Bound By Passion: No Desire Denied / One More Kiss / Second-Chance Seduction. Cara Summers

television.”

      “Reid tells me that you think the clue to the location of Eleanor’s necklace is in the painting,” Daryl said.

      Nell moved so she could stand directly beneath the portrait. As she passed the second whiteboard that Daryl had used to sketch out the time line of events, she gave it a glance and once more experienced that little tug on her memory that she’d experienced earlier in the evening, but whatever was lingering at the edge of her mind stayed there. Shifting her gaze to Eleanor, she tried to focus.

      Finding the necklace had to be at the top of her priority list. “She was so careful hiding the two earrings. She wanted them to be eventually found. So she had to have left clues.”

      “Cam is sure that’s why someone was paying those nocturnal visits to our library six months ago,” Vi said. “Trying to find those clues before Adair found the first earring.”

      “The stone arch is definitely in the portrait,” Daryl said. “But what about the cave in the cliff face where Duncan and Piper found the second earring?”

      He was right, Nell thought with a sinking heart. In the beats of silence that followed Daryl’s comment, she waited for Reid to say something. Anything. When he didn’t, the little band of pain tightened around her heart.

      The necklace, she lectured herself. Plot before subplot. But no matter how hard she stared at the portrait, she couldn’t make the cliffs appear. If Eleanor was seated in the gazebo as her father had always insisted she was, there was no way to fit the cliffs in the background.

      “If she left the jewels behind in different places, maybe she didn’t feel the need to put the clues all in the portrait,” Vi said. “Maybe that’s why our nighttime visitor spent so much time in the library.”

      No one said a word, but Nell was sure they were all thinking the same thing. If there was a clue in the library, discovering it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Someone had spent six months working there and had come up empty.

      A wave of exhaustion suddenly hit Nell. An arm went around her shoulders. Not Reid’s but her aunt Vi’s.

      “We need to sleep on it,” Vi said as she drew Nell toward the door. “Let our subconscious minds sort through it. Things will be better in the morning.”

      They’d better be, Nell thought. Then she remembered the notes she’d tucked into her fantasy box, and her tiredness began to fade. She was going to find Eleanor’s necklace by sundown tomorrow.

      And she was going to seduce Reid Sutherland tonight, just not in the garden. Yet.

      * * *

      REID STOOD ON the balcony of his room, his hands gripping the stone railing like a lifeline. He’d stepped out because it was as far away as he could get from the connecting door to Nell’s bedroom. The cold shower he’d already taken hadn’t done a thing to lessen his desire. While the water had poured down on him, he had reviewed the reasons why it would be a mistake to go to her. She needed sleep badly. He needed some distance to regain his perspective. Making love to her again would only increase her expectation that he could give her something that he was incapable of. He didn’t want to hurt her more than he already had. Etcetera, etcetera and so forth.

      Cut the crap, Sutherland. The real reason you’re holding on to the railing like a lifeline is because you want more than to make love to her again. You simply want to be with her. To lie beside her and hold her. To talk to her. Not just about the case or the sapphires. He wanted to know more about her. What she’d shared with him beneath the stone arch had only made him more curious.

      Pillow talk. It was an old-fashioned and clichéd term that his mother had used to describe one of the joys of her marriage to A.D. The fact that he could envision himself doing it with Nell scared the hell out of him. Spending the night with a woman had been near the top of his never-do list. He’d never brought one to his home because he valued the freedom, the flexibility to leave before morning. Staying the night built the kind of intimacy he’d never desired.

      With Nell, he wanted to spend the night, to wake in the morning holding her close, to see her face in the light of a new day. He wanted intimacy.

      Damn her. No other woman had made him want more than he could have.

      Lifting his hands from the stone railing, he found that his fingers had gone numb from the tightness of his grip. He had to think of something else. Vi had been right. He needed to sleep. While he slept, perhaps his unconscious mind would let him know what to do about Nell.

      But the thought of going to an empty bed kept him lingering on the balcony. The night was so quiet that he could hear individual waves licking the rocks along the shore. Flexing his fingers, he shifted his focus to the gardens that stretched from beneath his balcony to the stone arch and the hillside in one direction and the lake in the other.

      The stone arch was clearly visible in the floodlights, and the moon spilled enough light to make out the tops of the trees and the shadowy paths that wound through the gardens. Nell was so sure that Eleanor had left clues in the painting, but Daryl had been dead-on. The cliff face was on the opposite side of the castle from the gardens. If Eleanor had intended to leave clues to the location of the sapphires in the painting, she’d left a big one out.

      And if he stayed on his balcony all night, he definitely wouldn’t be at the top of his game tomorrow. He was about to turn and head for bed when his cell phone rang. A quick glance at the caller ID told him that it was Cam. He must have news.

      “Problem or favor?” Reid asked.

      “Neither. Adair and I discovered something...curious.”

      Reid knew his brother well enough—Cam wouldn’t call in the middle of the night unless he thought it was important. Aware of how sound could carry over water, he stepped back into his bedroom and slid the balcony doors shut. “Tell me.”

      “It was Adair’s idea,” Cam said. “Mom’s been in the library ever since she got permission to visit the Campbell estate, and A.D.’s been in the gardens. Neither one of them has gotten a tour of the castle, so this afternoon Adair convinced the housekeeper to give us one.”

      “You found something on our Gwendolen,” Reid said.

      “Not exactly. We learned the estate has fallen on hard times. The story in the village is that it started to decline about two hundred years ago—just about the time of Angus and Eleanor’s flight to the New World. Due to the lack of a male heir in Eleanor’s generation, the castle and the estate went to a cousin, but the money just wasn’t there. The present housekeeper says that her mother worked here after the Second World War when most of the furniture was sold or taken by debt collectors. She’s still alive, and we’re going to visit her first thing in the morning. But it’s what we didn’t find on our tour that’s curious.”

      “What did you not find on your tour?”

      “About the only things that didn’t get sold are a series of portraits in the upstairs ballroom. It’s a regular rogues’ gallery of Campbell heirs and family members. Each generation has a family portrait with the male heir and his wife and children. The last one has Eleanor in it—the same long blond hair. The housekeeper says the family wouldn’t sell them, but it’s more likely that the pictures wouldn’t be of much value to anyone but the Campbells.”

      It was unlike Cam to take so long in getting to the point, and that fact alone had Reid’s curiosity growing.

      “The thing is, none of the wives are wearing the sapphires—not even Eleanor’s mother,” he said. “Adair’s been nagging me ever since we left the ballroom to call you about it. She says that the sapphires should be in the paintings, and she claims their conspicuous absence means that Deanna Lewis might be right. The sapphires were not Eleanor’s dowry because they never belonged to the Campbells.”

      “There’s certainly an argument to be made for that theory,” Reid said. In his mind he could hear Nell making it. If the Campbells had been in legitimate possession of the Stuart sapphires,