‘Nor did I.’
The housebreaker chuckled. A low, husky growl of a laugh, distinctively male, it sent shivers over Deborah’s skin. He had a striking face, strong-featured, with heavy brows, deep grooves running down the side of his mouth, and eyes which looked as if they had witnessed too much. A fierce face with a discernible undercurrent of danger. Yet those eyes suggested compassion and even more improbably, given the circumstances, integrity. A memorable face, indeed, and an extremely attractive one. She met his gaze and for a few seconds the air seemed to still between them. A connection, a frisson, something she could not name, sparked.
‘I’m sorry to have alarmed you,’ he said finally, ‘but if you must blame anyone for my presence here you must blame your husband.’
Deborah began to wonder if perhaps she was dreaming. ‘But Jeremy—my husband—is …’
‘A m ‘But Jeremy—my husband—with a twisted smile. ‘I must thank you for not calling out. I am in your debt.’ He knew he should not, but he could not resist. ‘Let me demonstrate my gratitude.’ When he pulled her to him she did not resist. The touch of her lips on his was warm, sweet and all too fleeting. He released her extremely reluctantly. ‘I must go,’ he said roughly. ‘And you, madam, must do as you see fit.’
‘Wait a minute. I don’t even know what your name is.’
The housebreaker laughed again. ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’
He was already fleeing across the lawn. Staring after him in utter bemusement, Deborah remained stock still, watching the shadowy figure melt into the darkness. The stable clock chimed the hour. Above her, she could hear the sharper chimes of another clock. Looking up, she saw the window of the long drawing room was wide open. The French clock—it must be that she could hear. She touched her fingers to her mouth where the housebreaker had kissed her. Kissed her! A common thief!
No. Housebreaker he might be, but he was most certainly not common. His voice was that of an educated man. He had an air about him of someone used to command. The greatcoat which enveloped him was of fine wool. And, now she thought about it, his boots were of an excellent cut and highly polished. He smelled of clean linen and fresh air and only very slightly of sweat and leather and horse. She supposed he must have tied his steed up somewhere close by. She listened intently, but could hear nothing save the rustle of the breeze as it tugged at the bare branches of the trees.
She should wake the Earl. At the very least she should alert the servants. Deborah frowned. Whatever the man had stolen must have been concealed about his person, for he’d carried no sackfull of loot. Papers, perhaps? Despite the arduous task of setting Jeremy’s estates to rights—a task which his cousin never ceased to complain about—Lord Kinsail continued to play an active role in the government. Was the housebreaker a spy? That certainly made more sense, though the war was so long over there was surely no need for such subterfuge. And he had neither looked nor sounded like a traitor.
Deborah’s laugh, quickly stifled, had an unwelcome note of hysteria in it. She had no more idea of what a spy should look like than a housebreaker.
None of it made sense. It occurred to her rather belatedly that the thing which Lord Kinsail would consider made least sense of all was her own presence in the grounds, in her night clothes, at four in the morning. He’d want to know why she’d made no attempt to raise the alarm immediately—what could she say when she didn’t know the answer to that question herself? It wasn’t as if the thief had threatened her. She hadn’t felt scared, exactly, more … what?
The thought of having to suffer Jacob’s inquisition made up her mind. She would not give him any more reason to treat her with disdain. In fact, Deborah decided, making her way hurriedly to the side door, the time had come to break free from Lord Kinsail and this blighted place. Small consolation—very small—but her failure to provide Jeremy with an heir had one advantage. She had no real obligation to maintain close ties with his family. Lord Kinsail might grudge her every penny of the miserly widow’s portion which he doled out irregularly, and only after several reminders, but she doubted he could ultimately refuse to pay it. In any case, she was determined to find a way to survive without it. This would be her last visit to Kinsail Manor and damn the consequences!
Feeling decidedly better, Deborah fastened the door carefully behind her and fled up the stairs to her chamber on the third floor. Whatever it was the bold housebreaker had taken would be discovered in the morning. He was already gone, and her rousing the household now would not bring him back.
She yawned heavily as she discarded her mantle and unlaced her muddy boots, pushing them to the back of the cupboard out of sight of the inquisitive maid. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she made a face. Despite her hair curlers, that look on the housebreaker’s face just before he kissed her had been unmistakable. Not that she was by any stretch of the imagination an expert, but she was sure, none the less. He had wanted her.
Heat washed over her. What would it be like to submit to someone like that? Deborah pulled the bedclothes up around her, too beguiled by this thought to notice the cold. Desire. She wrapped her arms around herself, closed her eyes and recalled the velvet touch of his lips on hers. Beneath her palms her nipples budded. Behind her lids wanting flared the colour of crimson. Desire. Sharpened by its very illicitness. Desire of the dark, venal kind which roused Bella Donna, the heroine of the novels which were currently scandalising the ton, to shocking heights of passion. Desire such as she had never shared.
Desire. Deborah slipped down into the welcoming dark embrace of the bed, her hands slipping and sliding down over the cotton of her nightdress. And down. Closing her eyes tighter, she abandoned herself to the imagined caresses of a virile and skilled lover.
She awoke much later in the morning than usual, dragging herself up from the depths of slumber to the hue and cry of a household in a state of pandemonium. Slipping into a thick kerseymere gown, for Kinsail Manor, owing to a combination of its age and its current incumbent’s frugality, was an uncomfortably draughty place, Deborah sat at her mirror to take out her curl papers. Her straitened circumstances meant she could not afford the luxury of a personal maid, and, though Lady Kinsail had begged her to make use of her own dear Dorcas, Her Ladyship’s ‘own dear Dorcas’ was in fact an exceedingly dour creature, who believed a widow’s hair should be confined under a cap and kept there with a battalion of hairpins—the sharper the better.
Since she had perforce been attending to her own toilette for most of her adult life, Deborah made short work of gathering her long flaxen tresses high on her head and arranging her curls in a cluster over one shoulder. Her gown she had fashioned herself, too, in plain blue, with not a trace of the French work, furbelows and frills so beloved of Ackerman’s Repository.
She had resented her blacks when Jeremy died, resented the way they defined her as his relic, but it had taken her a full six months after the designated year of mourning to cast them off all the same, for she had come to appreciate the anonymity they granted her. It was then she had discovered that she lacked any identity at all to fill the gap. Like the anonymous gowns of blues and browns and greys she now wore, neither fashionable nor utterly dowdy, she felt herself indeterminate, somewhat undefined. Like an abandoned canvas, half painted.
An urgent rap at the door interrupted this chastening thought. ‘Please, Your Ladyship, but His Lordship asks you to join him in the long drawing room urgently.’ The housemaid, still clad in the brown sack apron she wore to lay the morning fires, was fairly bursting with the important news she had to impart. ‘We’ve all to assemble there,’ she informed Deborah as she trotted along the narrow corridor which connected the oldest—and dampest and coldest—wing of Kinsail Manor with the main body of the house, built by Jeremy’s great-grandfather. ‘The master wants to know if anyone heard or saw him.’
‘Heard who?’ Deborah asked, knowing full well that the girl could only mean the housebreaker.
She should have woken Jacob, she knew she should