“Yes, you are standing in it, Blaise.” Alistair gestured wildly to the study.
Blaise gave him a long look. “You are suspiciously eager to place me under Lady Hentley’s supervision.”
“I am eager for the party not to humiliate us, since our nephew will be doing that.” Alistair rolled his eyes.
Blaise smiled, but his mind had shifted to Iris’s honey-colored hair and amber eyes. He knew she could handle the affairs well for the party, but to have them at Knoxford House so close to his red room…
Alistair collected his gloves from the edge of a chair as Blaise moved the estimates into a neat stack, though neatness did not improve his thoughts.
“I shall take my leave, cousin; I would sooner face the study again.” He gave the room one last disgusted look. “Good day, Vale.”
“Good day, Skelton.”
When the door closed, the study seemed to take a breath.
Blaise remained still for a moment, listening to Alistair’s receding footsteps through Hentley House. Domestic sounds gathered in the wake of his departure. The room held the aftertaste of conversation, of mockery, and of questions no one had asked plainly.
He returned to the desk and stood over the papers.
Marcus will come.
Blaise sat, reached for a blank sheet, then stopped.
What would he write that he had not already written?
Marcus,
Your absence grows tiresome.
“No.” Blaise shredded the letter and reached for another.
Marcus,
I ask you again, as your uncle and guardian?—
Blaise let out a low breath and set the page aside. There were previous notes somewhere on the desk, drafts perhaps, along with the list of ladies’ names Iris had made for him to revise. He opened the top drawer and began to search.
The study desk resisted organization. Papers had been stacked unorderly. Receipts, household notes, a folded invitation, two sticks of sealing wax, a penknife with a nick in its handle. He shifted one pile, then another, increasingly aware that he was rummaging in a desk that was not entirely his, in a house that was not entirely his, and for a purpose that seemed less clear by the minute.
“Where the devil?—”
His fingers closed on a letter tucked beneath a packet of older correspondence.
The paper was not among his documents. He knew it before he pulled it. His name appeared on the outside in a hand he recognized.
Blaise.
He sat back.
For a moment, he did nothing. That was the last defense of a man who knew he was about to cross a line and wished posterityto record some hesitation. Then he came to and continued reading.
The first words struck with the intimacy of a voice at his ear.
He read them aloud before he could stop himself. “Blaise, I sit in the study you claimed as your own...”
Blaise continued reading it silently.
Line by line, Iris abandoned the safety of ordinary correspondence. Her words were not innocent nor composed. He should have stopped reading this confession, but he simply could not and did not want to.
