until she’d been introduced once again to Sue’s Border terriers. They were the most perfectly trained dogs she’d ever seen. It was remarkable. They moved in flawless unison. If Elizabeth told one of them to sit, they all planted their rumps on the ground at the same exact moment. A down command elicited a similar uniform response. After only an hour of looking after them, Elizabeth had begun thinking of them not as a pack of dogs but rather a military unit. A scruffy, wirehaired infantry.
The jet lag hit Elizabeth full force, and by nine o’clock she could barely keep her eyes open. She slipped into her nightgown and situated herself on the window seat. As she gazed out at the darkened London street and reflected on her first day in the Barrows’ household, Elizabeth wondered why they’d hired her. Other than to help out at the shows, of course.
Those dogs—Violet, Hyacinth, Daisy and Rose—could run the house themselves. They hardly needed a nanny. Although she supposed they were smart enough to get in serious trouble if left to their own devices. They had a television in their room. Or the telly, as Sue had called it. When the house was empty, Sue left it on to keep them company. Elizabeth wouldn’t have been surprised if the Border terriers tuned in to the home-shopping channel, dialed the phone with their little paws and ran up thousands of dollars in credit-card bills for crazy things like the ShamWow or a blanket with sleeves. That was the kind of intelligence they possessed. These were not normal dogs she was dealing with.
Bliss danced around on her hind legs, peeking over the edge of the seat until Elizabeth scooped her up. Not that the Cavalier wasn’t fully capable of jumping up there on her own. She was spoiled, plain and simple.
“Yep, you’re spoiled,” Elizabeth murmured as she surrendered and ran her fingers over the Cavalier’s silky chestnut ears. “But I love you just the way you are.”
Bliss let out a little snuffling sound and wedged her way between one of Elizabeth’s legs and the neat row of velvet pillows. Behind her, the window glowed with the soft yellow light of the streetlamps that lined the sidewalk below. Elizabeth smiled at the bright red telephone booth she could make out, even in the dark, right next to the cupcake bakery on the corner.
London was charming.
Elizabeth had been in the country for all of fifteen hours, and she was smitten with the place. The street was quiet now. The cupcake bakery’s windows were darkened. Some of the quaint row houses had lights on, but only in one or two windows. Even the church down the street had stopped ringing its bells every hour, on the hour. South Kensington was packing it in for the night.
But as Elizabeth scooped all sixteen pounds of Bliss’s dead weight into her arms, ready to head for bed, she spotted something out the window that gave her pause.
Another Cavalier!
She planted Bliss back among the pillows and leaned toward the windowpane for a closer look.
Her bedroom was three floors up, but she could spot a fluffy, wagging Cavalier tail from any distance. The dog prancing around on the threshold of the house across the street was most definitely a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. She squinted and tried to make out the dog’s owner.
It was a man. But from so high up, and in the dark, she couldn’t tell much else. He appeared to be wearing jeans and a sweater, but there was something about the way he moved that carried an air of formality.
They meandered down the street and, once they’d reached the church, turned back toward home. The man kept a watchful eye on his Cavalier until they’d made it about halfway down the block. Then he suddenly turned his face toward her window.
Elizabeth couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness, or his features, for that matter. But her face flushed with heat as she watched him watching her. He stood on the sidewalk with moonlight caressing his broad shoulders for a long while. Longer than seemed appropriate. Not that anything about spying on the neighbors was necessarily appropriate.
Elizabeth knew she should back away from the window and head for bed. She couldn’t seem to make herself do it. For some inexplicable reason, she felt drawn toward the pair outside. She told herself it was because of the dog, of course. Another Cavalier. Why wouldn’t she be curious? But the way her heart pounded told her there was a bit more to it than that.
He waved. It was just a slight movement of his free hand, but the stir it caused inside Elizabeth was sizable. She returned the gesture.
The man tilted his head, as though studying her. She was struck with the sudden worry that he could see her face. Could he tell who she was?
Surely not.
What did it matter, anyway? She didn’t know a soul here, besides the Barrows. She was anonymous. Invisible.
She swallowed, but a flutter rose up from her belly and settled in her chest. Sitting there, in silent communion with this stranger on a London street, she didn’t feel invisible at all. In fact, she felt anything but. She felt alive.
Disappointment tugged at her consciousness when he looked back down at his dog. They headed toward home. Elizabeth kept watching as he opened the door and the pair slipped inside.
“Come on, sweetheart,” she murmured to Bliss. “Time for bed.”
She crawled under the covers of the impressive four-poster bed, with Bliss curled by her side. Even though she’d traveled clear across the Atlantic Ocean that day and was exhausted beyond comprehension, Elizabeth lay awake for quite a while before she fell asleep. She tingled all over, from head to toe.
At last her eyes fluttered shut. And for the first time in a week, she wasn’t awakened by nightmares of Grant Markham.
6
Donovan stared into his tea and wondered if there was enough caffeine in the world to get him going the next morning.
“Lawrence, I won’t be going to work today,” he muttered.
“Yes, sir.” Lawrence just stood there, gaping at him in stunned silence until he vanished back down the hall.
Donovan never missed work. Not that “work” was an actual location. It was more of a metaphorical place. At Chadwicke, he conducted business in the library, surrounded by books that had been on the shelves for generations but were hardly ever touched. Sometimes he stared at the spine of the first-edition Dickens as he listened to Aunt Constance ramble on and on about some minute detail of the family trust while silently wishing he could tune her out and flip through its pages instead.
In London, he worked from the drawing room. But the only thing in the pale green room that interested him now was the whelping pen and its contents—Figgy’s tiny, wriggling pups.
He decided to give in and spend the day looking after his dogs. He wouldn’t be of any use to the Darcy Family Trust today anyhow. After his sleepless night, he’d probably give away half the family fortune without even realizing what he’d done.
And what was more, he couldn’t have cared less. How could anyone expect him to get any sleep after what he’d seen? That vision, for lack of a better term.
He’d taken Finneus out for a final walk up and down the block when he’d looked up and spotted her.
It wasn’t really Elizabeth Scott, of course. He still possessed enough sanity to know he’d only been imagining things. Or the dim light had been playing
