by Julia Quinn
Gareth nodded his agreement, then motioned for her to move aside as he pushed the cabinet back against the wall. “Did you find anything useful in the note?” he asked.
“The note? Oh, the note,” she said, feeling like the veriest fool. “Not yet. I can hardly read a thing with only the moonlight to see by. Do you think it would be safe to light a—”
She stopped. She had to. Gareth had clamped his hand unrelentingly over her mouth.
Eyes wide, she looked up at his face. He was holding one finger to his lips and motioning with his head toward the door.
And then Hyacinth heard it. Movement in the hall. “Your father?” she mouthed, once he had removed his hand. But he wasn’t looking at her.
Gareth stood, and on careful and silent feet moved to the door. He placed his ear against the wood, and then, barely a second later, stepped quickly back, jerking his head to the left.
Hyacinth was at his side in an instant, and before she knew what was happening, he’d pulled her through a door into what seemed to be a large closet filled with clothes. The air was black as pitch, and there was little room to move about. Hyacinth was backed up against what felt like a brocaded gown, and Gareth was backed up against her.
She wasn’t sure she knew how to breathe.
His lips found her ear, and she felt more than she heard, “Don’t say a word.”
The door connecting the office to the hall clicked open, and heavy footsteps thudded across the floor.
Hyacinth held her breath. Was it Gareth’s father?
“That’s odd,” she heard a male voice say. It sounded like it was coming from the direction of the window, and—
Oh, no. They’d left the drapes pulled back.
Hyacinth grabbed Gareth’s hand and squeezed hard, as if that might somehow impart this knowledge to him.
Whoever was in the room took a few steps, then stopped. Terrified at the prospect of being caught, Hyacinth reached carefully behind her with her hand, trying to gauge how far back the closet went. Her hand didn’t touch another wall, so she wiggled between two of the gowns and positioned herself behind them, giving Gareth’s hand a little tug before letting go so that he could do the same. Her feet were undoubtedly still visible, peeking out from under the hems of the dresses, but at least now, if someone opened the closet door, her face wouldn’t be right there at eye level.
Hyacinth heard a door opening and closing, but then the footsteps moved across the carpet again. The man in the room had obviously just peered into the baroness’s bedchamber, which Gareth had told her was connected to the small office.
Hyacinth gulped. If he’d taken the time to inspect the bedchamber, then the closet had to be next. She burrowed farther back, scooting herself until her shoulder connected with the wall. Gareth was right there next to her, and then he was pulling her against him, moving her to the corner before covering her body with his.
He was protecting her. Shielding her so that if the closet door was opened, his would be the only body seen.
Hyacinth heard the footsteps approach. The doorknob was loose and rattly, and it clattered when a hand landed on it.
She grabbed on to Gareth, clutching his coat along the side darts. He was close, scandalously close, with his back pressed up against her so tightly she could feel the entire length of him, from her knees to her shoulders.
And everything in between.
She forced herself to breathe evenly and quietly. There was something about her position, mixed with something about her circumstance—it was a combination of fear and awareness, and the hot proximity of his body. She felt strange, queer, almost as if she were somehow suspended in time, ready to lift off her toes and float away.
She had the strangest urge to press closer, to tip her hips forward and cradle him. She was in a closet—a stranger’s closet in the dead of night—and yet even as she froze with terror, she couldn’t help but feel something else…something more powerful than fright. It was excitement, a thrill, something heady and new that set her heart racing and her blood pounding, and…
And something else as well. Something she wasn’t quite ready to analyze or name.
Hyacinth caught her lip between her teeth.
The doorknob turned.
Her lips parted.
The door opened.
And then, amazingly, it closed again. Hyacinth felt herself sag against the back wall, felt Gareth sag against her. She wasn’t sure how it was they hadn’t been detected; probably Gareth had been better shielded by the clothing than she’d thought. Or maybe the light was too dim, or the man hadn’t thought to look down for feet peeking out from behind the gowns. Or maybe he’d had bad eyesight, or maybe…
Or maybe they were just damned lucky.
They waited in silence until it was clear that the man had left the baroness’s office, and then they waited for a good five minutes more, just to be sure. But finally, Gareth moved away from her, pushing through the clothes to the closet door. Hyacinth waited in back until she heard his whispered, “Let’s go.”
She followed him in silence, creeping through the house until they reached the window with the broken latch. Gareth leapt down ahead of her, then held out his hands so that she could balance against the wall and pull the window shut before hopping down to the ground.
“Follow me,” Gareth said, taking her hand and pulling her behind him as he ran through the streets of Mayfair. Hyacinth tripped along behind him, and with each step a sliver of the fear that had gripped her back in the closet was replaced by excitement.
Exhilaration.
By the time they reached Hay Hill, Hyacinth felt as if she was almost ready to bubble over with laughter, and finally, she had to dig in her heels and say, “Stop! I can’t breathe.”
Gareth stopped, but he turned with stern eyes. “I need to get you home,” he said.
“I know, I know, I—”
His eyes widened. “Are you laughing?”
“No! Yes. I mean”—she smiled helplessly—“I might.”
“You’re a madwoman.”
She nodded, still grinning like a fool. “I think so.”
He turned on her, hands on hips. “Have you no sense? We could have been caught back there. That was my father’s butler, and trust me, he has never been in possession of a sense of humor. If he had discovered us, my father would have thrown us in gaol, and your brother would have hauled us straight to a church.”
“I know,” Hyacinth said, trying to appear suitably solemn.
She failed.
Miserably.
Finally, she gave up and said, “But wasn’t it fun?”
For a moment she didn’t think he would respond. For a moment it seemed all he was capable of was a dull, stupefied stare. But then, she heard his voice, low and disbelieving. “Fun?”
She nodded. “A little bit, at least.” She pressed her lips together, working hard to turn them down at the corners. Anything to keep from bursting out with laughter.
“You’re mad,” he said, looking stern and shocked and—God help her—sweet, all at the same time. “You are stark, raving mad,” he said. “Everyone told me, but I didn’t quite believe—”
“Someone told you I was mad?” Hyacinth cut in.
“Eccentric.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips together. “Well, that’s true, I suppose.”
“Far too much work for any sane man to take on.”
“Is that what they say?” she asked, starting to feel slightly less than complimented.
“All that and more,” he confirmed.
Hyacinth thought about that for a moment, then just shrugged. “Well, they haven’t a lick of sense, any one of them.”
“Good God,” Gareth muttered. “You sound precisely like my grandmother.”
“So you’ve mentioned,” Hyacinth said. And then she couldn’t resist. She just had to ask. “But tell me,” she said, leaning in just a bit. “Truthfully. Weren’t you just a tiny bit excited? Once the fear of disco
very had worn off and you knew we would be undetected? Wasn’t it,” she asked, her words coming out on a sigh, “just a little bit wonderful?”
He looked down at her, and maybe it was the moonlight, or maybe just her wishful imagination, but she thought she saw something flash in his eyes. Something soft, something just a little bit indulgent.
“A little bit,” he said. “But just a little bit.”
Hyacinth smiled. “I knew you weren’t a stick.”
He looked down at her, with what had to be palpable irritation. No one had ever accused him of being stodgy before. “A stick?” he said disgustedly.
“In the mud.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“They why did you ask?”
“Because you, Miss Bridgerton…”
And so it went, the rest of the way home.
Chapter 10
The next morning. Hyacinth is still in an excellent mood. Unfortunately, her mother commented upon this so many times at breakfast that Hyacinth was finally forced to flee and barricade herself in her bedchamber.
Violet Bridgerton is an exceptionally canny woman, after all, and if anyone is going to guess that Hyacinth is falling in love, it would be her.
Probably before Hyacinth, even.
Hyacinth hummed to herself as she sat at the small desk in her bedchamber, tapping her fingers against the blotter. She had translated and retranslated the note they’d found the night before in the small green office, and she still wasn’t satisfied with her results, but even that could not dampen her spirits.
She’d been a little disappointed, of course, that they had not found the diamonds the night before, but the note in the curio cabinet seemed to indicate that the jewels might still be theirs for the taking. At the very least, no one else had reached any success with the trail of clues Isabella had left behind.
Hyacinth was never happier than when she had a task, a goal, some sort of quest. She loved the challenge of solving a puzzle, analyzing a clue. And Isabella Marinzoli St. Clair had turned what would surely have been a dull and ordinary season into the most exciting spring of Hyacinth’s life.
She looked down at the note, twisting her mouth to the side as she forced her mind back to the task at hand. Her translation was still only about seventy percent complete, in Hyacinth’s optimistic estimation, but she rather thought she’d managed enough of a translation to justify another attempt. The next clue—or the actual diamonds, if they were lucky—was almost certainly in the library.
“In a book, I imagine,” she murmured, gazing sightlessly out the window. She thought of the Bridgerton library, tucked away at her brother’s Grosvenor Square home. The room itself wasn’t terribly large, but the shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling.
And books filled the shelves. Every last inch of them.
“Maybe the St. Clairs aren’t much for reading,” she said to herself, turning her attention once again to Isabella’s note. Surely there had to be something in the cryptic words to indicate which book she had chosen as her hiding spot. Something scientific, she was fairly sure. Isabella had underlined part of her note, which led Hyacinth to think that perhaps she was referring to a book title, since it didn’t seem to make sense in context that she’d have been underlining for emphasis. And the part she’d underlined had mentioned water and “things that move,” which sounded a bit like physics, not that Hyacinth had ever studied it. But she’d four brothers who had attended university, and she’d overheard enough of their studies to have a vague knowledge of, if not the subject, at least what the subject meant.
Still, she wasn’t nearly as certain as she’d have liked about her translation, or what it meant. Maybe if she went to Gareth with what she’d translated thus far, he could read something into it that she didn’t see. After all, he was more familiar with the house and its contents than she was. He might know of an odd or interesting book, something unique or out of the ordinary.
Gareth.
She smiled to herself, a loopy, silly grin that she would have died before allowing anyone else to see.
Something had happened the night before. Something special.
Something important.
He liked her. He really liked her. They had laughed and chattered the entire way home. And when he had dropped her off at the servants’ entrance to Number Five, he had looked at her in that heavy-lidded, just a little bit intense way of his. He had smiled, too, one corner of his mouth lifting as if he had a secret.
She’d shivered. She’d actually forgotten how to speak. And she’d wondered if he might kiss her again, which of course he hadn’t done, but maybe…
Maybe soon.
She had no doubt that she still drove him a little bit mad. But she seemed to drive everyone a little bit mad, so she decided not to attach too much importance to that.
But he liked her. And he respected her intelligence as well. And if he was occasionally reluctant to demonstrate this as often as she would like…well, she had four brothers. She had long since learned that it took a fully formed miracle to get them to admit that a woman might be smarter than a man about anything other than fabrics, perfumed soaps, and tea.
She turned her head to look at the clock, which sat on the mantel over her small fireplace. It was already past noon. Gareth had promised that he would call on her this afternoon to see how she was faring with the note. That probably didn’t mean before two, but technically it was the afternoon, and—
Her ears perked up. Was that someone at the door? Her room was at the front of the house, so she could generally hear when someone was entering or exiting. Hyacinth got up and went to the window, peeking out from behind the curtains to see if she could see anyone on the front step.
Nothing.
She went to the door and opened it just enough to listen.
Nothing.
She stepped into the hall, her heart pounding with anticipation. Truly, there was no reason to be nervous, but she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Gareth, and the diamonds, and—
“Eh, Hyacinth, what’re you doing?”
She nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Sorry,” said her brother Gregory, not sounding sorry at all. He was standing behind her, or rather he had been, before she’d whirled around in surprise. He looked slightly disheveled, his reddish brown hair windblown and cut just a touch too long.
“Don’t do that,” she said, placing her hand over her heart, as if that might possibly calm it down.
He just crossed his arms and leaned one shoulder against the wall. “It’s what I do best,” he said with a grin.
“Not something I’d brag about,” Hyacinth returned.
He ignored the insult, instead brushing an imaginary piece of lint off the sleeve of his riding coat. “What has you skulking about?”
“I’m not skulking.”
“Of course you are. It’s what you do best.”
She scowled at him, even though she ought to have known better. Gregory was two and a half years her elder, and he lived to vex her. He always had. The two of them were a bit cut off from the rest of the family, in terms of age. Gregory was almost four years younger than Francesca, and a full ten from Colin, the next youngest son. As a result, he and Hyacinth had always been a bit on their own, a bit of a duo.
A bickering, poking, frog-in-the-bed sort of duo, but a duo nonetheless, and even though they had outgrown the worst of their pranks, neither seemed able to resist needling the other.
“I thought I heard someone come in,” Hyacinth said.
He smiled blandly. “It was me.”
“I realize that now.” She placed her hand on the door-knob and pulled. “If you will excuse me.”
“You’re in a snit today.”
“I’m not in a snit.”
“Of course you are. It’s—”
“Not what I do best.” Hyacinth ground out.
He grinned. “You’re definitely in a snit.”
“I’m—” She clamped
her teeth together. She was not going to descend to the behavior of a three-year-old. “I am going back into my room now. I have a book to read.”
But before she could make her escape, she heard him say, “I saw you with Gareth St. Clair the other night.”
Hyacinth froze. Surely he couldn’t have known…No one had seen them. She was sure of that.
“At Bridgerton House,” Gregory continued. “Off in the corner of the ballroom.”
Hyacinth let out a long, quiet breath before turning back around.
Gregory was looking at her with a casual, offhand smile, but Hyacinth could tell that there was something more to his expression, a certain shrewd look in his eye.
Most of his behavior to the contrary, her brother was not stupid. And he seemed to think it was his role in life to watch over his younger sister. Probably because he was the second youngest, and she was the only one with whom he could try to assume a superior role. The rest certainly would not have stood for it.
“I’m friends with his grandmother,” Hyacinth said, since it seemed nicely neutral and dull. “You know that.”
He shrugged. It was a gesture they shared, and sometimes Hyacinth felt she was looking in a mirror, which seemed mad, since he was a full foot taller than she was.
“You certainly looked to be in deep conversation about something,” he said.
“It was nothing in which you’d be interested.”
One of his brows arched annoyingly up. “I might surprise you.”
“You rarely do.”
“Are you setting your cap for him?”
“That’s none of your business,” she said tartly.
Gregory looked triumphant. “Then you are.”
Hyacinth lifted her chin, looking her brother squarely in the eye. “I don’t know,” she said, since despite their constant bickering, he probably knew her better than anyone else in the world. And he’d know it for certain if she were lying.