After she was done laughing so hard that her throat began to ache, she settled down to the best breakfast of her life. He did start to explain, but she knew well enough how tiresome these loonies could be when encouraged to enlarge on their fancies—she’d been raised by Mum, after all—so she waved him off and concentrated on her food.
Food? No, that was too ordinary a word for what they’d brought her. Folks in the Green would call it relishing, but she found herself thinking of words she’d never had the chance to use, words from the books she’d used to read to Mum: ambrosial, delectable, nectarous. She didn’t waste any time admiring it; the point was to get it into her stomach before St. Maur decided he’d like a bite himself.
Not a hard task, that. She started with the gooseberry scones, heaping them with clotted cream; moved on to toast points with butter and strawberry jam; then to the boiled eggs and a sausage seasoned with something grassy smelling and delicious. The coffee she drank down straightaway, the tea she sipped as she went, and the chocolate—oh heavenly mother, the chocolate she put down after a single mouthful. She knew an unwise idea when she tasted one.
All through this feast, she ignored St. Maur. And all through it, he sat there watching her as though she hadn’t just called him a madman and told him to hush. She’d seen cats with such patience, biding their time by the mouse hole, occasionally licking themselves to keep their pretty coats clean. But his expression took on a darker edge as the meal drew on. She began to sense that his fancy manners were only a mask—one a girl would be wise to leave undisturbed.
Finally, when not a crumb remained to occupy her, she wiped off her fingers and folded up the napkin—real embroidered linen, but with him watching, she could hardly pocket it—and took a deep breath. “Well. I may have to roll myself home, but I’ll go with a smile.”
“You didn’t like the chocolate?” The darkness edged his voice now, too. Something had displeased him. She wouldn’t bother to guess at what.
She lifted her chin. “No, I didn’t.” The chocolate tasted of heaven and if she finished it, she’d memorize that taste and then spend the rest of her life hungering for more. She didn’t like wanting what she couldn’t have, but she couldn’t want what she didn’t know about.
Which was why, she thought as she rose, it was best to be leaving as soon as possible. She just needed to get him out of the room a minute so she could collect her—well, more accurately his—things. “I’ll be going,” she said, “after a quick”—she cleared her throat—”visit with a chamber pot.”
He stood as well. “Certainly. But before you go, I hope you’ll permit me the chance to show you the house.”
He spoke as courteously as though he were dealing with a lady of his own kind. It got annoying, after a while, since it was so clearly a show. “I can tell you exactly what your house looks like,” she said. “I broke into it last night, and I’ll warn you, the lock on your garden gate is as shoddy as cheap tin. The rest seemed nice enough to feed a few counties for the summer, and that’s all there is to it.”
He nodded. “One thing, then. I’d like to show you one thing before you go.”
She hoped it wasn’t a weapon. “You’re not one of those dangerous lunatics, like?”
His mouth quirked as though he were biting back a smile. “I do hope not. If I returned your knife to you, would you feel safer?”
“And the gun,” she said promptly. She needed to get that back to Brennan.
But no: “I’ll save the pistol for your next visit,” he said and turned on his heel. “Two minutes, Nell. I’ll be waiting outside.”
He shut the door behind him. She raced back to the mattress and hauled out the lace. By an inch, the book didn’t fit in the inner pocket of her jacket, the candlesticks, either. Bloody hell. She put them back in their proper places and turned on her heel to snatch the linen napkin from the table—and the fork and knife, too; they felt heavy enough to be silver. A precious minute was wasted as she tested the knife on the embroidered stool, but the cloth proved too thick to cut.
The tour of the house: she’d be able to snatch up a few things along the way. Stuffing the cutlery into her pocket, she hurried out into the hall.
He was standing a few paces down the way, idly examining a stone bust of some ugly, big-nosed man in a wig. “Looks just like you,” she said as she caught up to him.
“You’re very kind,” he said dryly, walking onward.
After a brief hesitation, she followed. He moved smoothly as a tomcat, a sort of easy prowl, his hands in his pockets, the most glossy, expensive gentleman she’d ever seen in the flesh. Somebody should take his photograph. He’d certainly sell well to the ladies.
He glanced over his shoulder and caught her staring. She scowled and looked away—then peered harder around her.
For all her bluster, she’d been too panicked last night to absorb her surroundings in detail. The corridor was just … infamously nice. The wood paneling had a carved trim. The carpet was a fine weave of gold flowers on a background of auburn and navy. Brass sconces gleamed. The air held a mix of waxes and lemony balms, and it smelled more than clean; it smelled like something you’d want to buy, a scent to lull you to sleep on nights when worries had you tossing.
No wonder he walked so lazily. Probably he’d never known a moment’s worry.
To her irritation, she saw nothing small enough to be pocketed. “What’s this thing you want to show me?”
“A letter or two.”
“A letter?” She slanted him a glance. “I’d hoped for something a touch more exciting.” Or valuable.
He shrugged. “You’ll find them interesting.”
“I doubt it.”
He came to a stop, evidently struck by a thought. “I do beg your pardon. If you can’t read—”
“I can read,” she cut in. “And I’ll tell you why I learned—so nobody would read me something that wasn’t on the page. So don’t think to be pulling that trick.”
He gave her the sort of smile she saw on tired mums with crabby infants: there was no real feeling behind it. “I’m chastened,” he said, and resumed his stroll.
Rolling her eyes, she followed.
They turned a corner and the hall opened into a broad balcony appended on either side by flights of stairs that curved down toward each other. That door down there was probably the exit. “There’s my stop,” she said, making for the stairs.
His hand on her arm halted her. Had he squeezed or tugged, she would have shaken him off and maybe given him a sock in the gut for good measure: she was ready for it. But he didn’t even take proper hold of her. His fingers laid themselves on the spot right above her elbow, a steady, warm touch that somehow stopped her dead.
Queer thought: he had a magic touch to him. She’d bet she wasn’t the first lady he’d caught with two fingers.
“Please,” he said.
She turned back, eyeing him. It had been a long time since somebody had spoken that word to her. She liked the irony that he should be the one to speak it. He looked exactly as the master of this house should—richly dressed, too handsome by half, and radiant with that indefinable air that all rich people seemed to have: a sense of being comfortable, completely at ease, not afraid of anybody or anything.
And why would he be afraid? The world would see in one glance that he mattered.
She had to swallow hard to get the lump out of her throat. Stupid, but he made her feel bittersweet. He probably had chances and possibilities that she didn’t even know existed. He took them for granted, while a girl like her would need to sell her soul to get even a glimpse of them.
“What’s your angle?” she said on a deep breath. “Why are you so interested in the old earl’s bastard? And don’t give me any nonsense.”
He lifted a brow. “Evidently I didn’t make myself clear,” he said. “Nell, you aren’t a bastard.”
Looking at the girl gave Simon a headache. Or perhaps vertigo was the more accurate term. Each time he glanced into her thin, sullen face, he felt his brain waver under the strain of processing the message delivered by his eyes. She was remarkably similar to Lady Katherine—minus a few stone, a few hundred pounds in fashionable clothing and jewelry, and twenty-two years of tender rearing.
To say nothing of the black eye she was sporting. He’d find out who had done that.
He wondered how Kitty would like the knowledge that her twin was a guttersnipe from Bethnal Green. Nell was living proof that cosmetics and high fashion were not required for an Aubyn to be striking. But she also illustrated how very much Kitty’s looks owed to pampering. Both sisters’ eyes were a pleasing dark blue, but they required a complementary color to tip into violet, and Nell’s current outfit—a ridiculously oversized jacket and sagging breeches—suggested that dirty gray was not among these colors. Her spareness emphasized the cheekbones for which Kitty was so admired, but also brought into prominence the cleft chin and square jaw which Kitty so often hid behind her fan.
He could not wait to introduce them to each other. Kitty had been very persuasive when contesting Simon’s bid to have Lady Cornelia declared dead. It had been part of a strategy to strengthen his contestation of the will, and Kitty had been ardent in her opposition. I feel in my heart that she is alive, she’d wept to the judge.
How surprised she would be to learn that she’d been right.
Of course, it remained possible that this girl was an imposter, some by-blow of Rushden’s with the luck to resemble Katherine and the wits to adopt the missing heiress’s name. God knew Cornelia’s disappearance had been very public news sixteen years ago.
On the other hand, did it matter? She looked close enough to Katherine to be her twin, and she certainly could be coached to recite the right memories. Once she was plumped up and put into a Worth or Doucet, nobody with eyes would deny that she was an Aubyn.
At least, not until she opened her mouth.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked him, although it came out rather shrilly, and more along the lines of Ware-yuh takin’ mee.
Well, no one would expect the elocution skills of a six-year-old to have endured hard treatment. And this girl had been treated hard. That was clear enough in the way her eyes darted left and right, as though the hall might disgorge a bandit intent on mischief. He gathered that he might fall into that category, since she also took care to keep a remarkably constant distance from him—a length, he finally realized, just longer than an arm’s reach. She took care to be impossible to grab.
“The library,” he answered. He pondered the wisdom of informing her that she could be calm; he had no intentions of grabbing her at present. Indeed, he was still amazed by the effect she’d had on him last night. Granted, he’d been in a state of undress, which did tend to cast a man’s mind into erotic directions. And she’d squirmed most enthusiastically. But apart from the fact that she smelled like a sewer and was more bones than curves, she was his predecessor’s spawn and looked almost exactly like Kitty. These twin facts should have proved more effective than an ice bucket in chilling his interest.
Yet the attraction thrived. It flourished like a plant in some hot, tropical jungle. He could not quite believe he’d put his mouth to anything so filthy; in the strong morning light, a patch of dirt appeared ingrained on her neck. But there you had it: his interest was not only strategic, but prurient. He felt obscenely curious about her—and about himself, in her presence. Like a man drawn to the edge of a cliff by a suicidal curiosity, he tested himself now: did he want her because she was the heaven-sent answer to a dilemma? Or simply because he could have her—right now, if he liked, in any fashion he chose?
Yesterday he’d thought he’d learned what it meant to be powerless: to be robbed and defeated, comprehensively, by a dead man. The frustration, the humiliation of helplessness, had kept him up long enough to hear the smallest click of an opening door, and the soft fall of a footstep aiming for silence.
Had he wanted comfort; had he desired reassurance; had he required evidence that he was not powerless, after all—he could not have asked for better proof than her. She was a lesson in true vulnerability. She had broken into his home with a revolver so antiquated that only luck had prevented it from discharging accidentally. If, in retaliation, he decided to keep her locked in a room until his servants worked up the courage to object—which would take days, possibly weeks—he still would have nothing to fear.
Let the police be summoned. He would only need to inform them of the circumstances of her entry into his home, and she’d be off to prison in an instant. She was nobody—not yet—and he was the Earl of Rushden.
His predecessor had not managed to deny him all the perquisites of the title, after all. Even near to penniless, he’d still enjoy the privileges of his name, while she—well, she would be truly helpless.
Yet she seemed wholly unaware of her sad state. Not one plea for forgiveness had issued from her mouth. Not even, now that he thought on it, a please.
Come to think of it, he was the only one who’d spoken that word to date.
He laughed under his breath. Of course he was attracted to her—he’d always admired brazen gall.
He stepped ahead of her to open the library door. This gentlemanly reflex earned him a sharp look. She sidled past him into the room, then came to an abrupt stop. “Coo,” he heard her whisper.
So, at least the library impressed her. Long and narrow, it lacked windows thanks to some cheap ancestor who’d feared the window tax. Halfway down its length, twin staircases spiraled up either wall to a narrow walk that ran the length of the room and supported additional bookcases. He supposed it was impressive.
“Here’s a lot of books,” she murmured.
Not as many as there should be. At odd moments, old Rushden’s petty cruelty in selling his wife’s books still astonished Simon. The old bastard had all but given them away simply to make a point—simply to spite the one person who had loved them as much as the countess had.
“I’ve become something of a collector recently,” Simon said. Each and every of the countess’s volumes would one day reside on these shelves again, even if it took a lifetime to regather them.
“You must spend all your time reading,” said the girl.
He laughed. She cut him a peculiar look. “That’s not quite the point,” he said.
“They’re books,” she said flatly. “What other point is there?”
He paused. Actually, it wasn’t a bad question. He might have asked the same, as a boy. He’d lost countless hours to reading, enamored in discovering that the forgotten things—odd, curious facts for which the world no longer had any use—could be wondrous, worthy of attention and care. He’d felt very clever for appreciating them, for pointing out things that even the countess had missed. She’d been generous in her praise. I never thought of it that way. What a brilliant idea, Simon.
Memories of his boyish gratification made him smile now. “I favor the unique,” he said. “Literally. Many of these manuscripts are too rare and delicate to be read.” He deliberately paused. “Although rough handling does have its pleasures.”
She stared blankly. “So you’re keeping them safe for somebody to ruin later?”
Had she missed his innuendo, or was she having him on? The latter possibility intrigued him. One didn’t often think of the poor as having a rich inner world, much less a sense of humor. Their sullen eyes and sallow faces seemed to mask only a well-founded resentment and perhaps—if one believed the nervous talk at dinner parties—visions of the slit throats of their betters.
Come to think of it, humor wasn’t an asset commonly ascribed to anybody outside the beau monde. Even the middling classes appeared from a distance to be dull and despicably moral.
He eyed her as she crossed her arms and looked around. A grubby little thing with keen wits and a sharp tongue. Not at all what he’d expect of a slum rat. She was slighter than Kitty, a touch shorter, narrower through the shoulders—the best a body could do when raised on gruel and water, no doubt. But her throat was long, beautifully slim. The square angle of her jaw looked sharp enough to hurt a finger that pressed too recklessly upon it. Perhaps he should test that theory. She was ignoring him with irritating ease, looking up now at the skylights old Rushden had installed, and her expression—
Her expression stopped his breath. She wore a look of wonder so vivid and alive that he glanced up himself, wanting to see the miracle.
But there were only the skylights, which remained unremarkable.
Absurd to feel disappointed.
He glanced back to her face. Perhaps to her the skylights were miraculous. She hailed, no doubt, from one of those dark and crowded devil’s acres where glass was broken and the sky was hemmed by overhanging hovels. This world must seem entirely foreign. Everything clean, shining, immaculate: all of it strange and new, remaining to be discovered by her.
A curious feeling twisted in his gut. He didn’t quite like it. How absurd that he should be envious, even if only for a moment. Awed by glass and astounded by architecture, she was the simplest explanation of how cathedrals had conned generations into religious sentiments that justified their suffering. She was a naif whose requirements for awe were pitifully low.
He cleared his throat. “Just glass,” he said. But he could not remove his eyes from her. Strangest thought: he wanted her to look at him with that brightness on her face. If he could not feel it himself, then he wanted to stare into it for a while, until it ceased to hurt him.
Her chin came down. She gave a pull of her mouth as though to mock herself, but he caught the lingering effect of her amazement in the smile that she could not bite back. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” she said.
For the space of those six words, she sounded almost well spoken.
This was the second time she’d given him that impression. He considered her narrowly, wondering if she didn’t remember more of the Queen’s English than she let on.
“This whole place is so …” She turned full circle, her bony hands clenching in her shirt. Her fingers were a sallow, sickly shade, her knuckles white, as if she didn’t have enough blood to fill her body. “It’s beautiful,” she said—roughly, quickly, as if the idea embarrassed her.
Which seemed peculiar in itself. To call the room beautiful was only to observe a fact. A great deal of money had been spent in making it so The fine oak paneling on the walls, the carved bookcases, the carpets of French tapestry, the porcelain and objets d’art scattered on the low tables, had been acquired (and, alas, entailed) at great expense by his various predecessors. He knew this for a certainty, since he’d spent the last few days negotiating with an underground antique dealer about how much these items might fetch were they suddenly “lost” into that man’s possession.
He supposed there was no need to lose them now. The thought was bracing. Best get on with it. “As to the letters—”
“Where is that?”
“Pardon?” He followed her look toward a painting hanging over the door. That was the most irritatingly expensive estate with which he’d been saddled. Crumbling old pile, prison of his miserable youth. Somebody should have had the bollocks to knock it down a century ago, long before this whole entail nonsense began—
“Is it real?” she asked.
Puzzled, he turned back to her. “Yes. Paton Park.”
“Where is it?”
“Some godforsaken pocket of Hertfordshire. Why do you ask?”
She visibly hesitated. “It’s …”
He waited a moment longer, but she shrugged and seemed to lose interest. Looking down to her feet, she gave the floor a little kick. “Here’s some fancy.”
The exposed patch of floor was covered in painted tile—Spanish, from the looks of it. Was she going to remark on every feature of the room? “Yes, very nice.”
She smiled faintly. “Nice enough to serve, I reckon.”
Did a note of dryness infect the lady’s voice? He gave her a smile in return, a fine, rueful blend of self-deprecation and deliberate charm. It would go easier for them both if she took a liking to him. “I confess, I normally reserve my attention for the books, not the room in which they’re housed.”
She ran an eye down the bookcases. “You must have a lot of attention, then.”
The reply that leapt to mind gave him pause: it was wholly sexual and thoroughly inappropriate. Nearly he laughed. She was a ragamuffin with holes in her sleeves. Putting his body to hers would be as hygienic as bathing in a wallow.
Perhaps that was part of her charm, though. A taste of primitive perversions.
The other part, naturally, would be the sweet, dark justice of defiling his predecessor’s daughter.
The notion filled him with a warm glow that did not bode well for his chances in the afterlife.
She backed up and dropped into an upholstered reading chair. He felt his brow climb. The violence of her movement and the violent effect it wreaked on her anatomy left no doubt that she was not wearing a corset.
Oh, good God. She wore lad’s breeches; she smelled like tobacco and fish and onions. Of course she wasn’t wearing a corset.
He realized he’d laughed to himself when she gave him another of those looks—wide-eyed, slightly pitying. She really did think him a lunatic. He couldn’t blame her for it. It seemed his brain was going soft.
“So what’s this letter, then?” she squawked.
“Right.” He crossed the room, extracting a copy of Homer’s Odyssey from the shelf. The first of the letters tucked inside was worn soft with time and the repetitive stroke of fingers. The old man had grown increasingly short of attention over the years, but he’d never lost grasp of his twin obsessions: thwarting Simon and finding Cornelia.
Simon had a quick internal debate as he returned to her. If she couldn’t read well, she probably wouldn’t admit it; she’d already made clear that she valued her pride. Yet if she didn’t understand the letters, he’d no doubt that he’d lose her. Her concern for money was matched if not outstripped by her suspicions of him; she’d walk out today without a backward glance and tell herself later that leaving him had been the best way to keep out of prison.
Losing her was not an acceptable outcome. Holding her against her will would be problematic in regard to his larger goal.
He ignored the impatient hand she extended and settled against the edge of a heavy reading table. “The first is from Jane Lovell,” he said.
“Who?”
The light from above was falling across her face at an angle that erased the freckles and the worry line between her brows. She looked girlish. Innocent. He supposed she was innocent in every way that mattered to this moment—which he suddenly sensed was going to be more delicate than he’d imagined.
This brief pang of compassion irritated him. He’d spent sleepless hours last night marveling at his good fortune. She had dropped into his lap like a gift from the gods, and nothing—least of all her—would convince him to waste the opportunity she presented. Compassion was not only unnecessary, then, it was entirely hypocritical.
“I assume she was the woman who raised you,” he said. “But to begin with, she was your mother’s maid. Lady’s maid to the Countess of Rushden.”
“Go on.”
Her face might have been a mask for how little it revealed. He studied her as he continued, alert and ready for the slightest crack in her composure. “She stole you from the nursery. It seems she had an affair with your father—or perhaps not so much an affair as an encounter. By his account, it was not a long-standing arrangement.”
She made a small and indelicate noise, generated in her nose. When her lip twisted, he recognized the noise as contempt. “Encounter,” she said. “I suppose that’s your fancy word for rape.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve never heard it described as such.”
“Sure and you haven’t.”
Her words had the flavor and lilt of a jeer. He smiled in sudden recognition: this situation held a unique, gorgeous irony. Defenseless women were his least favorite type, but if word escaped that he’d held an urchin in his house overnight, nobody would be surprised. Titillated, yes; amazed, no. Up to his old tricks again, society would say, shaking their heads even as they blithely issued invitations to him for dinner.
Cornelia’s own father, in spreading tales of Simon’s exploits, had guaranteed that none of his peers would take Simon to task for misbehaving with her.
The idea inexplicably unnerved him. “Regardless of which word you use, the result was the same,” he said. “In the aftermath, the old earl lost interest in her, and Jane Lovell did not take it well. Indeed, she seems to have lost her wits. For revenge, she took one of the earl’s daughters when she fled. That daughter was named Cornelia.”
She still had him fixed in that flat, unspeaking look. “Not the rarest name.”
“You have a twin sister,” he said. “The resemblance is … extraordinary.”
Not the least of that resemblance lay in the long, haughty nose Nell now stared down. The last flicker of Simon’s doubt winked out. For three seasons, Kitty Aubyn had frightened scores of her fellow debutantes with this look. On Nell’s face, it might have caused a grown man to think twice.
“So,” she said. “You think I was the girl this lady kidnapped.”
“Yes.” He paused, because now wonder was ripping through him, and it was a heady sensation, novel enough that he wanted to savor it.
Cornelia bloody Aubyn. For sixteen years, old Rushden had ripped apart the country in search of her. And now, here she sat.
He cleared his throat. “She did not take you to ransom, I should add. She simply … took you.” He lifted the letter. “This is the note she left behind. It reads, ‘To His Lordship—’”
“I can read,” she said. “Hand it over.” Leaning forward, she plucked it from his grip. As she considered the note, some expression fleeted across her face—surprise, confusion, he couldn’t say. It did not show in her voice as she began to read, slowly but clearly. “‘I have taken a payment for what you took from me. You reviled me for a low woman; now your daughter will live as the low women do. As for her sister, she will have to look to you for providing her comfort. I hope you prove better to her than you were to me.’”
She shrugged and handed the letter back. “Whole lot of nonsense, sounds like.”
“The ravings of a madwoman,” he agreed. “But you see what it means.”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Then you’re not attending. You are the daughter she took. You’re the legitimate child of Lord Rushden and his lawful wife. You—”
“I’m listening,” she said sharply. “And I’m not deaf, so you’d best keep your voice down.”
Simon paused. “I wasn’t yelling.”
Now the girl looked uncomfortable. Glancing down to her hands, she lifted her shoulders in a jerky movement. “Guess you weren’t.”
Somebody yelled at her, Simon gathered, and on regular occasions. An alarming possibility occurred to him. “Good God. Are you married?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Eight times,” she said. “Twice this week. What’s it to you?”
A good deal, in fact. But he didn’t think this was the right moment to explain himself. “Curiosity. Humor me.”
Her lips thinned. “Not my job,” she said. “You can hire someone for that.”
“Touche.” She had a fresh brand of cleverness about her. It occurred to him, too, that her concern this morning had been for the wages she’d miss, not for the husband who would be alarmed by her failure to return home.
No, he thought, she wasn’t married.
He smiled down at the letter. Even had he been a praying man, he would never have thought to pray for Cornelia Aubyn’s return. But this heiress extraordinaire, the former fixation of a shocked and anxious nation, had turned up in his bloody bedroom—and in the guise of a grimy, half-educated factory girl with no idea of her entitlements. No idea that she had the right to demand anything.
I could tell her whatever I liked, he realized.
The temptation was so dark and powerful that he actually felt the hairs lift at his nape.
Anything at all.
Old Rushden must be writhing in his grave. For years, he’d reviled Simon as a black-hearted bastard. Now his own precious daughter had reappeared, desperately poor, desperately needy, with a waiting fortune of a million bloody pounds.
The world had curious ways of balancing the scales.
He exhaled. “This other letter,” he said with remarkable calmness, “would be one of the many that the earl received in the years before his death. First, though, I should say that your father did look for you—searched the entirety of Britain, in fact. Articles in the newspapers, sketches of you and Jane Lovell posted in the train stations, all of that.”
Judging by the depth of the line between her brows, frowning was a customary expression for Nell Aubyn. “How do you know all this?”
“I’m thirty last January,” he said. “I remember it. And I have cause to know the details. The late earl became my guardian two years before you disappeared.”
Old Rushden had wanted to groom his protege. Simon’s parents hadn’t even protested. Dazzled at the prospect of their son becoming an earl, they simply had handed him over. Simon supposed his mother might have wept, once or twice.
“Oh ho,” said Nell, “so I should have shot you, then. You’re practically him!”
Simon gave her a half smile. “There is no one on this earth whom your father would consider to be less like him than I.” Rushden had nursed great pride over his lineage. He hadn’t liked having to draw from the shabbier side of the family tree. It had fed and combined with his larger fury against the unjust fate that had deprived him of sons and a daughter besides.
That daughter now smirked. “You’re trying to talk your way out of a bullet.”
“Not at all,” he said politely. “I already confiscated your pistol.”
She cast a hopeful look around the room. “Could brain you with a fire iron.”
“I don’t allow fires to be lighted in the library. All that ancient paper.”
“Where’s that knife?”
“Patience,” he murmured. “You can gut me later. For now, the matter at hand. The key thing is, he looked for you everywhere. But nobody saw hide or hair of you, although every lunatic in Britain had a theory of your whereabouts. The flood of letters did slow, eventually, but even in the last month of his life, one or two arrived that claimed to know where you were.”
He’d said something very wrong. Her whole body shuddered as though she’d touched an electrical wire, then stiffened to a rigidity other women achieved only with a corset. “You get his letters, do you?”
Simon quickly wracked his brain for possible missteps. “No, he had a secretary for that.” His oldest, closest friend, now Kitty’s guardian. Grimston had always thought too highly of himself to admit he served as an amanuensis in exchange for the money Rushden “lent” him, but he’d handled Rushden’s correspondence for as long as Simon could remember.
He noticed that Nell was going very white. “And the letters that came after he kicked the bucket?” she asked.
His instincts reminded him that discretion was the better part of valor. “The executor for the estate would deal with those.” Grimston, also.
“What’s his name?” she asked flatly.
“Later,” he said, for it was clear she found the information important, and he would collect any bargaining chip available.
She nodded once, grimly. “Well,” she said. “Let me see this letter, then, that his lordship’s secretary thought worth reading.” She stuck out her hand.
He handed over the letter, which was only a copy; the original was in Grimston’s possession, having been submitted by his solicitors to the court to support the idea that Cornelia might still live. The irony was enjoyable, but Nell’s peculiar remark distracted Simon from dwelling on it. She could mean only one thing by her questioning. “Did you write to him?” If Grimston had gotten letters from her and chosen to destroy them … well, that complicated matters. It meant this would be quite the bloody battle ahead.
He felt an anticipatory thrill at the very prospect. He’d lost once to Grimston and Kitty. He would not lose again.
“Hush,” she said curtly. “I’m reading.”
This time, she read silently. At one point, her lashes flickered as though in startled recognition, but when she handed it back to him, she said only, “That’s a lot of money someone wanted.”
“Yes.” He supposed fifty pounds would seem like a fortune to her.
“Did he pay it?”
He nodded.
“Just to find out where I was?”
The question sounded awed, which stirred in him an odd, itching urge to wince. “It isn’t that much money, Nell.” He’d spent more on tips to the dealers at Monte Carlo.
“Maybe not to you,” she snapped.
This was a pointless line of argument. “Of course he paid it. He wanted very much to find you.”
“I guess they never told him where I was, though?”
That she sounded uncertain struck him as interesting. He’d always assumed the letter was nothing more than an extortion attempt, or a clever forgery fashioned under Grimston’s direction to support Kitty’s case. Certainly the wretched penmanship and mangled spelling had seemed too overdone to be real. “Do you think the writer actually knows you?”
She did not answer that. “To pay that much to a stranger … Those are some very deep pockets.”
He bit his tongue. Old Rushden easily had spent five hundred times that amount on his various investigators and advertisements. “Your father was a very wealthy man,” he said. “And he left all of it to his daughters.” Every goddamned penny, and every single property for which he’d managed to break the entail. In the months before his death, he’d set men onto the estates like vultures onto a corpse. They’d liquidated what assets they could, then bound up the profits in a trust for the girls.
“You said I was one of those daughters,” she said softly.
Finally, greed won the day. Simon smiled encouragement. “Indeed, I am convinced of it.”
A cynical little smirk crossed her face. “So I suppose you will give me that ten pounds, then.”
Christ, could her brain not budge from these trifling amounts? Five, ten, fifty—what matter? Look around you, he wanted to say, but he restrained himself, for this was the crucial moment. “You’ll receive a great deal more money than that, provided you can prove that you’re Cornelia Aubyn.”
“Ha.” It was little more than an exhalation of breath, but she suddenly looked weary. “Figures. I’ve no way to prove anything.” She gave him a quick little sideways look. “Ten pounds would do me just fine, though.”
He recognized that look. It was the quick calculation of a street dog that had spotted a bun dangling from a careless hand.
Perhaps the analogy was too apt. It called to mind, vividly, the fervor with which she’d—eaten was not the right word. Attacked the food more accurately captured it. The unsettling sensation he’d felt while watching her now resurfaced, a sort of revolted discomfort he recognized, belatedly, as his conscience.
He easily silenced that long-disused organ. It wasn’t as if he were lying. Even if Kitty surprised him by uncovering a strain of sisterly feeling—or, more unlikely yet, an urge for fair play—her guardian would not prove so angelic. Simon had long suspected that Grimston had an eye to marrying Kitty himself, and was only waiting to determine how to accomplish this feat without producing a scandal. At any rate, he would do everything in his power to prevent his ward’s fortune from being halved—particularly by an unknown guttersnipe of uncertain allegiances.
To secure her rightful share, Cornelia would need Simon’s help.
“I’d be willing to assist you,” he said. “There are ways to go about this sort of thing. Of course, it takes a legal fight, and that requires money in itself. But I could fund your efforts.” He still had a few accounts tucked away, yet to be drained.
She gave him a sly little smile, crooked and slightly toothy. Bizarrely attractive. “But you won’t help for free.”
Ah, yes, he hadn’t mistaken it: this was a carnivorous smile she was offering. One alligator’s congratulation to another: I see what you’re doing here.
Perhaps she did see. Perhaps she saw him more clearly than most people did.
Or maybe she didn’t see him clearly at all, for suddenly he wondered if he would have helped her, regardless, out of sheer, libidinal curiosity. Such pluck she had. What would it take to make her tremble?
“Perhaps I’d help you only for the pleasure of it,” he murmured. “What do you think?”
She came closer. Simon put his elbow on his thigh and leaned in to meet her. Her father would have died several years sooner, no doubt of apoplexy, if only he’d foreseen this moment: his despised heir and long-lost daughter inclining toward each other like lovers. “Can’t cozen a cozener,” she said.
Her self-possession was a gorgeous thing. A dare he had no intention of resisting. “Rarely,” he said. “But it’s always fun to try.”
One slim brow lifted. “Maybe you should just give it to me straight.”
He felt his smile widen. He would give it to her straight anywhere she liked. On a whim, he reached out to touch her face.
She went still. Those magnificent blue eyes locked on his as he stroked her cheek. No, not magnificent: they were too much like Kitty’s eyes. Yet beneath the grime, her skin was as soft as new velvet, and the discovery made his own skin prickle. A peculiar pleasure flooded through him, sharp edged, greedy, curiously prideful. It was a feeling he associated with the discovery of a rare genius, some talent that others had overlooked—a pirate’s triumph, really: the thrill of finding and seizing buried treasure.
“Take your hand away,” she said, “or I’ll knock your teeth in.”
He almost invited her to try. She fenced so well with her wits. It might be entertaining to see what she could do with her fists.
But their surroundings called for a gentler seduction. He had a good many books on his desk too fragile to bear her weight if he were to push her down atop them.
He withdrew the reluctant hand to his thigh, where it dug into his quadriceps in the effort to behave itself. What would she look like once he’d cleaned her up? Like Kitty, his mind insisted, but his intuition spoke differently. The light in her eyes seemed too militant and keen now to be confused with her sister’s.
“Honestly, then.” He paused to clear the hoarseness from his voice. Had he ever had a woman quite like her? He didn’t go trawling in the East End for bed sport, of course. But this bizarre attraction seemed to have less to do with her dirt than with her demeanor.
Due to the circumstances, his lust also contained an element of possessiveness. Quite novel, this covetous feeling. But natural. For his plans to succeed, nobody else must have this girl. Only him.
Indeed, she might well have been fashioned just for him. No family to placate. No tiresome expectations of romance and chivalry. No expectations whatsoever.
It dawned on him that her mood had changed. She had scooted forward to the very edge of her seat and now rested her weight on the balls of her feet, poised to spring up and flee.
He forced himself to sit back and cross his legs, creating the picture of a man at ease. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t enjoy catching her. But it always worked better when a woman wanted to be caught.
His posture communicated the desired message. She eased back in her chair.
He gave her a pleasant smile and borrowed her language. “To tell it to you straight, then: I inherited the earldom and a few crumbling and unprofitable estates. Your father took great pains to see that I inherited nothing else.”
She watched him expressionlessly. “Why?”
He shrugged. “He thought very highly of the Aubyn lineage. My conduct … failed to satisfy him. At any rate, all the true wealth went to his daughters—at this point, to Katherine. As a result, everything left to me stands at risk. The estates are going to seed. I’ve no money to support or improve them, and this is widely known, or will be, soon enough. Paired with certain other considerations”—chiefly, his reputation—”this prevents me from finding a quick solution to my financial difficulties, such as—”
“Marrying an American,” Nell said. “Somebody with money, like that Churchill bint.”
“Yes, like that Churchill bint.” Such marvelous language she used. “So, you see, I am—”
“Well screwed.”
Her words—their hot, immediate effect—caught him off guard. He pressed his lips together, eyeing her up and down. “Hmm.” So many possible replies. Such restraint on his part.
“Precisely,” he said on his exhale. “Yet your miraculous reappearance offers …” He smiled. “Another route. I can help you reclaim your true place in the world, Nell. But I will have to ask you to make it worth my while.”
Curious that he couldn’t yet manage to read her tone or expression. He was accustomed to understanding people. Often he understood them even better than they did themselves.
He might have taken her inscrutability to mean there was no depth to her, but even their short acquaintance proved otherwise. Conversely, she might be opaque because her depths were so foreign, so purely lower class, that he simply had no hope for getting a grip on them without prolonged exposure.
Well. It seemed he’d turned into a snob, which made this next bit all the more ironic.
“You’ll do it very simply,” he said. “Marry me.”