This time, her pat was more of a stroke along his thigh. “I am. I love books. I love that you used your disability as inspiration for the nurturing of your intellect.”

Love. Abigail Abbott had used the word love, and in connection with Stephen’s accursed knee. Perhaps the infernal letters of doom had best stay hidden for a good long while.

“You developed your inquiry business on the strength of a young woman’s rotten experience with romance. I don’t like that, but I admire it.”

Wodin rose and put his chin on her knee again.

“Does he want to go out?”

The bloody dog wants to steal you away from me. “He can go out whenever he pleases. I fashioned a swinging door off the pantry, like a hinged portcullis. Constance’s cats and Wodin are free to visit the garden as they need to. Please tell me the rest of what you know about the letters, Abigail, or I will succumb to the lure of my impure thoughts.”

Her next stroke along his thigh—a caress, really—began an inch higher. “Impure thoughts?”

His thoughts regarding Abigail were both pure and impure. She’d lost a child, for God’s sake, grieved in solitude, and climbed from a pit of sorrow to fashion a life on her own terms. She solved other people’s delicate problems with a combination of cunning, tenacity, and discretion.

That she was as physically attractive as she was formidable created a tangle of esteem, desire, curiosity, and some vague yearning Stephen could not name in any language.

“Lustful thoughts,” he said, petting her knee. “Naughty, delicious, naked, wild, lascivious, hot, erotic…Trifle with me, Abigail, please.”

He was growing aroused, under his brother’s roof, the parlor door open, and the damned dog giving him censorious looks.

“I want to be alone with you,” he muttered, stealing another kiss. “I miss you. I dream of you, and any minute, my darling sister-in-law will march in here, a pair of smirking blond footmen pushing the tea cart behind her. I will die a thousand deaths of frustrated longing while swilling scandal broth and getting biscuit crumbs on my cravat.”

Abigail gave his knee the most luscious, maddening squeeze, and then sat back. “Now is not the time or the place for your courting nonsense, my lord. We face a conundrum.”

Where to swive without being interrupted was always a puzzle. “We do?”

“If I don’t have those letters and Stapleton doesn’t have them, who does? How did that person obtain them, and what will he do with them? Why steal the letters in the first place when they are merely sentimental effusions, years old, and they don’t even mention me by name?”