Abigail no longer wore her rosemary hedgehog scent. Jane must have put a stop to that. The new fragrance was soft, gardenia with a citrusy top note and a cinnamon finish. Complicated, warm, feminine…perfect for Abigail Abbott.
“Quinn said he admires me?”
“The admiration was in his voice, in his gaze as he peered around at shelves and shelves of books, some in German, some in French, many in Latin. He said you are a mechanical genius. I was flattered to be allowed into the sanctum of your adolescence and found two books on poisons that I would like to borrow.”
“You may have them, of course. Quinn is a financial genius, by the way. He reads the paper, stares off into space, moves money around, and the money has babies and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I am more pragmatic, investing in the inventions that I know will be of use.”
Abigail withdrew her hand. “You made a portable cannon that could swivel three hundred and sixty degrees. Walden showed me the plans.”
Just what a lapsed Quaker lady did not need to see. “I’ve also patented firing mechanisms, safety triggers, bullet molds, rifling processes, bomb designs, cranes, lifts, folding stairways…some of it’s useless, some of it’s lucrative. Might we get back to the letters?”
“You are quite enterprising. Walden was warning me.”
Enterprising was good, wasn’t it? “Subtlety is not Quinn’s style. His warnings are blunt, sincere, and unmistakable. What would he be warning you about?”
“Not to trifle with you, not to try to make a pretend engagement into something it cannot be.”
God spare me from meddling siblings. “What if I’d like to be trifled with? What if you’d like a bit of trifling in return? We are adults, Abigail, and I’m a first-rate trifler. One of the best in the realm. I like trifling, and because one doesn’t need two good knees to go about it, I’ve made something of a study of trifling in all its glorious permutations.”
She patted his bad knee, which was not well advised when the subject under discussion was trifling.
“You have such a keen wit. I like that about you.”
He kissed her cheek. “I am not jesting, and Quinn was not threatening. He was meddling. He thinks he’s being subtle, but he’s about as subtle as Wodin introducing himself to a cured ham. So I read a lot of books. What sort of woman is impressed with that?”
This time, her pat was more of a stroke along his thigh. “I am. I love books. I love that you used your disability as inspiration for the nurturing of your intellect.”
Love. Abigail Abbott had used the word love, and in connection with Stephen’s accursed knee. Perhaps the infernal letters of doom had best stay hidden for a good long while.
“You developed your inquiry business on the strength of a young woman’s rotten experience with romance. I don’t like that, but I admire it.”
Wodin rose and put his chin on her knee again.
“Does he want to go out?”
The bloody dog wants to steal you away from me. “He can go out whenever he pleases. I fashioned a swinging door off the pantry, like a hinged portcullis. Constance’s cats and Wodin are free to visit the garden as they need to. Please tell me the rest of what you know about the letters, Abigail, or I will succumb to the lure of my impure thoughts.”
Her next stroke along his thigh—a caress, really—began an inch higher. “Impure thoughts?”
His thoughts regarding Abigail were both pure and impure. She’d lost a child, for God’s sake, grieved in solitude, and climbed from a pit of sorrow to fashion a life on her own terms. She solved other people’s delicate problems with a combination of cunning, tenacity, and discretion.
That she was as physically attractive as she was formidable created a tangle of esteem, desire, curiosity, and some vague yearning Stephen could not name in any language.
“Lustful thoughts,” he said, petting her knee. “Naughty, delicious, naked, wild, lascivious, hot, erotic…Trifle with me, Abigail, please.”
He was growing aroused, under his brother’s roof, the parlor door open, and the damned dog giving him censorious looks.
“I want to be alone with you,” he muttered, stealing another kiss. “I miss you. I dream of you, and any minute, my darling sister-in-law will march in here, a pair of smirking blond footmen pushing the tea cart behind her. I will die a thousand deaths of frustrated longing while swilling scandal broth and getting biscuit crumbs on my cravat.”
Abigail gave his knee the most luscious, maddening squeeze, and then sat back. “Now is not the time or the place for your courting nonsense, my lord. We face a conundrum.”
Where to swive without being interrupted was always a puzzle. “We do?”
“If I don’t have those letters and Stapleton doesn’t have them, who does? How did that person obtain them, and what will he do with them? Why steal the letters in the first place when they are merely sentimental effusions, years old, and they don’t even mention me by name?”
When Stephen fell, he usually experienced a moment of knowing he was toppling before the hard reality of the cobblestones or floor connected with his person. That instant of rage (to be sent sprawling again), dread (cobblestones hurt, carpeted floors weren’t much better), and resignation lasted a small eternity.
So too, when Abigail sat back, all polite composure and logical pronouncements, did a small eternity pass.
Stephen’s body grasped that yet another occasion of arousal was about to end in disappointment, even as his mind acknowledged that the situation with the letters was troubling.
Between those reactions lay the truth in his heart: He desired Abigail Abbott. She was formidable and luscious. Her touch was lovely and bold, she wasn’t put off by honest arousal, and she had reposed her darkest secret into Stephen’s keeping.
What smacked him as abruptly as landing on hard cobbles was the reality that he would die for this woman. She had heard his worst confessions, taken them quite in stride, and even seen his decisions in a compassionate light.
He would lay down his life to keep her safe, and, more than that, he would kill for her too.
“Stapleton is tithing to the Temple of Venus in the person of Ophelia Marchant,” Ned Wentworth said. “He plays his games in the Lords, and he haggles with the trades, but I couldn’t find any evidence that he is being blackmailed.”
As best Abigail could tell, Ned Wentworth wasn’t a Wentworth by birth, but he had in common with the family a practical approach to life’s seamier challenges. He was dark-haired, slim, and of an age to be recently down from university. His attire was natty to the point of dandyism, while his gaze held the shrewdness of a young man who’d matriculated in a hard school.
“Gaming debts?” Lord Stephen asked.
“He’s too busy fleecing John Bull in the Lords to sit about his clubs dicing,” Ned replied.
Various Wentworths were lounging about the library, Their Graces on the sofa, Duncan and Matilda on a love seat. Stephen had the reading chair by the fire, his foot on a hassock, while Ned had the seat behind the desk and Abigail the second reading chair.
“What about recent disruptions of routine?” Abigail asked. “Is his mistress of long-standing? Has Stapleton changed where he attends divine services? Does he no longer go to the theater, or has he discharged any staff?”