The Duchess Hunt by Jennifer Haymore

her to watch his broad, wool-covered shoulders recede into
the darkness, her heart galloping again.

 
    Chapter
Three

    Simon and Sam woke at dawn the next
morning to search the dower house. As Esme had said, everything was in its
place, with no sign of a struggle or anything untoward – besides the empty safe
and the items missing from it.
    After breakfast, Esme and Sarah joined
them to continue the search, while Theo and Mark rode to question the
villagers.
    From the moment Sarah walked through the
door of the dower house, Simon’s awareness of her sharpened, honing in on the
small things about her he found so fascinating. The fresh scent of her, like a
meadow after a spring rain. The curve of her waist, the rise and fall of her
bosom, the pale turn of her ankle when her skirt lifted slightly as she leaned
over something. Her pink lips pursed in concentration as she filed through a
sheaf of papers. The way black curls kept falling over her eyes… how his
fingers itched to smooth the hair back, tuck it behind her ear.
    When he’d touched her last night, felt the
soft flesh of her chin pressing against his fingertips, his body had hardened
and his cock had stirred, straining against the material of his pantaloons.
He’d looked into those wide blue eyes, had studied the contrast of her dark
lashes and brows against her porcelain skin, and he had grown uncomfortably
hard. He’d wanted to brush his fingers over the slant of her cheekbones, press
his lips to that soft, pink mouth, lay her down on the bench…
    Hell.
    He wished that part of him that had become
so wildly attracted to Sarah Osborne would retreat. This was neither the time
nor the place, and as much as his body told him otherwise, Sarah was most
certainly not the woman.
    And, for God’s sake, his mother was
missing.
    They were all in the duchess’s bedchamber,
Sarah and Esme going through the bedside tables while Simon and Sam searched
their mother’s desk drawers, when Sarah said, “Ooh. They didn’t take all the
jewelry, then.”
    Simon turned to see her holding up
something small between her thumb and forefinger. He frowned. “What is it?”
    “It’s a ring,” she said. They all gathered
around to see the object she transferred to her palm so they could view it more
clearly.
    “Mother’s ring.” He gazed at the
diamond-encrusted gold. She never took it off – hadn’t since the day his father
had given it to her as a wedding gift. Simon’s grandfather had purchased the
ring for his grandmother on a long-ago trip to the Continent.
    After a long silence in which no one
moved, Esme asked warily, “Why is it not on her finger?”
    “Perhaps she removed it before retiring at
night?” Sarah suggested. “It was in her bedside table.”
    “Although her bed is made,” Sam said, “so
we know she wasn’t forcefully taken from it.”
    “She could have been… taken… just before
she went to bed.” Esme nearly garbled the word
taken
. “Everything is laid out on her dressing table as if she was
preparing for bed.”
    That was true. There was a basin full of
water and soap scum, long since grown cold. A cosmetics jar was open on the
dressing table, and the duchess’s brush had strands of hair in its bristles as
if she’d just finished combing her hair.
    “Yes,” Sam agreed. “Though if she was
removed from this house against her will, she didn’t put up much of a struggle.
If she had, things wouldn’t be so orderly.”
    “And yet if she knew she would be
leaving,” Sarah mused, “she wouldn’t have been preparing for bed.”
    “Perhaps the person she left the dower
house with was someone she knew,” Simon said.
    “Oh, that doesn’t help at all,” Esme
whispered. “She is acquainted with
everyone
.”
    “It does narrow the field a bit, though.”
Simon took the ring from Sarah’s open hand and slipped it into his pocket.
“I’ll keep it safe until she returns to us.”
    Simon met Sarah’s gaze. He stared into her
lovely