“Sounds dreadfully uncomfortable.” She tsked and pressed a kiss to Lucien’s cheek.
You have no idea, he thought, his mood fractious.
“I have matters well in hand,” he lied. “Mr. Richards has supplied a good deal of information on Lady Avalon.”
Morgan patted his sleeve before venturing to the sideboard. “I told you he was the best man for the job.”
Lucien had wanted to hire an investigator that his acquaintance, Lord Savage, had brought to his attention on his last trip to London. But Morgan had been rather insistent and claimed that she was feeling excluded. So he’d given in and contacted Richards on her recommendation, much to his current regret and frustration.
“I’m still waiting to hear more about the women she’s traveling with. But I’ll leave no stone unturned. Hell, I’ve even resorted to taking Pell’s advice on the matter.”
“Which reeks of desperation,” Pell said flippantly.
Morgan smirked as she brought her cousin a glass of Madeira. “That’s precisely what I was going to say.”
“I know. You’ve become predictable in your old age,” he said before he took a sip.
“Oh, cousin. Your humor is the reason why you should never trust a drink I give you. I know far too much about poisons.” A flash of alarm crossed Pell’s face, just before he spit the Madeira back into the glass and she chuckled. “Don’t keep me in suspense, brother. Tell me, what was our cousin’s advice? Was it as clever as your decision to open the gates?”
“Not now,” Lucien growled.
He didn’t need a reminder that it had been his duty to protect the book, to keep it from falling into the wrong hands, and that he had failed.
Throughout the ages, there had been men who’d wanted to claim the recipes for themselves. Power-hungry men driven to crush their enemies and elevate their own place in history. Decades had gone by without a single attempt. One would think that, in the age of reason, learned men would no longer believe in myths and legends. But his grandfather had warned him that history would always repeat itself. And he’d been right.
“What?” she asked, all innocence. “All I’m saying is that we should consider ourselves fortunate that the second attempt to steal the book in our lifetimes didn’t end up like the first. Then again, we have no idea what your Lady Avalon might have done if her efforts had been thwarted at all.”
“She isn’t a cold blooded criminal.”
“Are you sure, brother?”
Restless, he paced between the door and open window. He needed an occupation. If he were at Caliburn Keep he could go into the old buttery and try a new experiment. Not that it would matter without the book, he reminded himself.
But he was having difficulty imagining Meg guilty of villainous compulsions. Or perhaps, the part of him that was inexorably drawn to her had simply murdered the part of him that was capable of rational thought.
Scrubbing his chin, he stared through the window, unseeing.
There had been moments when he’d felt so close to deciphering the mechanics of her mind that he could almost anticipate her next words just from a look. Then there were also moments that left him with more questions than answers. He was thinking, again, of the satchel, of the choice he’d made.
Pell stalked across the room to pour a fresh drink. “Wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t sure about her. Women are fickle creatures, the whole lot of them.”
“Not this one,” Lucien said, his mind made up about Meg. “She knows precisely what she wants and will stay her course. It is up to me to anticipate her next move and be there to intercept her.”
A haughty laugh rang from Morgan’s lips. “You make it seem as though you’re hunting her instead of the book.”
Could he have explored other avenues from the start? Perhaps. But he had made a purposeful decision to stay close to her and it was in his nature to continue on one course until every possibility was examined in depth. He would see this through, no matter how long it took.
“If a wolf steals a rabbit from your trap,” he said, “then a man hunts the wolf to find its den, and there, he’ll find the other wolves.”
“But will he get the rabbit back?”
That was the question of the hour. And he hated to admit it, but he did not know the answer.
His sister came up beside him, her reflection smiling in the window glass. “Why don’t you introduce me? Perhaps I can learn more about her—woman to woman—as you continue your hunt.”
* * *
Meg and the aunts were shown to a suite of rooms that were bright and airy with a view of the vivid rhododendrons blooming in the garden below. It was so lovely here that it was impossible to imagine that anyone could have a single trouble in the world. But Meg had plenty.
Lucien had given her his trust, and in return, she was still deceiving him about who she really was.
She was a horrible, horrible person!
Mentally, she gave that tail-twirling devil on her shoulder a firm talking to. But in midcastigation, a knock fell on their door.
It was a porter, bearing a handwritten invitation to the ladies from the Duke of Merleton, wanting their immediate response.
Maeve and Myrtle greedily skimmed the missive then said in unison, “We’d be delighted to accept.”
The porter bowed and left. When the door closed, the aunts began chirruping excitedly.
“Already an invitation to dinner, and he wishes for us to meet his sister,” Maeve said with a grin as she began pulling out the pins in her hair. Crossing the tiled parlor, she stepped through the open door of her bedchamber and onto a millefleur carpet that muffled her footfalls.
Myrtle practically skipped in the same direction. “And he hasn’t been away from us for more than an hour at most. It seems that he cannot bear to be parted from a certain someone, hmm?”
“It certainly does,” Maeve agreed, appearing in the doorway as she ran a brush through the thick strands of her gray hair. “If you’ll recall, I had a feeling about this from the very beginning.”
“No, indeed, sister. I believe that I had the feeling.”
“And I believe,” Meg interjected on a sudden rise of throat-tightening nervousness, “that neither of you can have any sort of feeling at all, for two reasons. The first being that this is only a holiday flirtation, nothing more,” she said and paid no attention to the fact that her words lacked conviction. “The second and most important is that the duke still believes I’m Lady Avalon. Remember her—the woman who stole his family’s book?”
Myrtle shrugged. “Oh, higgledy-piggledy. None of that makes a bit of difference when romance is in the air.”
“What’s in a name? as Shakespeare wrote. The important part is that Merleton has come to know you, my dear,” Myrtle said.
Meg sighed and stared sightlessly into her own wardrobe. They might not think it mattered, but she knew better.
He’d been different with her, more watchful ever since the day the satchel spilled. She supposed she couldn’t blame him after the way she’d frantically tried to keep him from seeing all the letters from Wiltshire, from her brother, Ellie and Aunt Sylvia. Every one of them addressed to Margaret Stredwick.
But Meg couldn’t risk him finding out the truth that way. Not in that moment. Not when everything seemed so promising. She couldn’t let this feeling end. And she feared it would the moment he knew who she really was—not an exciting adventuress and agent provocateur—just a dried-up debutante, one step away from the shelf.