The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)(3)
Save that for later, too.
“I’m a rodent. All rodents squeal when poked.” She punched the sofa once again. She was going to bruise her knuckles if she kept that up. “Are you planning to poke me, too?”
“No.” Stray thoughts didn’t count, thank God; if they did, all men would burn in hell forever.
“Do you always skulk behind curtains, hoping to overhear intimate conversations?”
Robert felt the tips of his ears burn. “Do you always leap behind sofas when you hear your fiancé coming?”
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “Didn’t you hear? I’m like a book that has been mislaid. One day, one of his servants will find me covered in dust in the middle of spring-cleaning. ‘Ah,’ the butler will say. ‘That’s where Miss Wilhelmina has ended up. I had forgotten all about her.’”
Wilhelmina Pursling? What a dreadful appellation.
She took a deep breath. “Please don’t tell anyone. Not about any of this.” She shut her eyes and pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Please just go away, whoever you are.”
He brushed the curtains to one side and made his way around the sofa. From a few feet away, he couldn’t even see her. He could only imagine her curled on the floor, furious to the point of tears.
“Minnie,” he said. It wasn’t polite to call her by so intimate a name. And yet he wanted to hear it on his tongue.
She didn’t respond.
“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” he said. “If I don’t see you downstairs by then, I’ll come up for you.”
For a few moments, there was no answer. Then: “The beautiful thing about marriage is the right it gives me to monogamy. One man intent on dictating my whereabouts is enough, wouldn’t you think?”
He stared at the sofa in confusion before he realized that she thought he’d been threatening to drag her out.
Robert was good at many things. Communicating with women was not one of them.
“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “It’s just…” He walked back to the sofa and peered over the leather top. “If a woman I cared about was hiding behind a sofa, I would hope that someone would take the time to make sure she was well.”
There was a long pause. Then fabric rustled and she looked up at him. Her hair had begun to slip out of that severe bun; it hung around her face, softening her features, highlighting the pale whiteness of her scar. Not pretty, but…interesting. And he could have listened to her talk all night.
She stared at him in puzzlement. “Oh,” she said flatly. “You’re attempting to be kind.” She sounded as if the possibility had never occurred to her before. She let out a sigh, and gave him a shake of her head. “But your kindness is misplaced. You see, that—” she pointed toward the doorway where her near-fiancé had disappeared “—that is the best possible outcome I can hope for. I have wanted just such a thing for years. As soon as I can stomach the thought, I’ll be marrying him.”
There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice. She stood. With a practiced hand, she smoothed her hair back under the pins and straightened her skirts until she was restored to complete propriety.
Only then did she stoop, patting under the sofa to find where she’d tossed the knight. She examined the chessboard, cocked her head, and then very, very carefully, set the piece back into place.
While he was standing there, watching her, trying to make sense of her words, she walked out the door.
MINNIE DESCENDED THE STAIRS that led from the library into the darkened courtyard just outside the Great Hall, her pulse still beating heavily. For a moment, she’d thought he was going to start interrogating her. But no, she’d escaped without any questions asked. Everything was precisely as it always was: quiet and stupefyingly dull. Just as she needed it. Nothing to fear, here.
The faint strains of the concerto, poorly rendered by the indifferent skills of the local string quartet, were scarcely audible in the courtyard. Darkness painted the open yard in a palette of gray. Not that there would have been so many colors to see in daylight, either: just the blue-gray slate making up the courtyard and the aging plaster of the timber-framed walls. A few persistent weeds had sprung up in the cracks between the paving stones, but they’d withered to sepia wisps. They had scarcely any color in the harsh navy of the night. A few dark figures stood by the hall door, punch glasses in hand. Everything was muted out here—sight, sound, and all of Minnie’s roiling emotions.
The musicale had drawn an astonishing number of people. Enough that the main room was mobbed, all the seats taken and still more people skirting the edges. Odd that the weak strains of badly played Beethoven would draw so many, but the crowd had come out in force. One look at that throng and Minnie had retreated, her stomach clenching in tight knots. She couldn’t go into that room.
Maybe she could feign illness.
In truth, she wouldn’t even have to pretend.
But—
A door opened behind her. “Miss Pursling. There you are.”
Minnie jumped at the voice and swiftly turned around.
Leicester’s Guildhall was an ancient building—one of the few timberwork structures from medieval times that hadn’t perished in one fire or another. Over the centuries, it had acquired a hodgepodge collection of uses. It was a gathering hall for events like this, a hearing room for the mayor and his aldermen, storage for the town’s few ceremonial items. They’d even converted one of the rooms into holding cells for prisoners; one side of the courtyard was brick rather than plaster, and made a home for the chief constable.