Courtney Milan (33 page)

“I have a good idea what you were going to do.” With those words, John Mason stepped into her father’s office. Mary shut her eyes. She hadn’t cried, not even when she’d realized that her father had left her alone with nothing. Not when she’d realized that the future she’d dreamed of was gone forever. It had been easy to bury her fear, her despair, her mourning. Those emotions were too big to believe, her loss too large to comprehend.

Why, then, did the sight of John Mason make her want to weep?

She opened her eyes wide, willing that stupid moisture to evaporate into nothingness.

Across the room, John met her gaze briefly and then looked away.

He didn’t belong with these men; he never had. The other men were both grandfathers; John was scarcely twenty-five. They were dressed in sober, respectable browns and grays, every white starched to points; John’s cravat was a bare pretense of a neckcloth, well-laundered but soft. Most of all, the other men were thin and pale from hunching over desks, while John’s hours out of doors had left him golden skinned and broad shouldered.

He hadn’t been part of their initial investment scheme. His father and his brother-in-law had been involved. But he’d taken over when his relatives had passed away.

That was how she had met him.

She had always believed his eyes were sweet—large and liquid brown. There had been nothing sweet about them last night when he’d confronted her father, proof in hand, finger pointing directly at his chest. There was nothing sweet about them now, either. Mary’s stomach churned, and she looked away.

“Don’t be difficult, boy,” Lawson said. “It’s your money at stake, too. She knows something. I swear it’s so.”

“I don’t truck with hitting ladies,” John responded.

“She’s no lady.”

John’s eyes flicked to Mary, touching her without really seeing her. But he didn’t contradict the older man. He simply shrugged. “I don’t truck with hitting women, either,” he said in a low growl, then spat on the ground.

Don’t spit on Papa’s carpet,
some stupid part of her wanted to say. As if the Turkey carpet mattered. Just one more possession to be sold to make up for his wrongdoings. One more thing for her to leave behind. Still, that disrespect hurt more than John’s casual acceptance of her new status.

“Come now,” Lawson said. “Given what her father owes us, she’s practically a servant. It’s not wrong to slap—”

John shoved the other man into the wall of the office. “I mean it, Lawson. That’s enough.”

She forced herself to concentrate on the hard lines of John’s face, so different from the confident smile that he usually gave her when their paths crossed. He made her think of a rocky cliff: impossibly hard, with an unforgiving drop to the crags below.

“Very well,” Lawson finally muttered with a sullen sneer. “But one day, you’ll regret letting her go. Useless bitch.” That last was directed at her.

Mary wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her affected by that epithet. She simply nodded to the two men, as if this were the last round of an exchange of pleasantries, and turned to go.

John set his hand in the curve of her spine and guided her away, down the dark hallway, to the back of the house. He wrenched the servants’ door open and then glanced outside, verifying that nobody was about. Then, and only then, did he turn to her.

“Mary…” He ran one hand through the dark brown of his hair. She’d never heard his voice like this—dark and rumbling like thunder on the horizon. She’d never seen his eyes like this, either. There was a tension in them, worry lines gathering at the corners. He wasn’t quiet because he intended to be gentle with her. It was the quiet of a pot on the verge of boiling over.

“John.” She shut her eyes.

“Swear to me that you don’t know where he is.”

Like everyone else, he was thinking only of her father. But unlike the others, at least he believed her. For now. Mary’s thoughts went to her trunk, to the ache in her arms.

“If I had to guess,” she told him gravely, “I would say that he went straight to hell. He left me—” All that angry fury raged within her for a moment, startling in its heat. No place to put it now; she had too much to do.

“Did he tell you where the money was?”

“Not a word.”

“What are your plans? Is that your trunk over there?” His tone was curiously flat as he spoke to her—not devoid of emotion, but withdrawn, as if he’d turned away from his own feelings.

She hadn’t dared to look at the massive steamer trunk where it lay. It had followed her from Southampton to Vienna, and then back for more holidays than she could count. It was large enough to fit all the many components of a lady’s wardrobe, and that made it very large indeed. The rope she’d used to lower it was still fastened to one handle, the brass fittings dented where it had banged against the ground when it had gotten away from her. She glanced over, bit her lip, and nodded.

He didn’t rush over and open it. Thank God.

“Do you have anywhere to go?”

“My father’s second cousin lives in Basingstoke. He’ll take me in.” The lies came easier now.

“And you have a plan.” He nodded. “I wish…” His voice was still flat, but his lips pressed together.

She turned away. “Don’t wish. You’ll only say something that we’ll both regret. After last night, anything more is impossible.”

And yet the possibility of that
more
kept intruding on her. Was it so little, then, that they’d had between them? She had liked the look of him, the way that he laughed. He’d liked the look of her. That was all. A few months’ acquaintance.

A few kisses, a few conversations—not much, but enough to spark a lifetime of hope. Enough that she’d chosen the possibility of him and family over…

No. She couldn’t let herself think that way any longer. Those memories belonged to another woman entirely—Miss Mary Chartley, the daughter of a respected member of the community. She wasn’t sure who she was in this skin any longer, but she’d ceased to be that person. No matter what she and John might once have been to one another, it wasn’t enough to survive the cataclysm of discovering that her father had taken thousands of pounds from their partnership.

She took off one glove, removed the ring from her finger, and held it out to him.

His flat façade finally cracked. His hand slapped against his trousers, and he turned his head from her. “God damn it.”

“Set it against my father’s debt.”

His jaw worked. It took him a few breaths to regain his composure, but when he turned back, he didn’t take the ring from her. “You’ll need help getting to the station.” Before she knew what was happening, he was reaching for the handle of her trunk.

She couldn’t let him touch that. If he tried to lift it, he might wonder what made her luggage so heavy.

“Really, John,” she said sharply, stepping in front of him. “I should think you’ve done enough.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“Doesn’t it? Say you love me, that you would marry me without any fortune, with my father in disgrace. Say your sister would welcome me into the family, knowing that my father stole her son’s future.”

He met her eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw reflected there. Regret? Anger? “You’re right,” he finally said. “I can’t say anything of the sort. But—”

“I don’t love you, either. If I did…” She slipped the ring into his hand. “If I did, surely I could not give you this with my head held high.”

If he’d put her in mind of thunder before, that flashing look in his eyes was the lightning, spearing her through in one instant. For one second, she thought he was actually going to grab hold of her. But he didn’t move. He didn’t even frown. He simply took a deep breath and shoved the ring into his pocket.

“Well, then.” Another breath, and he looked away. “Good riddance.” His voice dropped low on that last.

It was a good thing her heart had turned to stone, or it might be breaking now. She
hadn’t
loved him. She couldn’t have. If she’d loved him, she would be weeping now, and she refused to weep. But they would have had a home all of their own. Children. Happiness. Warmth. She would have had John himself, so sweet, so strong, and yet so utterly implacable when betrayed…

She nodded.

He leaned down to her. He didn’t put his hands on her and draw her close, as he might once have done. Still, she felt the echo of those prior intimacies on her skin. On her lips, tingling with his nearness.

He was going to kiss her one last time. She’d yearned for his kisses before, but she didn’t want one now. She wanted her memories of him to remain unsullied by the last twenty-four hours.

But close as he came, his lips didn’t touch hers.

“Mary,” he said softly. “My nephew’s future depends on the income from this partnership. If I find out that you have lied to me, that you know where your father is and where he hid what he stole…” He raised his eyes to hers. “I will escort you to the gates of hell myself.”

Chapter Two

Eighteen months later, Somerset, on the edge of the hills of Exmoor

T
HE
A
UGUST SUN BEAT DOWN
like the breath of hell itself. Fitting, John Mason decided, for the task that lay ahead.

Not, of course, the work that he was supervising now—that was dead easy, watching the digging in four fields so that he might lay drains that had long since ceased to function. No, it was his other, private task that had left him feeling like one of the damned.

Another man would have been happy to see Beauregard approach on horseback. He would have welcomed the respite from the midmorning sun and the labor.

His host—John supposed that was the proper appellation for the man—had a mare saddled, following behind him.

“Mason,” Beauregard said, raising a hand in greeting. “I can’t believe you’ve started work already, and on the first morning, too.”

John glanced at the sun—already a good measure above the horizon—and shook his head. “No point in dawdling. I’ve been in your fields these last five hours. By the time the clock strikes ten, I scarcely consider it morning any longer.”

“That’s why I have an estate manager.” Beauregard grinned. “And friends.” He smacked John on the shoulder.

Friends
was stretching the truth. Acquaintances, perhaps—and unlikely ones at that. John had dashed off a piece about his experiences with drainage techniques for a farmer’s gazette. Beauregard had read it and written to him, asking for help and clarification. Two months of correspondence later and John had been ready to write the man off as hopeless. That was when a chance mention in a letter had caught his attention.

“I did promise to introduce you to the neighbors,” Beauregard said. “I don’t expect you to work all day. You’re my guest, not a laborer.”

John didn’t bother correcting the man. Yes, John owned land in Southampton. But he had no illusions about what that meant. There was a lot less
gentleman
in him than there was
farmer
. He wore a thousand hats—veterinarian to his cattle, chemist when it came to soil treatment, mechanic to the plows. Right now, he was posing as Beauregard’s personal drainage engineer. He’d inherited a rather soggy piece of land himself, and had developed something of a talent for walking a piece of ground and understanding the underground streams, the seep of water just below the surface, the strange accidents of soil and slope that explained why one field was a swamp and the other a lush meadow.

But all of that was nothing to the role that he’d taken up now—that of investigator on behalf of his seven-year-old nephew, and, if his suspicions proved correct, judge, jury, and executioner, all in one.

“Where are we off to?”

“Doyle’s Grange first. That is what you requested, yes? It’s not even a mile away. You’ll like Sir Walter. He’s a capital fellow.”

“I’m sure he is,” John said. He gave further directions to the men who were working under him, straightened his coat, and then mounted his horse. But as the mare beneath him ambled down the lane to Doyle’s Grange, it wasn’t Sir Walter—whoever that was—who occupied his thoughts.

He’d looked for Mary Chartley for months after she left, but his efforts had ended in Basingstoke. She’d arrived there via rail; after that, he had only conjecture. She must have met her father, because two days after she’d fled her home, a doctor had issued a death certificate for Mr. Chartley. The parish church records showed that he’d been buried the day after.

Very convenient, that certificate of death. Almost as convenient as the book that Mary had put in the post to Mr. Lawson that same day—her father’s secret account book, the one they’d torn the house apart trying to find. The one she’d sworn she knew nothing about. It hadn’t shown the details of Mr. Chartley’s thefts, but it had contained all the information about the account he’d maintained with a separate London bank. The book itself had noted a few withdrawals, but the balance should still have been intact, at least as of a few months before his embezzlement was discovered.

But the record of those last months had gone missing. Someone—Mary herself, or perhaps her father—had sliced the last four pages from the accounting. When Lawson had his solicitors make a written demand on the bank, the account had yielded a few paltry hundreds of pounds. Not enough to give John’s nephew the start he deserved in life. But the accounting had told him one thing: The money was out there. He’d lost it once when he’d let Mary go. This time, he was going to find it.