Free The Heiress by Lynsay Sands Page B

but dancing with a dead man while having the most ridiculous sexual fantasies about Suzette. All this while waiting to be able to slip out of the house undiscovered. Oh yes, guilt—and many other emotions—made a man do foolish things.
    “Please, Suzette. Can we not at least hear him out?” Lisa pleaded.
    There was a moment of silence and then Suzette answered, her voice exasperated, “Very well, but only because Christiana is stuck with him now.”
    “I knew it could not have been all pretense when you were courting Christiana,” Lisa said happily, her voice fading as they apparently, finally, moved away from the door.
    Daniel pressed his ear to the door to listen as the muffled voices grew fainter. Once he could no longer hear them, he waited another moment to be sure they hadn’t just fallen briefly silent, then reached for the doorknob and eased the door open. After sticking his head out to glance both ways to be sure the hallway truly was empty, he finally started out into the hall with his burden, only to stop after one step and back into the room again as a door opened up in the hall.
    Grinding his teeth together, Daniel eased the door almost closed and stood peering through the narrow crack until the maid who had been sleeping in the bedroom connected to the master bedroom appeared. Christiana’s maid was his guess, and he watched impatiently as she walked by in the direction of the stairs. She moved as silently as a sylph and Daniel frowned to himself as he realized he wouldn’t know when she had cleared the stairs and it was safe to exit. Sighing, he leaned his shoulder against the wall beside the door and started to count slowly to one hundred, sure it couldn’t take longer than that for her to reach and descend the stairs and then make her way up the hall toward the servant’s section of the house.
    Daniel grew tired of the exercise by the time he reached fifty, but made himself continue to seventy-five before pulling the door open and easing his head out to peer about again. A gusty sigh of relief slipped from him when he saw the way was clear, and he hurried out into the hall, making for the stairs. He even reached them, but it was as far as he got before the sound of a door opening in the hallway below made him freeze. Adrenaline rushing through his veins, he peered over the railing in time to see Suzette appear below him. She was alone and walking at a quick clip.
    Cursing under his breath, Daniel turned and hurried back up the hall wondering why the devil Richard hadn’t kept the woman preoccupied longer. He almost went to a different room than the one he’d just exited, but didn’t know which room would offer a safe haven. Daniel suspected the room he’d been in was the one Lisa was occupying while here, but that meant Suzette’s could be any of the other rooms and with his luck that would be whichever one he chose to duck into. In the end, he decided to return to the original room as the only relatively safe haven at the moment. Once Suzette went into her own room, he would then have to get out of Lisa’s quickly though, because with his luck, she would soon follow her sister upstairs.
    Cursing George and even Richard for this ridiculous predicament, Daniel ducked into the room he thought was Lisa’s and eased the door almost closed so he could watch to see which room Suzette went into. It simply wouldn’t do if he started to leave, needed to find a new hiding spot to avoid Lisa and ducked into Suzette’s room by accident to escape the girl.
    Daniel had the door open a bare sliver, just enough to see the length of this end of the hall to the top of the stairs. He found himself smiling for absolutely no reason he could think of when Suzette’s head came into view as she mounted the stairs. It was replaced with surprise when her upper body came into view and he noted the large damp patch on the front of her pale muslin gown. But that surprise was replaced with interest as he noted the way