Awakening The Shy Miss. Bronwyn Scott

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      ‘Are you feeling all right, dear?’ Her mother gave her a concerned look. She had to be careful here or her high-strung mother would pester her all night if she thought anything was wrong.

      Evie answered with a sip of her water. She couldn’t plausibly conceive of answering that question with any amount of truth. It would give her mother a fit if she knew what Evie had spent dinner thinking about. Evie had learned long ago to keep her imagination to herself.

      Her mother rose from the table and smiled at her father. ‘Why don’t we all move into the sitting room? Mrs Brooks has left the doors open to catch the breeze.’ To Evie, she said, ‘I have a letter from one of your sisters.’ She retrieved a letter from a pocket in her skirt and smiled as if she held a great prize. If it was from Diana, maybe she did. Diana had married two years ago to an earl in Cornwall and promptly popped out an heir. Evie would bet money the contents of the letter held news of a spare arriving in the spring. If the letter was from her other sister, Gwen, perhaps the letter was less of a prize. Gwen had married a baronet’s second son who aspired to be a don at Oxford. Evie had sewn both of their wedding gowns.

      This had become the routine of their evenings since her sisters had gone. The three of them would eat, would go into the sitting room. Her father would read to them from one of his current history interests, her mother would read any interesting letters and Evie would stitch on her latest project. Tonight it wasn’t enough. How could she go from the heat, the dust, the masculinity of the excavation site to her mother’s sitting room? To letters about someone else’s life? How could she, when her head was full of Andrew and a Russian Prince with a hot touch? Her life had suddenly become interesting on its own without any help from her sisters.

      She made her excuses at the stairs. ‘I think I will go up instead. I am tired,’ she lied with a wan smile. ‘I might write a note to May before I go to bed.’ That part was true. May and Beatrice would know what to make of her mind’s tendency to compare the two men.

      But it was difficult to concentrate on writing the letter. Her mind kept drifting back to the day and all she’d seen—a thousand-year-old comb and a white pavilion where even now, as the summer moon rose, a dark-haired man might be preparing for bed. It did not occur to her until she climbed into her own bed that she hadn’t once wondered about Andrew in his. Those feelings would come, she told herself. Of course they would come. How could they not? She’d been infatuated with Andrew for ages. It was entirely different with the Prince. Dimitri was exciting and new, she’d not had time to think about him, to adjust to him, to get used to him. She didn’t know what to expect, whereas her infatuation with Andrew was a well-travelled path.

      There was likely no harm in finding Dimitri exciting and new. She might as well enjoy the novelty of such a fantasy while it lasted. He would leave and, besides, he was a prince and she was Evie. There was certainly no future there no matter how rousing his touch or how hot his eyes. But for a little while, Madame Fortune was finally smiling on her.

      * * *

      Fortune was finally favouring him. Andrew poured himself a brandy in the dark quiet of his study. He was treating himself to a glass of the good stuff tonight. He’d known from the start, uniting himself with Dimitri Petrovich would be a good idea and now he could turn that association into a cash crop of artefacts. The comb Evie had told him about was a good start, a sign of more to come.

      He took up his seat in front of the cold hearth, content to sit in the dark and think. He’d been staggered by the amount of money a museum had paid the Prince for that mosaic in Herculaneum and again when the Prince had sold some of the artefacts from the excavation outside Athens.

      The money was pocket change to a man of the Prince’s wealth, but Andrew had a broader vision in mind. If a museum would pay those sums, how much more would private buyers pay for the privilege to possess a piece of authentic history? That was the real market, in Andrew’s mind. The Prince was rankly opposed to that option. Private collections kept artefacts hidden from the public. In the Prince’s mind, museums were the public’s gateway to understanding and accessing their past. Andrew didn’t care. Everything had a price, even the past, and he would sell to the highest bidder.

      History could be very lucrative, as long as the Prince dug up something of merit. That was the risk. But it was a risk that cost him nothing but time. The site might not prove to be fertile. He had great faith in the Prince. The Prince understood what to look for and the Prince knew why certain items had value, why they appealed to people. Once the Prince dug up something of merit, the next step would be to get the right clientele out to the site. That’s where Evie’s drawings came in to play. He could use them as advertising to the right clientele, powerful, rich men. After that, he had another plan for those drawings that would further line his pockets. All he had to do was flirt a little with Evie, keep her dangling, keep her willing to please, which shouldn’t be hard to do if the Prince was right about her affections—and he had to make sure the Prince didn’t find out about his plans until it was too late. Once the Prince returned to Kuban, there would be nothing he could do about it. Andrew just had to wait him out until October. Andrew smiled in the dark. This was turning out well, better than expected.

      * * *

      Things were going better than expected, but that didn’t mean they were easy. Dimitri stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders to get the kinks out of his neck. He’d spent most of the day on his hands and knees painstakingly brushing off what he hoped were tiles in General Lucius Artorious’s dining room. It was looking promising. Now that they’d made it to the centre of the room, an elegant mosaic was starting to emerge in the shape of a rose embedded in the floor and the team had found pieces of pottery that had been taken over to Evie with hastily scribbled notes for cataloguing.

      Ah. Evie. She’d been a godsend. He let his gaze linger on her at a distance, her head bent over her work, her hand moving tirelessly, her concentration unbreakable. Did she know he spent far too much of his days watching her? Far too much of his time wondering about her—about her life in West Sussex? Aside from his growing intrigue with her, bringing her on to draw had been a good business decision. Her work was excellent, her attention to detail as focused as her drawings had led him to believe. And there were actually items for her to draw. Progress was being made that bore out his research. Andrew had not been wrong when he’d suggested a Roman general’s villa was here in the rolling hills of West Sussex and that information was paying off in spades.

      His gaze found Evie at her table and he smiled. Evie’s pile of drawings grew by the day, drawings that would serve as illustrations in the book he would put together on the excavation, as well as drawings he would archive for the museum in Kuban. She made not just one copy, but three of the same item, each one a brilliant replica, each one a product of her patience. She had an aptitude for the art and for the organisation of it. Stefon, impressed, had told him how Evie had overhauled their usual organisation system and made it more efficient.

      She made his own days more efficient too in ways she probably didn’t realise. Did she know how much he looked forward to their brief conferences that started and ended each day? He liked the routine of that—of looking forward to talking with her at the beginning of the day when everything was fresh and new. They would talk about the prospects for the day, what he hoped to find, hoped to do. To speak his hopes out loud gave his day structure. They would end the day much the same way: a brief discussion of whether or not those hopes had materialised. It was a good way to put the day to bed.

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