Once Upon a Wallflower

“All right,” Nan conceded, “what if you are correct? Then who would have come to Miss Linworth’s chamber and attacked her?”

Mira’s eyes slipped out of focus, and she raised her hand to cover her mouth as a vivid picture of what might have happened that night filled her head. “Mr. Ellerby. They were eloping, so she would have been expecting him, would have allowed him into the room without a fuss.”

“But if they were in love, and eloping, why would he kill her?” Nan prompted softly.

“Perhaps he changed his mind. Or she did. They quarreled, and he struck her. It might even have been an accident. Maybe he did not mean to kill her. And then, to cover his crime, he carried her to the allure and threw her off. Perhaps he hoped that people would think her death an accident. Or perhaps Mr. Ellerby intended to implicate his brother. There is certainly no love lost between them, and Nicholas stands between Jeremy and the Ellerby fortune.”

Mira shivered. She shot a sidelong glance at Nan. “It might have happened.”

“Yes, Miss Mira, I allow it might have happened,” Nan said. “But didn’t you say that someone had been following Miss Linworth about in the days before her death? That someone had broken into her room just that morning? Why would Mr. Ellerby behave like that toward a woman who had agreed to run away with him? That seems to me more like the behavior of a spurned suitor, someone obsessed. Someone obsessed with something—or someone—they cannot have.”

“Quite right, Nan. It does seem strange that Mr. Ellerby would burgle the bedchamber of his betrothed the day of their elopement. So perhaps Miss Linworth had yet another admirer. Someone who learned of her intention to elope with Mr. Ellerby and became angry enough to kill her. Not Nicholas, he does not seem to have cared one whit for her defection. But another man.”

Mira stood, and began pacing the same path Nan had been following earlier. Head bent in concentration, she saw nothing but a blur of blue and cream carpet and her own skirts.

What was she missing? Someone with money had been involved with Bridget and Tegen. And someone, other than Jeremy and Nicholas, must have been infatuated with Miss Linworth. Was Miss Linworth’s unhappy suitor the same man who had been involved with Bridget and Tegen?

All three girls had been killed near Midsummer, so perhaps it was a guest at the annual Blackwell house party. But Bridget, at least, had been intimate with her lover at Christmas, because that was when she conceived her child. Midsummer and Christmas. Why did that seem important? Why was that niggling at the edge of Mira’s mind? Midsummer and Christmas.

Mira froze.

The blood drained from her face in a dizzying rush, and a peculiar buzzing sound rang in her ears.

“Sweet heavens,” she whispered. “Lord Blackwell.”

Mira stood outside of Nicholas’s tower room and rapped on the heavy door with all the force she could muster.

In her hurry, she had braved the allure and gotten caught in a quick rain shower. Now a dripping ringlet slipped across her cheek in a clammy caress. Mira was vividly aware of how bedraggled she must appear, the fine muslin of her dress clinging to the sapphire satin of her underslip, droplets of rainwater sliding down her nose. But she could not wait to share her revelation with Nicholas.

She knocked again, throwing her weight into her movement. Suddenly the door swung wide, and she stumbled into the warm amber haze of Nicholas’s room, colliding with a solid wall of male flesh as she did so.

“Honestly, Mira-mine, this is the second time you have fallen into my arms like this. Either you are quite the forward girl, or you are quite the clumsy one.”

Nicholas’s soft laughter vibrated through Mira’s bones, and the steady thump of his heart beat beneath her fingers.

She raised her head, and a trickle of icy water wended its way under her collar and down the curve of her back. She shivered as she met his moonlight eyes.

“I…I am sorry, my lord,” she stammered, struggling to break the spell of his gaze and remember why she had come. “I need to speak with you. I have the most alarming news.”

Nicholas quirked his eyebrows in interest, reaching out a finger to lightly brush the raindrops from her eyelashes. Mira’s eyes blinked shut at the gentle touch, and another shiver gripped her.