With Love (Blackwood & Friends #1)

Chapter 26: The Best Laid Plans...

Chapter 26: The Best Laid Plans...

He opened the door to her room at the same time she was leaving it, almost stumbling into him as she hurried out. From behind Nicola, her lady's maid stared at him with wide-eyed surprise and worry as she carried Nicola's already packed valise in her hand.

"You can leave us," Jason told her, and she obliged hastily, dropping the valise, and slipping out the chamber, disappearing. To Nicola, he asked, "Where are you going, Nicki?"

Her amber eyes were wide and wild, searching him with an uncertainty and shyness he didn't like. He knew the cause of it, he was here to dispel it, and he exhibited commendable restraint at not pulling her into his arms and crushing her against his body right then and there. He didn't want her to go, he didn't want her to leave Northwick ever again.

"I need to leave," she said softly, a tremble in her voice. She began to wring her hands in her skirts, a nervous twitch he had seen so often in the past week.

"Why?"

She blinked owlishly. It was so very tempting to reach out and push that curl of hair that had strayed from its pin and drooped along the curve of her cheek and neck, slip it behind her ear. "The letters." Simply stated, but her lips moved with anything but. So expressive, even when she was in obvious turmoil, they quirked adorably to the side- so animated and uniquely her. He wondered if she ever noticed those attributes about herself, things that made her so vastly different from any other girl he had known before...

"What about the letters?" Jason stepped into her chambers, compelling her to step back and admit him. She did so with a questioning look, turning to the side as he slipped past her.

"Jason, you surely know why."

Deliberately, he extended his arm out beside them and pushed the door closed slowly. "Enlighten me."

Her brow puckered with confusion. Jason leaned against her door and waited, crossing his arms over his chest and tilting his chin to look at her. "I wrote them," she said flatly, making a gesture with her hand, flattening her palm against the middle of her chest as if emphasising the truth of her convictions. "Those were my confessions, my letters that you found."

"I know." He arched one brow at her. "So why are you leaving?"

"You knew or you know?"

"There's a difference?"

She gave him a pert looked, wrinkling her nose in an adorable moue of annoyance. "Yes. If you only know, that infers your knowledge may only extend as far back as a few moments ago. But if you knew..."

"I knew."

A thousand emotions and feelings flashed across her face and Jason merely waited for her to settle on one. Unfortunately, she seemed to favour confused agitation and plunked her hands on her hips, glaring at him. "Since when?" she demanded.

He so did enjoy catching glimpses of her spirit, the riotous little things that she kept locked away so tightly in that shell of hers for nobody to see. He had made a plan for this, for her, but like most plans do- things had gone awry. For his plan to work, all his players had to be in accordance... and attempting to control the Blackwood members of his household was like trying corral angry tigers- impossible, and probably dangerous.

"Since I found you snooping outside my chambers."

She stiffened, her hands dropping, and her expression cringed as if embarrassed. "How?"

How, indeed? "Well, I couldn't be certain at first, darling," he explained, "but I had my suspicions and I needed to confirm them."

Jason had brought the box of letters over to his bed that day after finding the little mouse lurking in the passageway outside his chambers, and he had sifted through the contents in confusion. There must have been close to a hundred of the neatly folded little bits of parchments, all bound so neatly with twine, all coated with a lingering, familiar scent. It was the smell of them that triggered the memory of her, the same heady floral scent that stirred the air around them in her chambers presently, and it had driven him mad trying to figure it out. Jason had spent the entire night pouring over those letters, had spread each out on the floor of his chambers as he attempted to assign chronological order to the events depicted within them. His room had looked like a rumpled checkers board, and he had faired no better. By the time the sun had risen, he had scoured the contents of those letters enough to form an idea about who it could be and he found himself somewhat surprised and excited by the possible conclusion. He decided that morning, haggard and unkempt at the breakfast table, that he would court Nicola Eversley even if she wasn't the author of those letters, but they could certainly be construed as the catalyst that made him come to that life-altering realisation.