Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] Read Online Free Page B

lady’s small, daily jewelry. Graham doubted his mother had owned any other kind, for the coffers had been depleted years before she’d married into the Cavendish clan. He flipped open the lid with one finger, but the case was empty. Someone had emptied it of valuables long ago, he imagined. Just what his mother would have wanted, her little treasures pawned for more adventures in fatality.
    It was a very nice room, but it was just a room. Once this room had meant something to him, as it had even to his father, he imagined, for though his father had never spoken of her, the duke had never married again either. That might have been because he already had his heir along with several spares, or it might have been something deeper. Graham would have liked to believe that his father had been capable of something deeper, once upon a time.
    He snorted. Probably not. His father had been precisely what he’d seemed, aggressive and coarse.
    Turning to go, he grazed the edge of the little dressing table with his hip. Being rather more elderly than stable, it teetered. Graham caught it with a quick motion, but the jewel case slipped off and fell to the floor. God, he was as bad as Sophie!
    He bent to sweep up the case. It had cracked along one corner, the joined wood parting in a thick dark crevice. Graham frowned as he gazed at it. It wasn’t of value to him particularly, but he hated to throw it out.
    Then he saw a gleam of metal through the crack. Tilting the case, he shook it, but nothing fell. Looking more closely, he tugged at the ancient velvet lining in that corner, pulling it away to see that it had come unstuck long ago. Beneath it lay a ring of gold.
    It wasn’t an especially impressive ring. The stone was diamond but not overlarge, and the simple band and setting showed no particular finesse. For all that, it was very pretty. Merely a simple, unpretentious ring, the sort a lady might enjoy wearing simply because she liked it.
    Graham barely remembered his mother. She was a whiff of perfume in his mind, a softer voice amid the manly roaring. Even so, he doubted his mother would have wished him to use this bauble for a betrothal ring. It wasn’t nearly ostentatious enough to offer to a girl he hoped to make a duchess.
    Still, he slipped it into his pocket. After all, he needed both a girl and a ring, didn’t he? Perhaps the trick was to find a girl who would fit the ring he already had, not the other way around.
    THERE WAS SELDOM a criminal disturbance on the sedate street where was situated the esteemed—even though no one of true importance had thought of them in years—firm of Stickley & Wolfe, Solicitors. The officeitself was on an upper floor, above a glover’s at street level and a servant-placement agency on the next. Wide windows looked down upon the street, but the noise, even during the day, rarely ascended so high.
    If someone had strolled the street below late that night—for one could with little danger, even so deep in the night—they might have glanced up at just the right moment to see the flicker of candlelight where none should be.
    Fortunately for the intruder in the offices above, there was no one on the street.
    The tall, once-handsome, now dissipated-looking man standing in the silent office of Stickley & Wolfe, Solicitors, might not have seemed as though he belonged there. After all, he wore dark, common clothing and the secretive air of a thief. Of course, the impression wouldn’t be helped by the fact that it was the middle of the night.
    In point of fact, he had every right to be there. Wolfe wasn’t much of a solicitor—in school he’d cheated more than studied and bribed his way more often than either, in addition to holding a tasty spot of blackmail over the dean—but what did his lack of competence matter when he and his very capable partner only had one client?
    His partner, Stickley, wasn’t someone he would have chosen himself, but their fathers had been partners before them and