“Not to my knowledge,” Hudgins replied. “Shall I fetch her?”
Alec imagined that it would take the old man the same amount of time to reach Lily’s rooms as it would take Alec to search the entire house. And so he declined the offer and did just that.
She was not in the kitchens or the library, the conservatory or any of the sitting rooms. He climbed the stairs and began to search the bedchambers, beginning with the floor where he slept in the suite that had been described to him as “the duke’s rooms.” Sharing the corridor were door after door of perfectly neat, beautifully appointed, large, airy, clearly unused spaces. How many people were supposed to live in this damn house?
And where was Lily’s chamber if it was not among these?
He climbed to the third floor, imagining that he would find rooms similar in size to his own, massive and filled with her things. It occurred to him that there was nothing in the common areas of the house that indicated that she lived here at all. In the two days that he had shared the space, he hadn’t seen a single thing out of place. A book left on a side table. A teacup. A shawl.
Hell, Cate produced trails of items throughout the Scottish keep, as though she were leaving breadcrumbs in the forest. He’d just assumed all women did the same.
The third floor was darker than the second, the hallway narrower. He opened the first door to discover what must have been a nursery or a schoolroom at some point, a large room with a lingering scent of wood and slate, golden shafts of afternoon light revealing dust dancing in the space. He closed the door and headed down the dim corridor, where a young maid replaced candles in a nearby sconce.
“Pardon me,” he said, and whether it was the Scots burr or the polite words or the fact that he was nearly two feet taller than she was, he shocked the hell out of the girl, who nearly came off the floor at the sound.
“Your—Your Grace?” she stammered, dropping into a curtsy worthy of a meeting with the Queen.
He smiled down at her, hoping to put her at ease. She shrank back toward the wall. He did the same, to the opposite side, suddenly deeply conscious of the fact that he was so out of place in the narrow space. Wishing he were smaller, as he always did in this godforsaken country, where he threatened to crush furniture like matchsticks.
Pushing the thoughts to the side, Alec returned to the matter at hand. “Which is Miss Lillian’s chamber?”
The girl’s eyes went even wider, and Alec immediately understood. “I am not planning anything nefarious, lass. I’m simply looking for her.”
The girl shook her head. “She’s gone.”
At first, the words did not make sense. “She’s what?”
“Gone,” the girl blurted. “She’s left.”
“When did she leave?”
“This morning, sir.” After their disastrous breakfast.
“When will she be back?”
Those wide eyes gleamed white. “Never, Your Grace.”
Well. He did not like the idea of that. “Show me her chamber.”
She immediately obeyed, walked him down the turning hallway, all the way to the back corner of the house—to the place where the servants’ stairs climbed in narrow twists to their chambers on the upper levels of the house. To such a strange location in the home that he nearly stopped her to repeat his original request, certain he’d terrified the young woman into miscomprehension.
But he hadn’t. She knocked on a barely there door and opened it a crack, immediately leaping back to allow him entry.
“Thank you.”
“You—you’re welcome,” she stuttered, the surprise in her voice leaving Alec hating this country anew, with its ridiculous rules about gratitude and the servant class. A man thanked those who helped him, no matter their station. Hell. Because of their station.
“You are free to go,” he said softly, pushing the door open, revealing Lillian’s quarters, tiny and tucked away, so small that the door did not open all the way, instead catching on the foot of the little bed.
One side of the room shrank beneath a deeply sloped ceiling, beyond which the servants’ stairs climbed, threatening the entire space with a sense of deep, abiding claustrophobia. The sunlight that had streamed into the nursery made the tiny room warm, but that could also have been the result of its contents.
Here were all of Lillian’s things, the breadcrumbs that were missing from the forest of the rest of the house: books piled everywhere; several baskets of needlepoint, filled with threads in a rainbow of colors; a little wooden hammock overflowing with old newspapers; an easel with a half-painted view of tile rooftops and trees in spring—the view that lived beyond the narrow little window that dwarfed the opposite wall.
The bed was covered in blankets and pillows, more than Alec had ever seen on much larger beds, each coverlet in a bright color that seemed to run at odds with the others.
That was, perhaps the most shocking thing about this room—not the size, nor the clutter, nor the fact that it was as far away from the rest of the house as possible, though certainly all those things surprised—but the color. There was so much of it.
It was so different from everything he’d seen of her before.
So opposite the rest of the house she’d decorated according to the latest styles and the demands of myriad ladies’ magazines. Here, in this wild, wonderful space filled with clutter and color and . . .
Stockings.
Alec’s gaze fell to the foot of the bed, where a pair of pretty silk stockings was draped over the plain wood frame, so carelessly that he imagined Lillian had removed the long sheaths of silk with distracted speed.
He would be lying if he said he did not pause for a moment to consider such an action, Lily one foot up on that colorful bed, untying the little white ribbons at the tops of the stockings and rolling them down her legs, tossing them over the rail before tossing herself into the pillows to rest.
Not that rest was the first thing he imagined her doing in that bed after removing the stockings. He imagined her there, spread across that little bed, hair wild over her pillow, eyes half-closed, lips parted, beckoning.
To him.
He was instantly hard, and entirely furious with himself. He cleared his throat. He was her guardian. And she was his ward. His missing ward.
And he was in this room to locate her, with or without her stockings.
He shifted at the discomfort of the thought. With. With her stockings.