Page 48 of The Scandalous Spinster

Selene looked at her over the rim of her teacup. “If you wore bright blue or emerald green instead of that terrible muddy gray, and you allowed me to soften your hair, you could have them vying for your attention.”

“That sounds dreadful.” Clara wrinkled her nose. “No, thank you.” She might not enjoy being overlooked and mocked, but she did not think she would enjoy being the center of attention either. Especially not here, where she had covert business to see to.

Not to mention, she might even now be sharing a pot of tea with her blackmailer.

Was it Lord Howell? Lord Whitlow? Lady Falstaff?

There were dozens of guests. And it all seemed too implausible. More likely her blackmailer had hired someone to deliver the note: a footman, a lady’s maid, the baker’s son from the village delivering sticky buns shaped like nymphs for teatime. As always, the list of possibilities was endless.

She suddenly felt a little queasy and very carefully set down her forkful of potatoes.

*

Across the table, Bram frowned.

Clara was up to something.

She was uneasy, but not in the way social events usually made her uneasy. He knew the difference at a glance. She looked nervous. Guilty.

He hoped like hell it had nothing to do with the previous night’s activities. Never in a million years would he have thought he would be trapped in a grotto with Lady Clara Prescott. That she would let him touch that soft, delicate skin. That her muffled whimpers would be for him alone.

Best not think on it. Growing hard at the breakfast table was not done on any level of society. And it wasn’t the perfumed hothouse flowers descended from earls and dukes, nor the sultry Selene, who affected him this way. It was the quiet, moon-haired spinster with a devil’s own heart.

Her secret mischief only made her all the harder to resist.

The discomfort as she sipped her tea from a cup painted with orchids made him want to smash the table into tiny pieces. Was she scared? Nervous of him? The thought made his chest feel like it might collapse, the same dreadful pressure that being indoors for too long caused him. He needed the open sky, the relentless battering of the wind. Clara.

The more properly she dressed, the primmer her expression, the more he wanted to undo her. To make her forget every rule of decorum the way she had in his arms last night, however briefly. She was bright as the full moon in the night sky, and how no one else seemed to notice was beyond him.

He should probably apologize.

But he wasn’t the least bit sorry. In fact, it had only made him hungrier for her. Ravenous.

But social norms dictated it.

Mulishly, he did not want to apologize for giving her pleasure, for watching her take it wholeheartedly.

More importantly, he wanted to know why she kept glancing around, then fiddling with a piece of paper hiding under the cuff of her sleeve.

Chapter Seventeen

They had a key that unlocked a door to a grotto of disrepute, and other keys with nothing to unlock.

It was maddening.

Nothing fit any lock in the dining room. Nor the library. Nor the dower house. It could literally be anywhere else. Was it for a door, a cabinet, a box? A garden shed? The marquis’s bedroom?

Perhaps Clara was not cut out to investigate misdeeds and bring bad men to justice, after all.

She hurried up the main stairs. The other guests had dispersed to play billiards and walk through the village, as the sun was warm today, coaxing more tulips and bluebells out of the ground. Clara wondered if anyone would think to buy Granny Mab naughty-looking pastries.

After last night, those pastries suddenly made a lot more sense.

Which meant the grotto was hardly a secret. So why, then, had Sybil left a key?

“I know you weren’t disobeying me and wandering off alone,” Bram said suddenly from behind her, lethally calm.

She yelped, loudly enough to put her goose army to shame. He was on the landing behind her, arms crossed and watching her with a single raised eyebrow. She would have raised one right back if she knew how to. “Must you lurk?” she asked.