Page 32 of The Scandalous Spinster

“Certainly not,” she replied primly. “I do not giggle.”

He stepped closer, his words brushing the hair at her temple. “You don’t fool me, Lady Clara,” he said softly, with a dark kind of knowing. “You never did.”

She might have forgotten how to breathe. Breathing was not important. What was important was the nearness of him, the warmth of his body, the desperate heat climbing up her thighs. The fact that she might actually die if she did not get closer still. How did he kiss a woman? Softly? Leisurely? Forcefully?

She’d written a dozen kisses. But she’d never written his.

She licked her lower lip. She couldn’t help it.

“I told you not to do that,” he warned.

“Do what?”

He huffed a small chuckle, but there was nothing light or amused about it. It was rough, tempting. “And I told you already that you don’t fool me.”

And wasn’t that amazing?

Dangerous, definitely. But amazing too.

She swayed a little closer, mesmerized. Then she snapped back to her regular posture.

“What will it take, I wonder?” he asked. “For you to let go.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” She cleared her throat. “We have work to do.”

“Of course, Lady Clara.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, felt needled without knowing exactly why. Something about the way that he used her title. “Look for anything untoward,” she said with what was alarmingly close to a flounce.

She inspected the cottage as though she was a stalk of dry winter wheat and Bram was fire, circling her warily, always alert to exactly where he was in relation to her. She decided it meant she would have made a marvelous spy. Aware, conscientious. A dismal flirt, but a marvelous spy.

The cottage held a kitchen table by the smoke-darkened stone hearth, two chairs, a shelf for plates and cups and bowls. A narrow bed with a moth-eaten blanket and a wooden chest at the foot.

And little black doves everywhere.

Clearly, Sybil had not felt safe. Just as clearly, she had only been able to leave maddening clues.

Clara peered under the mattress and in the wooden chest. Bram crouched down to feel up the flue of the hearth for anything hidden there. They found spiders and pencils and doilies. No obvious pleas for help, no letters accusing the marquis of nefarious deeds. No convenient map to Sybil’s location. Not even a single lock that fit the key around Clara’s neck.

She let out a disgruntled sigh. “Priya would have found something more by now.”

“Priya is a witch.”

“I’m going to tell her you said that.”

“She already knows she’s a witch. I’ve told her.”

“She probably ought to have come herself. We don’t even know what we are looking for.”

“We’ll find something.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asked. Sybil’s wellbeing was in their hands. As was Heloise’s.

“The marquis is up to his eyeballs in misdeeds—there’s bound to be something useful.”

“Perhaps.”

The small cottage smelled like wood smoke and dust. Sunlight streamed through the window, a wash of pale gold. There was a vase of dried flowers on the sill, a basket of mending beneath it. “I like it better here than at the Hall—is that very odd of me?” she asked.