A Mummers' Play Read Online Free

consequences. Doubtless abandoned Beaufort bastards littered Europe!
    This fueled Justina’s already fiery resolve. She could imagine what havoc such a wretch could create as an English duke. He must be stopped.
    Once in his private suite, she set about a search that would leave no secret unexposed.
    An hour later she rubbed dusty hands on her drab skirt and admitted that she had found nothing.
    The enormous ornate desk was as good as unused, with neat stacks of unmarked paper beside undisturbed rows of pencils and pens. No pencil had so much as been blunted by use.
    “Bone idle as well,” she muttered.
    But Justina wouldn’t be so easily thwarted. The very blandness of everything showed she had not found Lucky Jack’s real possessions. She’d set about a rigorous search for secret compartments, even crawling underneath the desk to tap for hollow spots.
    Eventually, she emerged disheveled but no further forward.
    Pushing her cap frill out of her eyes, she stared around the room. Where could the dratted man be hiding things?
    Perhaps in his bedchamber? She opened an adjoining door to see a large tester bed with the handle of a warming pan poking out, and a nightshirt hanging on a rack close to the fire.
    Two wardrobes and a set of dressing drawers offered many hiding places, but a bedchamber was open territory to servants, who had to clean all the corners and dig around in the drawers. He’d be a fool to hide his secrets there.
    No, she thought, closing the door and turning back, it was much more likely that any incriminating material was hidden in the study where few would venture. In fact, it was probably hidden among the books.
    She surveyed the tiers of shelves, almost overwhelmed by the task, but Charles had trained her well. Searches were not butterfly affairs—a peep here, a poke there. They were tedious and methodical. But in the end, painstaking precision brought results.
    Making herself think of only one book at a time, Justina started at the glass-doored shelves to the right of the main door. She climbed the library steps, took down the first book on the top shelf, and riffled through the pages. Then she checked down the spine for inserts, and inspected the endpapers to see if they had been disturbed.
    Nothing.
    She replaced it and took the next.
    She had worked her way down three shelves, remembering to check that the shelves themselves did not have false backs, and was standing on the carpet with a new book in her hand when Jack Beaufort walked into the room.
    They stared at each other in shocked silence for a moment.
    Then he snapped, “What the devil do you think you’re doing, ma’am?” Anger scorched through it, but leashed in a way that alarmed her more than open rage would have.
    Justina pushed the glasses back up her nose and tried to calm her frantic heart. “Oh, sir! My lord . . . Your grace! What a fright you gave me.”
    And that was the honest truth.
    From a distance, his height had not been so apparent, or his broad shoulders and shrewd, steady eyes. She was suddenly reminded that Jack Beaufort had served as a colonel and been decorated for it.
    He was undoubtedly a very dangerous man.
    Stepping closer, he said, “I’m likely to give you a worse fright. What business have you in here?”
    He was so close that Justina had to tilt her head back to face him. Anger was emanating from him like heat, parching her mouth, causing sweat to slick her palms. . . .
    She managed not to back away, but she had to escape those furious dark eyes. To save a scrap of honor, she told herself she was looking at the book in her hand, seeking an explanation for her intrusion. To her relief, she found it was a gazetteer. There could conceivably be a reason for someone to want such a reference book late at night.
    “I . . . I was looking for some geographical information, your grace. For her ladyship . . .”
    “What ladyship?” he demanded.
    After a quick review of his family tree, she picked a