Page 85 of The Rogue’s Countess

Phoebe kissed her friend goodbye once more than walked away. As always, she felt better after having shared her problems with her friend. It was the one thing Phoebe

missed the most about Lawrence. He had been her confidant when she had nowhere else to turn. The thought made her wince as she feared she would need his counsel in the very near future.

Chapter 22

Gideon entered Chelmsford House with a smile on his face. Laying his hat and cane on the entryway table, he walked quickly toward the stairs, his gift for Phoebe in his coat pocket. Before leaving to visit his club this morning, Gideon had gone through the connecting doors of their rooms to check on her. She’d still been asleep, and he’d studied her as she slept, memorizing the softness of her profile and the full, lush curves of her beneath the sheets.

Eager to give her the present he’d bought for her and to gauge her reaction to his note, Gideon took the steps two at a time and strode down the hall to her room. He rapped on the door with his knuckles and waited a moment. When there was no response, he knocked again. Concerned when his second knock received no answer, Gideon slowly opened the door of her room.

As he stepped across the threshold, he frowned in puzzlement. Phoebe’s chifforobe doors were flung wide open, and her peignoir hung haphazardly off of the bed. His wife was not overly meticulous, but he’d never seen her bed chamber in such a state of disorder. It was as if she’d ransacked the room looking for something. Gideon’s gaze fell on the breakfast tray with its untouched meal. Slowly crossing the floor to the table, he saw his note to her was unopened.

A sense of foreboding swept over him as his gaze continued to survey the chaotic state of Phoebe’s room. Everything about the scene in front of him said something was wrong. He knew it as surely as he knew how deeply he loved his wife. It was as if she’d received some terrible news and dressed at a frenetic, frantic pace to leave as quickly as she could.

For Phoebe to leave her room in shambles meant the news she’d received had been so momentous that it had thrown her into a state of mental distress. Gideon shoved his hand through his hair, and a sense of impending doom coiled its way around his chest. The invisible vise continued to tighten as his gaze continued to scan the room. There had to be some clue as to what had incited Phoebe’s frenzied state.

Gideon quickly moved to her dressing table to see if she’d dropped something that would give him a clue as to what had happened. Her brush lay haphazardly near the edge of her dressing table, while the box that held hatpins was opened and two pins were thrown carelessly on the table. But there was nothing that might have been the catalyst for the havoc in her room. Crossing the floor to the chifforobe, he briefly glanced at the row of drawers inside the furniture. One drawer was still open and hung at an odd slant as if Phoebe had tried to push it close then gave up the struggle to adjust it. A dainty stocking dangled carelessly over the side of the drawer, but he ignored it. Instead, Gideon fixed his gaze on the dresses in the large compartment next to the tower of drawers. As if he would find answers to his questions, Gideon jerked two gowns apart. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, and with a sense of hopeless frustration, he shoved them aside and moved on to the next two. As he forcibly pushed one dress after another to the opposite side of the wardrobe, they created small blasts of air, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw something flutter down to the floor.

Gideon’s gaze dropped to see a piece of paper that had danced its way under the chifforobe until only a small piece of it was showing. Tension surged through him as his fingers carefully pulled the paper out from under the furniture. The moment he read the first line of the note, he froze.

At first glance, it was impossible for him to comprehend the words written on paper, and he was forced to read the note again. Each time he read one of the endearments the sender had used, it was as if they were nails being hammered into his body. She had a lover. No. He refused to believe that.

Whoever Lawrence was, the man was important to her, but Gideon couldn’t believe the writer of the note could be Phoebe’s lover. She could never have responded to him the way she had in every passionate moment they’d shared since they’d exchanged their vows. Every time he’d claimed her as his, Phoebe had cried out his name with passion, desire, and need. It defied logic that she had a lover with the way she’d responded to Gideon’s every caress.

Even before they were wed, she’d given herself to him with an abandon that made it difficult to believe she had a lover. In the back of his mind, a voice called him a fool to think otherwise. Gideon quickly crushed the voice into silence. Seconds later, the voice reared its ugly head to jeer at him for thinking he could rationalize the note. A damning note the voice used as evidence with every disavowal Gideon considered as he tried to rationalize and explain away the letter’s meaning.

Worse, it had been this note she’d chosen to open first—not his. The knowledge cut so deep it was as if someone had gutted him with one stroke of a butcher’s knife. His gaze returned to the endearments written on the paper he was holding. Words boldly declaring love and affection for his wife. Jealousy and rage erupted inside him as images he didn’t want to consider forced their way into his head.

The intensity of the emotion was so great that if the writer of the note had been standing in the same room, Gideon would not hesitate to strangle the man. Every inch of him was tight and rigid as his hand crumpled the note in his fist. From deep inside him, a dark roar of anger rose up and rolled out of his throat in a visceral response to the pain slicing into every inch of him.

The agony slamming into him was almost crippling as his gaze searched for something to vent his anger on. The closest physical object in reach to use as a release for his wrath was the chifforobe. Fury pounded its way through his muscles as he slammed one of the doors of the wardrobe closed.

It crashed violently into the frame of the furniture before it swung outward with equal force. The force of the door crashing into the chifforobe made the entire piece of furniture shudder. As the door swung outward again, it brushed against the open drawer with its feminine undergarments. Already three-quarters of the way open and at an odd angle, the drawer teetered for a moment from the force of the door hitting it before crashing downward.

The wardrobe door had swung inward again and knocked the drawer off its downward trajectory. In a loud crash, it landed upside down at an angle that propped it up against the bottom portion of the wardrobe and spilled its contents onto the floor. Gideon glared at the feminine garments peeking out from under the drawer before he whirled away and strode toward the door.

He was almost halfway out the door when something odd about the drawer brought him to an abrupt halt. Gideon turned around and studied the drawer for a moment, trying to determine what had made him hesitate to leave Phoebe’s bedroom. Slowly moving forward, he tilted his head slightly as his brain registered that there was a bundle of papers lying beneath the garments that had been in the drawer. The papers were almost completely hidden by the frothy underwear, but it was the hard outline of their solid form that had caught his attention.

More letters? Without thinking twice, he bent to pull the papers out from under the clothing. The bundle was too large to be letters, and Gideon frowned as he turned over the top sheet of blank paper. The page beneath it was filled with line after line of blue ink. He began to read, and the anger he’d experienced only moments before evolved into a cold rage.

All this time, she’d been making him out to be a wastrel in the Currer Chronicles. Christ Jesus, even the bumblebees on the cake last night. The performance of regret and remorse had been remarkable. She’d actually convinced him that her regret for adding the bumblebees to the cake was genuine. Not even Edith had ever manipulated him as skillfully as Phoebe had.

“Damn her,” he snarled. “Damn her to hell.”

Whirling around on his heel, Gideon strode out of Phoebe’s room. As he made his way downstairs to the library, the pain of her betrayal and lies intensified with each step he took. He’d been a fool, and worst of all, despite his rage, a part of him wanted to believe there was an explanation for the evidence in his hands.

§ § §

Gideon tossed down a gulp of his third glass of cognac as if it were a beer he’d bought in a disreputable pub. Where was she? He had no idea what time Phoebe had left, but it was almost noon. Was she in her lover’s arms at this very moment? Was Phoebe giving herself to the bastard as passionately as she’d given herself to him? A light rap on the open door of the library made him jerk in surprise, and he spun around to see his mother standing in the doorway. A frown of disapproval creased her brow as she arched her eyebrows at him.

“Is it not a bit early for that?

Lady Wrotham nodded toward the snifter in hand. Gideon tossed the remaining liquid down his throat in a defiant move then walked to the liquor cart to pour more cognac into his snifter.

“Was there something you wanted, Mama?”

“I was wondering if you’d seen Phoebe this morning? I wanted to see how she was feeling.” The marchioness’s words made Gideon snort loudly with disgust.

“My wife is out at the moment.”