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hard, angular lines, making her thoughts turn to places she had no business allowing them to wander. Then she realized how very much taller he was than she (and like her sister Georgie, Freddie was quite tall for a lady), and she thought more fully about all the hard, angular lines he must possess in other locales.
    When she felt a flush of heat creeping up her neck, she knew she must absolutely turn her thoughts in a different direction, and quickly lest he notice her blushing. Granted, then he would more than likely simply stare across at the hearth again. It might not be all bad.
    As such, when Lady Upton Grey had arisen from her seat and announced it was time for the ladies to retire to the drawing room and leave the gentlemen to their port, Freddie had found it difficult to repress her unladylike sounds of relief.
    She was not accustomed to spending such an inordinate amount of time pondering the oddities of any gentleman apart from her brother Percy, no matter how dashing and debonair the gentleman in question might appear.
    Appearances, after all, did not tell the whole story of a man. She knew that as well as anyone, after observing the changes in Percy since Papa had died.
    She silently thanked the heavens when, after the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing room, Lord Preston had decided to play cards with three of the others, well away from Freddie and her sister.
    For the remainder of the evening, she had sat with Edie and discussed all manner of things which were quite inane and banal, but which blessedly allowed her mind to wander to things other than Lord Preston’s piercing hazel eyes. How very odd that he preferred to watch a roaring fire than to look upon her.
    Of course it would happen that the first place her mind wandered was back to that room in the blue corridor. Or, to be more specific, to the reliquary itself which was in the room…and to the five thousand pounds Lord Upton Grey seemed certain it would fetch at auction.
    She oughtn’t to allow herself to think about it at all. It wasn’t hers. It belonged to her host. Well, now that he’d given it to Lord Preston, she supposed it belonged to the marquess. Nevertheless, it wasn’t hers, or Mama’s, or any of her sisters’, or even Percy’s.
    It shouldn’t matter to her in the slightest.
    Yet she could think of little else, if anything at all.
    Because of that, she quickly grew bored with sitting in the drawing room and whiling away the hours until she could make her escape.
    Then an absurd idea struck her and, as with all the Bexley-Smythes, once an idea took root in her mind, it was practically murder to remove it. She wanted to go back to the blue corridor, back to the near-empty room housing the golden reliquary, and take a closer look at it.
    She just wanted to determine if it really was a reliquary as she suspected. Or at least that was what she was trying desperately to convince herself of. And if it was one, she wanted to know if it was still holding the relic it had been created to hold. Surely Lord Upton Grey had already checked inside it, but one never knew for certain about these things unless one was willing to perform an investigation.
    There were few individuals Freddie knew who would be better suited to investigating anything. She’d spent years trying to sort out all the various lies and half-truths her siblings had told, all in the name of making certain someone other than the person in question was blamed for some nonsense or another. In more recent years, it had fallen upon her to investigate all the pursuits Percy had undertaken so she could discover in advance what their fate might be. Determining exactly what this treasure was could be entrusted to no one else—particularly since no one should know she was aware of its existence.
    For all she knew, it could be something else other than a reliquary entirely.
    She’d only seen it from a distance, after all, and her glance had been fleeting at best before