to Rachel’s figure. Cory smiled to think of that figure now.
His smile vanished. Rachel had not paid him a great deal of attention that evening. During dinner she had been placed next to Caspar Lang and in the impromptu dancing that had followed she had given her hand more than once to Caspar and to various other admirers, including John Norton. It was galling when Cory had warned her away from both Lang and Norton. It was even more annoying that when Cory had approached her for a quadrille, Rachel had apologised and explained that she was spoken for. Lang had been hanging on the back of her rout chair and had smirked in a manner that had made Cory want to strangle him with his own neckcloth. John Norton had also overheard the remark and had laughed as he came to carry Rachel off into the dance. Cory had gone to cool his heels in the card room, but through the open door he could still see Rachel twirling from one end of the set to the other. Under the circumstances, he had swiftly lost the game.
It had been no hardship for Cory to leave Marney Hall early, return to Kestrel Court and prepare to venture out again, less formally dressed and certainly less inclined to draw attention to himself. He needed to sort through Maskelyne’s books that Rachel had consigned to the stables, and he could not do it during the day when everyone was involved in the excavation and would notice his absence. There was only a slim chance that Maskelyne would have left any record of his activities in the house, but it was all they had to go on. Hence his presence in the Midwinter Royal stable yard at a time when Rachel was asleep in the room just above his head…
As if in response to this last thought there was a flicker of light above him and a pool of gold spilled from an upstairs window to mingle with the silver moonlight. Cory pressed back into the darkness. It would be disastrous for anyone to see him now, particularly Rachel, who was quite dauntless enough to come downstairs to see what was going on.
He looked up. The curtain at Rachel’s window twitched. Cory kept absolutely still. He was sure that he had not made enough noise to attract attention, so what had disturbed Rachel sufficiently to wake her in the middle of the night? Had she not yet retired for the night, or could she not sleep after the excitement of the evening?
The curtain moved and he saw her. She was standing in the window, framed by the candlelight. She was peering out into the darkness. Her dark hair was a cloud that framed her face in a way that lent it an ethereal air.
Cory looked at her and discovered that he did not want to look away. The pale candlelight was behind her now and it shone through the insubstantial white nightdress that she was wearing, illuminating in glorious detail a view of Miss Rachel Odell that he had never been vouchsafed before. Cory smothered a grin. He was no gentleman to be standing here and staring, but since the opportunity had presented itself he was not going to turn it away. In the shadowy light he could see all Rachel’s curves, previously only hinted at beneath her neat and tidy exterior. Cory’s smile deepened. Her waist was small and nipped in, and her breasts were luscious. He could see the shadow of the cleft between them and the darker smudge of her nipples against the lawn of the nightdress. And lower, where the outline of her thighs pressed against the thin material, he could see…
Cory realised that he could not actually see anything, since the window sill cut Rachel off neatly at the waist, but his imagination filled in the gaps in intimate detail. His body hardened with desire and at the same time his mind intervened and slammed him up hard against a metaphorical wall. This was
Cory pressed the palms of his hands against the rough brick of the stable wall and forced himself to look away. He was sweating with the effort of controlling his body and fighting off the images that plagued his mind. The night air touched his face and turned the sweat cold. He screwed his eyes up in agony.
When he glanced back at the window, the light had gone and the night was dark again. Cory let his breath ease out of him in a long sigh. It had to be a momentary aberration. He would never think about Rachel in that way again. Because if he did, it would turn a lot of his life’s certainties upside down and nothing could be the same again.
Cory deliberately dismissed the episode from his mind and a moment later softly, carefully, edged his way around the side of the stable block. A cool little breeze scattered stray pieces of straw across the cobbles. It masked the lifting of the latch as he opened the stable door and stepped inside.
He stopped just inside the door and edged it closed, but left it unlatched. The thin sliver of moonlight cut out, and he was standing in the darkness, the tickly smell of hay in his nostrils and the dusty shadows pressing close. He did not move for at least a minute. Cory had been in some dangerous and unusual situations in his life and the one thing that he had learned from them all was never to make hasty decisions and always to be on his guard. His instinct was telling him now that something was amiss. Someone had been there before him.
He struck a light and looked about him in the flare of the flame. The stable was empty of everything but a mound of old hay, for the Odells did not keep a carriage. Cory trod softly across the cobbled floor and looked into the end stall. When he had collected Castor earlier in the day he had taken the opportunity to locate the pile of false books that Rachel had thrown out of the library. They were stacked neatly away in the corner of the final stall.
Or, at least, they had been. Now they were scattered across the cobbles, the covers ripped off, the wooden blocks splintered. Cory bent down slowly and picked one of them up. As Rachel had said, they were beautifully made. Each block of wood was cut to exactly the same size and each had an elegant printed leather cover stuck to the front. When they had been displayed on the library shelves it would have been impossible to tell from a distance that they were not real books. Now they were fit for nothing but the fire.
Cory gave a heavy sigh and straightened up. Evidently someone other than himself had heard about Jeffrey Maskelyne’s collection of false books. Knowing Rachel, it was entirely possible that she had shared the information with Lady Sally’s reading group, deploring the philistinism of a man who had to fill his bookshelves with fakes…
He felt a cool draught on his skin and a sudden shiver down his neck as all the hairs stood on end. He had not heard the stable door open, but now he realised that he had made a potentially fatal mistake. For one split second he had forgotten to be careful.
And in that second the blade of a dagger touched the skin of his throat and lingered there like a caress.
Chapter Seven
Rachel had been unable to sleep. She had tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable position in the big four-poster bed. There had been a panel of bright moonlight that had crept through a gap in the curtains and illuminated the mantelpiece and a patch of the floor. It disturbed her. Rachel knew that sooner or later, she would have to get up and close the curtains properly. When she finally gave in and did so, she could not help but glance out of the window. The moon was high and the burial mounds were illuminated in black and silver, shadows flowing into darker shadows in a way that was as beautiful as it was mysterious. Nothing moved in the landscape, although Rachel could hear the soft rush of the river away to her right, and the breathy call of the tawny owl in the copse. With a sigh, she put out a hand to draw the curtains, pausing as a flicker of movement caught her eye. Someone was creeping around the edge of the stables.
Rachel almost drew the curtains and left them to it, for, in her opinion, anyone who wished to sneak around an Anglo-Saxon burial site in the dark was clearly quite unhinged. Then she thought of all the hard work that her parents had put into the site. They had not found the Midwinter Treasure yet, nor anything of any great value, but they had catalogued and preserved a great many artefacts that would be of interest to the Saxon scholars at the British Museum. It would be a shocking pity if their work should be sabotaged by an intruder.
Rachel was not afraid of confronting prowlers. She had single-handedly taken on an angry mob in Egypt when they had tried to wreck her parents’ excavation and had vanquished a tomb robber in Derbyshire by hitting him over the head with a seventh-century pot. With an angry swish, she pulled the curtain back into place, then went over to her cupboard. She rummaged about inside, emerging with a thick cloak and a pair of stout outdoor boots. The ensemble was rather haphazard and would gain no plaudits from the fashionable, but Rachel did not care. Even though it was summer and had not rained for weeks, she was taking no chances on flimsy footwear. She did not stop to check her reflection in the mirror. Picking up her candle, she opened the bedroom door.
The moonlight spilled over the floor of the landing and lay in threads down the staircase. Rachel tip-toed down
