Phoebe’s stomach plummeted to her feet.
CHAPTER 5
“Did your staff find anything?” Phoebe demanded as soon as she stormed into the dining room.
“Phoebe!” her father hissed. He was seated at the Duke’s right hand, looking as though he’d spent twice as long getting dressed for dinner as Phoebe had. It was nice to see such paternal concern in a man with a missing daughter.
The Duke had been taking a sip of wine as she entered. He put down the glass with exaggerated patience, then gestured for Phoebe to take the seat across from her father. Phoebe gritted her teeth but followed the implied order, too desperate for information about Hannah to do otherwise.
It was only when she was in her seat that the Duke answered her question.
“One of the footmen found carriage tracks leading away from the house,” he said without inflection. “The snow is still falling,so it’s impossible to know where they are going. The house has been searched, and Miss Hannah is not in residence. But it seems that she had a… collaborator in this escape.”
In another circumstance, Phoebe would have been impressed by her sister. How had Hannah managed acollaboratorwhen their father had been secretive and clever about his schemes? Phoebe had thought that secrecy to be excessive, but apparently, it wasn’tenough.
In reality, however, she was too worried to feel anything else.
She fingered the note in her pocket as her father leapt to explain that Hannah must have headed out with a respectable widow or a vicar’s wife or someone equally unobjectionable—though how on earth her father was supposed to know any such thing, Phoebe had no idea. Lord Turner had always believed that he could simply insist something was true until it became so. Phoebe did not think he would find this strategy particularly useful when it came to the Duke of Redcliff.
Call it a hunch.
She debated showing the two men sitting across from her the note in her pocket as her father’s frantic explanation petered out in the face of the Duke’s unflinching regard.
It wasastonishinglyawkward, but Phoebe was too busy fretting about her sister to even enjoy it properly.
On the reverse, she was too distracted to suffer from the properly excruciating silence that hung over the table for the remainder of the meal. She picked at the food, which was probably delicious, her hand darting to her pocket every few minutes, almost as though she feared that if she stopped reaching for it, her one clue to her sister’s whereabouts would disappear, scant though it was.
If either of the gentlemen noticed that she was suspiciously quiet as they ate, neither commented upon it.
After dinner, they all, by unspoken agreement that nobody was in the mood for parlor games or port, retreated to their bedrooms, though it was absurdly early to do so, even for the country.
While Phoebe was grateful that she no longer had any eyes watching her, she found that she still could not settle, not even with the gentle drifting of snow outside her window. The riotous wind from earlier had diminished, but Phoebe still found herself desperately hoping that Hannah was somewhere safe and warm.
By midnight, Phoebe couldn’t take it any longer. The room she’d been given was pleasant enough, if as sparsely decorated as the remainder of the house, but she’d run out of things to look at ages prior.
She wrapped herself in her dressing gown—even with the fires burning, as the Duke had said, all of these old houses got drafty at a certain point of the year and remained that way until springfinally broke. She crept her way down the hallway, searching for something to distract her.
Anything.
The warm glow of a fire burning, as yet unbanked, drew her to the library. The promise of a novel was too great for her to pause and considerwhythis room was still so cheerfully lit, so she was startled when she heard a voice.
“Impropriety must run in the family.”
Phoebe’s hand flew to her throat, something that irritated her immensely. She hated seeming like the fragile miss from a Gothic novel, sticking her nose into ghostly things, too foolish to get out of her own way. She drew her hand down, scrunching it into the folds of her dressing gown, and forced herself to adopt an unbothered mien.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked lightly.
“Impropriety,” the Duke repeated, a lilt in his voice that might have been humor in a less serious man. The tumbler of amber liquid in his hand suggested that this ease was bought and bottled, not natural. Phoebe suspected that this wasn’t his first drink of liquor, but he was far from drunk.
No, he just looked… a little lighter. Looser.
“I’m just seeking a book,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He hummed. “Your sister runs off, and you’re sneaking around my house in the dead of night.” He gestured with the glass. “Not the mostpreciselycorrect behavior, is it?”
Phoebe pressed her lips into a tight line. She would not be charmed by this less uptight version of him. He was, after all, trying to insult her. He didn’t know that she wasn’t the kind of person who was flattered by being called improper.
“You should get out more,” she said pertly, even though he was the last man with whom she ought to be engaging in banter. “Get a good look at what ‘improper’ really is.”
