“Thank you for coming and I am sorry about yesterday.” He was and he wasn’t, because despite its brevity, he had thoroughly enjoyed the feel of her in his arms, and her outraged blush afterward had been quite delightful.
Being a gentleman, he acted chagrined at her subsequent, outraged chastisement and didn’t mention that during the few moments before she remembered to be outraged by his impertinence, she had melted against him and kissed him right back.
“In my defense, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” He winced recalling how she had been teased mercilessly afterward, especially by Vee who had taken great pleasure in telling everyone she was certain she had miraculously seen Diana swoon. “Let’s face it, it is the sort of thing I would do with little provocation and I figured a lackluster peck on the cheek wouldn’t have stopped Olivia in the long run.”
She waved that away with a tight frown, taking in the musty study and the shelves of ledgers and neat wooden file boxes lined beneath them rather than talk about the kiss a moment longer. Perhaps she hadn’t dissected it with the same focus as he had afterward? Or even thought about it at all. There was every chance their quick, five-second smacker hadn’t made her body sizzle in quite the same way as his had. A depressing thought but undeniably for the best now that his world was about to implode.
“Is this everything?”
“I scoured the house and the attic after he died and found no more of the duke’s papers. He was quite meticulous.” Giles tapped one of the ledgers as he forced his mind to focus on the task at hand. “There is a separate book for each year, and they are all in chronological order. Every bill, receipt, and contract detailed in each of these ledgers is also in date order in its corresponding box.”
“And his private correspondence?”
Giles shook his head. “There isn’t any.”
“Not even in his bedchamber?”
“There were no papers in either the one here or in Shropshire—unless they are sequestered and stitched inside his mattresses. I’ll confess my searches weren’t that thorough, but then he wasn’t a sentimental man. He never even kept the letters and pictures I sent him as a child, so I suppose once he had read one, he tossed it away.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd that he kept nothing personal?”
Giles tried not to stare as she undid her cloak and tossed it onto one of the old leather wingbacks. Tried not to notice how the fine wool of her green dress draped her pert figure to perfection,or how the shade of it brought out the emerald in her clever, feline eyes. “Of course I think it odd. It is beyond suspicious but he was a man with a deep, dark secret, so I suppose such caution was par for the course. Did your forger father keep any private correspondence?”
She smiled a little as she shrugged, drawing his gaze to her lips briefly and reminding his of their potency. “A fair point, but important clues come in many guises and we should start with his most personal effects first.” She pointed upward. “Which way is his bedchamber?”
“Believe me, there is nothing to find there. That room is as spartan as a monk’s and as soulless as… well… my unsentimental sire.”
“I shall be the judge of that. In my experience, even when tracks have been covered thoroughly, something gets left behind.”
“He buried his hornet’s nest under thirty-one years of compacted dirt, Diana. There is nothing there.”
“Vesuvius buried Pompeii nearly two thousand years ago under tons of molten lava, but with some shovels and some dedicated,obedientdiggers who listened to instructions from their wise leader, humankind still found it. As you have put me in charge—”
“Did I?”
She pretended he hadn’t spoken. “We shall do things my way.”
Giles led her upstairs to the room he had last entered on the day they removed the duke’s body. Despite the natural frigid chill in the room after months of no fire in the grate, there was another underlying it. The remnants of the essence of the man and his cold heart.
Aside from the stripped bed, everything had been left as it had been on that day. His old, dented pocket watch lay on the nightstand beside a solitary candlestick. His slippers side by side on the floor. His hairbrushes, comb, and razor were lined ruler-straight on the dressing table. All personal things yet impersonal at the same time. To test that theory, Giles picked up the watch. Turned it over in his hands and still felt no sentimentality toward the object even though he had seen it a thousand times attached to the duke’s waistcoat.
“That looks old.”
“It is. He owned it for as long as I remember.” Giles traced one of the dents in the battered silver case with the pad of his finger. He clicked it open, shook his head at the scratched glass and rust-spotted face. “It is as ugly as it is tatty, but it worked, so it never would have crossed his mind to replace it.” He snapped it shut, the familiar sound reminding him that his allotted time with his sire was up. An intrinsic part of the duke yet he still felt no connection to it or the man who had owned it at all. Because that frustrated him, he discarded it. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“I have no idea until we find it.”
“Or not, as is most likely going to be the case. I’ve already been through this room with a fine-tooth comb.”
“Well done you—but now we are both going to do it properly.”
Diana left him to search through the nightstand while she rummaged through the dressing table. When all they had found were the everyday items one would expect, like matches or hair pomade, they both moved to the adjoining dressing table. That proved to be just as fruitless.
Being suspicious by nature, Diana insisted they move thefurniture, remove drawers, and check beneath and behind things. Still there was nothing beyond the dust and fluff the maids had neglected to find, no doubt because it was all too much trouble for a master who did not appreciate them.
“I did tell you there was nothing here.”
She skewered him with her glare. “If you are going to start telling me you told me so again, Giles Sinclair, then you can solve your own mystery and I shall go. I did have other plans for today. Urgent newspaper work I have postponed to help you.”
