathing, the clatter belowstairs, the hum of a maid in the hall—all the sounds around him went dim as he looked down at the words.
He’d… known?
Davis had known who she was? Davis had regretted his actions?
Davis had meant to tell her the truth.
Arthur passed the paper wordlessly to Lydia. He felt—ah, hell, he could not stop himself from looking at her face. He was torn between the desire to give her privacy and the desire to burn the bloody thing before she read it. He didn’t want Davis to hurt her again. He didn’t want Davis totalkto her, damn it. He wanted—he wanted—
He watched, frozen, as she read the words.
She blinked rapidly, her lovely eyelashes fluttering. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “That’s Davis’s hand. I recognize it. But how could he have known my name?”
“I don’t know,” he said roughly. If she started to cry, he was going to kill his brother.
But no. The thought struck him like a knife. He couldn’t kill Davis, because—what if Lydia still wanted him?
Arthur had assumed that the revelation of Davis’s misdeeds would have quashed Lydia’s affection for his brother. Surely she would not still love the man who had meant to use her for his own gain.
But this paper showed something different. This paper showed a man who regretted what he’d done. A man—perhaps—whom a woman in love might be able to forgive.
He found himself doing some violence to the remaining blank sheets of paper in the tightening grip of his fist.
Lydia’s gaze flickered to his hand, which now held a small snowball of crushed foolscap. “Goodness. Give me those. Have they anything you can discern?”
He had no idea. He hadn’t bloody checked. He’d been too busy watching Lydia’s face and trying to divine whether she seemed pleased or crushed or filled with longing.
But he could not make her out. She smoothed out the stack of papers and—did he imagine it? Did her fingers trace her name in his brother’s messy scrawl? He did not know.
The remaining papers held faint impressions of numbers and sketches that looked rather like Arthur’s own diagrams and designs. He had known—of course he had known that Davis too was handy with a drawing pencil. Only he had forgotten, somehow. It had been a long time since he’d seen that side of Davis.
