Page 49 of Daring in a Blue Dress
“What sort of a noise?” She yawned, suddenly snapping her teeth closed while yanking the duvet up to her chin. “You don’t think it was...mice?”
He didn’t answer, instead pulling off the cushions that sat on the window seat, and lifting up one of the two hinged seats.
There was nothing inside the storage area.
“Well?” Mercy asked, the duvet now up to her eyes as she sat huddled in bed, pressed against the headboard in a way that said she expected a great wave of mice to come streaming over the sides of the window seat. “How many are there?”
“None. That is, there are no mice in it. There’s nothing in it. It’s completely bare.”
“Completely bare things don’t make mysterious noises. What exactly did you hear?”
“Two thuds, one thunk, and a singularly alarmingkerwidget.”
She sat up straighter, lowering the duvet so that her mouth was free of it. “I can explain away the thuds and thunk, but I can see why thekerwidgetis alarming. That’s not a normal sound.”
“No.” He knelt next to the window seat, feeling more than a little silly when he ran his hands around the interior, pressing on the walls and floor of it to make sure there wasn’t some sort of secret panel.
“What are you doing? I can’t look because you’representing a view of you that I’m not super crazy wild about, and that’s saying a lot because I’m super crazy wild about all the other views of you.”
Hastily, he straightened up from the bent position, and reached for the closest pair of pants, heat washing up his neck and cheeks. His voice came out stilted when he said, “My apologies.”
She pulled the duvet down from where she’d been covering her eyes with it. “That’s OK. And stop being embarrassed—I know you didn’t mean to moon me. Besides, I like your butt. I just don’t need to see... you know... all of it.”
He grimaced, and was about to apologize again when she added, “What were you doing bent over like that, anyway?”
“Pressing on the walls of the window seat in case there was some sort of panel that slid back to reveal a secret hiding place.”
“You mean like a secret passage?” she asked, her nose wrinkling in the most adorable way. He badly wanted to crawl back into bed and kiss her nose, wrinkles and all, but he knew that neither of them would sleep until they had a better idea of the origin of the noise.
“More like a hiding spot for a cache of untold wealth in the form of jewels, or even a small hoard of gold coins. Houses this age sometimes had little spots where the lord and master could tuck away bits of his wealth.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed, and slid forward, picking up from her bag the gossamer-thin garment she called her nightgown. “I think a secret passage is way cooler than just a hidey-hole.”
“I suppose that would depend if something of valueor interest is hidden in it.” He tapped the walls of the storage area again, but they sounded perfectly normal, and not at all like the sort of structures given over to midnightkerwidgeting. “Perhaps I misheard—”
At that moment the overhead lights—both of them—gave whispered hiccups and went out, one after the other.
“You bastard house!” he shouted, raising his fist to the ceiling. “You’re costing me a fortune in lightbulbs!”
“Come back to bed,” Mercy said, and patted the duvet. “You must have been dreaming.”
“Possibly, although I wasn’t aware I was sleep—” He stopped in the midact of closing the seat lid.
“Hmm?”
“Mercy,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Come see this.”
The sound of a duvet slithering to the floor was followed by the soft padding of her feet, and suddenly, she was there, at his side, her warm, sleepy scent twining itself around him. “If you are planning on showing me a mouse—”
“Shh,” he said softly, and pointed even though he doubted she could see the gesture in the dark.
“Why? What—oh!”
It hadn’t been visible with the lights on in the room, but now that they were out, a soft golden glow definitely showed along the near bottom edge of the window seat.
