Page 63 of Would I Lie to the Duke
Chapter 19
Jess pushed back the bed linens and sat up. She ought to be asleep, but there had been a honey-soaked pastry served with dinner’s final course, the taste of which haunted her even hours after retiring to bed.
Easier to focus on the honey’s flavor rather than Noel, asleep somewhere in this beautiful house.
He’d picked this room for her. The walls were covered in hand-painted wallpaper, and while the bed was made of dark chestnut wood, it had been carved into elegant gothic designs that made it seem like a vessel bound for the shores of a fairy kingdom.
Any lady would be happy to have such a room for her bedchamber. Jess was no lady, but she loved the space, and her heart softened to think of Noel selecting it specifically so she’d enjoy it.
He had watched her throughout the dinner and afterward, and there had been dark need in his voice as he’d wished her good night at the conclusion of the evening.
She wanted him. So badly she shook with it.
No—impossible. If, by the grace of some heavenly deity, he did decide to invest in McGale & McGale,she couldn’t allow him to think that she’d slept with him as a means to secure his money. Learning the truth about who she was would only make him view their every interaction as a betrayal.
Yet... if she told him everything, told himwhyshe did what she did... He was a man with heart. He wouldn’t cast her aside because she’d fought to keep her family together. Would he?
And tomorrow, he and the others would visit the farm. Nervousness mixed with eagerness jumped through her—this was what she’d wanted for McGale & McGale. The culmination of her work at the Bazaar was less than twenty-four hours away. Hopefully, Cynthia and Fred would do their parts, and the end of the day would see their business with at least one new investor.
Her growling stomach interrupted her swirling thoughts. She pressed a hand to her belly, trying to quiet it. The food served tonight had been incredible, and she wanted more of it.
After grabbing a shawl, she peeked out of her room, and no one was in the hall. The last time the clock had chimed, it had been a quarter to one in the morning.
She took a candle and crept down the corridor.
Every country house had its idiosyncrasies, but thanks to her employment with Lady Catherton, Jess had enough of an idea about most houses’ layouts so she could find the kitchen and larder easily.
In short order, she arrived. It was a large room with a high, smoke-stained ceiling. The fire had been banked, and, to her relief, no one was about. But her true aim wasn’t here.
She found the larder quickly and shut the door behind her. Light from her candle revealed marble shelves lined with covered jars, while haunches of meat hung from hooks.
Jess put her candle on a table in the middle of the room, then approached the shelves as she rose up onto the tips of her toes to reach the honey pot.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor. She froze, then cursed the fact that she had forgotten to douse her out-of-reach candle. Surely whoever was outside in the hallway could see light coming from under the door. If it was the butler or housekeeper, they’d likely investigate to make certain none of the staff was eating what belonged to the master.
But servants were quite forgiving of anything the master or his guests might do. She was Lady Whitfield, after all. Not Jess McGale.
The footsteps approached and then stopped outside of the larder. She arranged her shawl, straightened her shoulders, and tipped up her chin.
The door opened, and Jess’s plans to behave regally fell away.
It was Noel. Dressed only in his shirtsleeves, breeches, and boots.
His open shirt exposed his chest and the shadow of dark hair that dusted his pectorals. As he entered the larder and closed the door behind him, his muscles shifted beneath the fine lawn of his shirt.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, hating herself for the asinine question.
He raised a brow. “The master of the house is permitted to go wherever he likes, whenever he likes.” Then he ruined the aristocratic hauteur of his reply by saying, “And Cook told me that he’d put a meat pie aside for me in case I needed something to nibble on in the middle of the night.”
“Do you often come down to the larder after midnight?”
He set his candle down beside hers. “As habits go, it’s my least dissolute. You’re here for a snack, I imagine.”
“I am discovered. We share the benign inclination to ransack larders when everyone is asleep.”
She didn’t do it often at Lady Catherton’s home, and when she did, she made certain to grab only a few rusks or sugarplums. But she remembered all too well the lean years on the farm, when she’d gone to bed hungry and there had been nothing to eat in the middle of the night, and hardly anything for the morrow’s breakfast.
She could never tell Noel, of course.
