Page 118 of The Scottish Duke
She turned and looked out over the landscape. “I’m sorry if I worried you, but I had no other place to go where I could be guaranteed of privacy. No one comes here.”
“Then I apologize for interrupting you. I do, however, have the whole of Blackhall searching for you, so it’s best if we return.”
“You do?”
“Everyone from the majordomo to the stable boys. Nan is the only one exempt from the search, although I daresay my mother is doing her best to find you as well.”
“Oh dear. Why?”
“Why?” he asked. “Why?” He shook his head then answered her. “Because Nan was poisoned and it’s only a miracle that you weren’t. Because I’ve got a damn basket of adders back at Blackhall and I’ve done a lousy job of being a husband. Because. Just because.”
“All right,” she said, looking bemused.
“All right?”
She nodded.
“Damn, that was easy.”
“You made a lot of sense.”
“I dismissed Matthews,” he said, reaching out and patting Robbie on the back. His son swiped at him with his fist again, summoning his smile. “His were one of the sets of prints we found. When I pressed him, he admitted destroying your apothecary. I don’t know if he was the one who put the monkwood in the tea.”
“I always thought it was Mary,” she said.
“I found her prints as well.” He debated telling her about Thomas and then did.
“Thomas didn’t do anything,” she said. “I can almost guarantee that.”
“That’s right, you find him charming.” He tried to conceal his envy but it must have escaped.
Her laughter startled him. So, too, Robbie’s sudden grin.
“What’s so amusing?”
“You,” she said. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were jealous. As if you have any reason to be.”
She shook her head, still smiling.
What did he say to that? What did she think of him? Did he really want to know?
“What do you think of me?” he asked, daring himself.
She tilted her head and regarded him in the same way he often studied a rendering of a set of fingerprints, looking for a pattern in the swirls, something to indicate in which category he should file the specimen.
“I used to worship you from afar,” she finally said. “I’d sit in the conservatory and watch for you every night.”
“You couldn’t have,” he said.
“Why? Because you didn’t know I was alive? I studied you the way my father used to examine a flower. What is the shape of its stalk, its stamen, its petals? How does it react to nature? What is its environment?”
“I never knew,” he said.
“You weren’t supposed to know,” she said. “If you had, I would no doubt have been lectured by Mrs.McDermott, or even let go.”
“Is that why you came to the ball that night, because I was someone that interested you?”
Her smile deepened. “I wasn’t just interested in you, Alex. I was fascinated with you. I wanted to stare at your face for hours at a time. I wished that I’d taken up portraits because I ached to paint you. It was more than interest. Perhaps it was obsession. The day you took my fingerprints was the happiest day of my life.”
