Page 49 of The Heart of an Earl

“Good. So then, you need to see the box. I need to trust you with seeing it.”

“I don’t need to see it to know you trust me, Jules. I already know you do.”

She grinned. “Your arrogance astounds me sometimes.”

He didn’t bother to hide the obnoxious smile that cut across his face.

She extracted her naked limbs from his and went to her new dress draped across the other chair by the fire. “I had the shop girl sew longer pockets into the dress. That is what took so long in the dressmaker’s shop.”

He shrugged. “It gave me time to appraise the latest fashions.”

“You’re a connoisseur?”

“Not in the slightest. I wouldn’t know how long the tails of my own coat should be these days, much less what a fashionable lady should be wearing. Nevertheless, the dress is stunning on you, though I imagine any dress would be stunning on you.” His eyes drifted, hungry, across her naked skin. “Not that I want you in anything but what you’re wearing at the moment.”

She quirked a smile at him over her shoulder as her hands sifted through the fine wool of the dress, searching for the deep pocket. Her fingers found the box and she pulled it into the air.

She couldn’t help but pause for a moment, dreading what she was about to do.

She knew the power of the box.

What it did to men.

She didn’t want that to happen to Des.

But if she was to trust him—truly trust him—she needed to show him.

Worry filling her chest, she shuffled to him, her right hand clutching the box along her thigh, hiding it, though it was wider than her palm. Stopping in front of him, she took a deep breath and then flipped her hand over, presenting the box to him.

“I thought it would be bigger.”

She stared at him, her right eyebrow raised. “You thought it would be bigger?”

“To kill men over it? Yes. I expected bigger.”

She held it out to him. “Open it.”

He took it from her, turning it over in his hands, admiring the shifting swirls of the grain of the wood that looked as though a whirlwind had been captured in full fury and turned into wood. No hinges, but a well-hidden top plank that was an eighth of the box tall. No hinges, no latch.

“You have to swivel the top to the side to open it.”

Des did so and her heart dropped in her chest, just as it did every time the box was opened.

She’d battled this peculiar energy that ran through her ever since she’d seen the blasted thing years ago in Mr. Draper’s dying hand. He had trusted her father and been rewarded for his loyalty with a bullet in his chest. He’d struggled for air, for words that were drowned out by the blood in his throat, yet his fingers still gripped the box.

After his last breath, her father had ordered her to grab the box from his dead hand and open it, and she did.

She had never been the same since. Nothing had been the same since.

Des’s head stayed angled down, his stare on the ring inside.

The gold of the ring entwined in the middle—slipping along a smooth finger of wood that curled and weaved inside the box. Alive.

The whole of it was alive anytime light entered it.

The ruby caught the flicker of a flame from the fireplace and she cringed.

She didn’t want Des to be affected. Didn’t want him to see what everyone else saw in the box, in the ring, in the stone.

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