Page 85 of The Countess Caper

“There’s nothing to tell. My father always carried it with him.”

“Where did he get it?”

“How should I know? I was barely out of the nursery when he used to sing me the song it played.” She had no idea if he’d bought the watch because of the song or if he sang her the song because of the watch.

“You’d better hope for your own sake that your memory sharpens. Because we’re here.”

The carriage rumbled to a stop.

Tessa had run away.

Again.

It was bad enough that when Roarke woke, his bed was empty. He wanted her snug bottom against him, her hair tangled on his pillow. Cold feet because she stole all of the blankets. Mercilessly.

Not this cold, empty feeling in his chest.

It only got worse when he found her bed empty, her clothes on the floor.

Her daggers missing.

He’d been trying to convince himself that he was being dramatic. That he’d spent too much time with the theatrical Lord Kensington, with Holly and her morbid poetry, with Rue and her kitchen knife. In a house rigged to take out guests with swinging chandeliers and trick stairs. He was accustomed to the moors, to wild ponies and very few people, and those people were generally too intimidated to look him in the eye, never mind chatter on about the logic behind nicknaming Tessa Punch Bowl Ophelia.

He’d chosen this because it fulfilled an oath to his dying mother.

His very clever, very troublesome mother.

She had not cared for his first wife. She had mourned her death, as was proper and compassionate, but not the death of his marriage to a woman who had run away to be with any man but him. All other men. A woman who had hated the quiet of the country, hated long walks outside, mud on her boots, a hulking husband who did not know any poetry and would not wear cravats unless forced by king or Parliament. He was not elegant, entertaining.

And now Tessa.

Gone.

But she wouldn’t leave, not like this. That much he knew, even if his heart was racing and in very great danger of cracking into pieces like those damned ceramic animals they used to play at bowls. The hallway was littered with the dust.

She wouldn’t leave the women of Magpie House.

Whatever his uncertainties and worries, that much was true. She might have left him. He wanted to howl at the sky at the thought. But she wouldn’t leave them without a word, without a plan. She wouldn’t leave this disaster of a house. She’d kick him out on his arse first.

Even if she had snuck out of his bed on their wedding night and run away.

He rubbed his chest. None of this felt right. Not her leaving; not the prickle across the back of his neck.

He pulled on a shirt and prowled through the house, in case she was tucked away somewhere, scraping paint off a two-hundred-year-old table. Pulling rusty nails from a cracked banister. Chasing the weasel out of the music room, where it sometimes liked to dance across the pianoforte keys, creating the most discordant song. She always laughed. Yesterday he had stood on the stairs, arrested by that laugh. Frozen like a lovesick fool, grinning at nothing.

She wasn’t anywhere to be found. Not the kitchen after a toasted muffin, nor the gardens for lavender to rub on a splinter.

There had been too many housebreakers, too many men with knives and plans for him to feel at ease.

Rue marched toward him, a letter in her hand. “We have a problem.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The house was grand in the way only a house in Bath could be, with balconets and columns and black iron railings. She had never been to the Crescent, never seen the half-moon of terraced houses made of the golden stone overlooking the parkland. She had never been to this house with the blue door and the lark knocker.

But she knew it all the same. It was familiar in a way that she could not explain.

She knew the floors in the front hall were pink marble, and the slender columns on either side of the grand staircase were painted gold. There were yellow roses in the garden outside the window and birdcages scattered throughout the parlor.