Leslie Lafoy (11 page)

His gaze slowly slid from the distance to connect with hers and she summoned a smile for him as she advanced, observing, “You look as though you’ve been dragged through a knothole backwards.”

“Oh, it’s a thrice-annual ordeal,” he replied, barely shrugging one shoulder. “I’ve become accustomed to it. I trust that my mother was her ever gracious self?”

Isabella dropped into the leather-upholstered chair on her side of the desk. “She reminds me a great deal of my dearly departed grandmama.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Good,” she admitted, “in that you know exactly where you stand with her.”

“Lord,” he groaned. “What did she say?” He’d barely gotten the words out before he raised his hand to stay her answer and hastily added, “No, wait. Let me rephrase that. I know my mother. What did she ever so clearly
imply
?”

Ah, he did know her well. “Barrett, darlin’,” she drawled, deliberately thickening her accent, “I sincerely regret havin’ to tell you this … I know your heart’s set … But your mother would
kill
you if you married me.”

His jaw dropped.

“And she’ll kill
me,
” Isabella went on, “if I do anything that lessens your chances of eventually snaring a good woman.”

It took him several long seconds to recover enough to blink, swallow, and clear his throat. “You are a good woman.”

“Not nearly good enough,” she countered, waving her hand dismissively. “Evidenced by the fact that I’m an American and that I’ve taken up residence with you. I formed the distinct impression that in your mother’s mind the former directly accounts for my willingness to do the latter. And no, I didn’t try to explain the circumstances to her. I didn’t think it would make any difference.”

He set his glass on the desk and scrubbed his hands over his face. “I know that you don’t have any particular reason to believe me, but she really is a nice person.”

“Oh, I doubt that she has even one malicious bone in her body. But, as I said, your mother reminds me of my grandmama. The unpleasant side of that is that no matter who you choose to marry, your mother will always think that you could have done better. Papa and Tio Jasper paid dearly for handing their hearts to Grandmama’s daughters.”

“Damned if I do,” he said on a sigh. “Damned if I don’t.”

“That seems to be a fair summation.”

One corner of his mouth quirked up. “If you were in my shoes, what course would you take?”

“I’d marry whomever I pleased and then move far, far away.”

He nodded and seemed to be giving the idea serious consideration. After several moments he slid his gaze back to hers. Devilment sparkled in the depths of his eyes as he asked, “Do you know if it’s difficult to learn to speak Chinese?”

“I think it would be well worth the effort.”

He laughed outright and she decided that kindness lay in not dampening his humor with questions about the past. And that wisdom lay in putting some distance between herself and a handsome man whose twinkling eyes warmed her body and soul.

“How do ham croquettes with a horseradish sauce sound for dinner?” she asked, pushing herself up out of the chair and heading for the door. “With peas and little pearl onions—or carrots—on the side. Rolls and butter, of course. And maybe apple dumplings for dessert. With whipped cream.”

Barrett watched her walk away, wondering if she even noticed that he hadn’t answered. Jesus, she was a fascinating thing. Sweet syrup and moonlight one minute, wicked irreverence in the next. And then blushing, skittish innocence in the moment after that.

Lord, he could only hope that she decided to leave the whipped cream off the dumplings. As fantasies went, he really didn’t want to resist that one.

Chapter Six

Full, warm, and satisfied, Barrett leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out under the kitchen table. “That was absolutely delicious,” he offered, smiling at his empty dinner plate. “Don’t tell Cook, but it’s one of the best meals I’ve had in ages.”

“Thank you. Would you care for more peas and carrots?”

“It depends,” he drawled, sliding his gaze over to hers as he smiled. “Did you make apple dumplings?”

She nodded, her eyes bright. “Whipping the cream is all that’s left to do. It won’t take but a minute. The crock’s already chilled.”

“Then I’ll decline the more healthy course and go straight for decadence,” he declared, thinking that the statement summed up his approach to life in general. It also, he realized as she rose from her seat, fairly well expressed his inclinations regarding Isabella Dandaneau. Intelligent, companionable, a damned fine cook. And beautiful, he added, watching her move toward the larder. Perfectly curved in all the right places and owing precious little to either a corset or padding. At least from what he could tell so far.

So far?
Barrett shook his head and forced himself out of his own chair. No, he told himself as he carried their dishes to the sink, Belle was a sweet indulgence he should resist. A delicacy he wanted, yes. Hell, a man would have to be long dead to not want her. But in the wake of Mignon … Rolling back the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, he shook his head again. It had been only a matter of days. He didn’t have all that many standards and few of those were carved in stone, but the very notion of casually, deliberately setting out to seduce Belle so soon … It seemed low in the extreme.

The subject of his musing returned to the kitchen table with a gray stone crock, a bottle of cream, and a rotary eggbeater. “Leave the dishes, Barrett,” she admonished. “I’ll get to them in just a bit.”

“No.” He tossed some soap flakes into the washing pan and stepped to the stove for the hot water pot, adding, “You cooked, I’ll clean.”

“Do you make a habit of helping in the kitchen?”

“I went without household staff for the first two years after I left Her Majesty’s Army,” he explained, filling the wash pans and keenly aware that she was watching him. “When I didn’t dine out, I made my own meals. I eventually concluded that the cleaning nymph wasn’t going to flit through in my absence and that if I didn’t want to make myself sick, I was going to have to wash some dishes.”

“Necessity might well be the mother of invention, but what no one ever mentions is that drudgery is her stepchild.”

He chuckled, amused by her perspective, and plunged the dishes into the hot, soapy water.

“You’d best put on an apron,” she said a moment later, taking a frilly, bibbed affair off the wall peg beside the larder door. “You don’t want to ruin your clothes.”

“There are limits to my domesticity,” he protested as she came at him with the hideous thing. Scrubbing an already clean plate so that he looked too diligently occupied to interrupt, he added, “A man has to maintain some standards, you know.”

“So does a woman,” she countered, standing beside him at the sink, the scent of roses enveloping him. “And while I’m perfectly willing to cook, I loathe doing laundry.” Gently, she took his upper arm and drew him around to face her. “Please accommodate me.”

Accommodate her? Oh, Lord, as invitations went … His pulse hammering, his blood heating, he tried and failed to rein in a wicked smile as he looked down at her. The blush across the high arc of her cheekbones, the way her gaze darted away from his told him that her thoughts had arrowed along the very same path as his own. And he couldn’t resist the temptation.

“Do you always live so dangerously?” he teased, holding out his arms, giving her a choice between stepping into them or sliding the apron over them.

She swallowed and fixed her gaze on the center of his chest. “Not as a general rule,” she replied, the color in her cheeks deepening as she carefully, almost hesitantly slipped the apron over his hands and forearms. “Sometimes the words just spill out before I can think better of them.”

“It’s an endearing quality.”

“Oh, yes,” she countered, laughing softly as she leaned closer to lay the shoulder straps into place. “Especially when it’s not humiliating.”

“Do you know that you’re blushing?” he asked as he considered wrapping his arms around her.

“Yes,” she admitted, her gaze coming up to meet his while she stepped back and took the decision away from him. She grinned and arched a brow, then moved behind him, adding, “But I was hoping you’d be gentleman enough to refrain from pointing it out.”

“Just when, precisely,” he posed, trying, unsuccessfully, to see her over his shoulder, “did you conclude that I was a gentleman?”

The apron pulled snugly around his waist as she tied the strings and answered, “This morning. You were decidedly uncomfortable in talking about the time you spent with Mignon. That’s the hallmark of a true gentleman.”

His conscience prickled. “I’m really not, Belle. Not down deep. You need to know that.”

“Consider it duly noted,” she declared, moving back to the table. “Not believed, mind you,” she added, looking over her shoulder at him, her smile wicked and her dark eyes sparkling mischievously, “but noted.”

Oh, he was going to hell anyway. It was too late for self-denial to make one whit of difference. Just when, he wondered, turning back to the sink, would it be all right to actively pursue her? A week? A fortnight? They were going to be together only for as long as it took to find the treasure. Once they did, Isabella would be on her way. It could be only days. At which point, he silently groused, the entire matter of appropriate timing would be moot. The more optimistic side of his thinking suggested there was also a distinct possibility that they might never find the treasure; theoretically, they could be together forever. Despite the heat of the dishwater, his blood chilled.

“I’ve been thinking about who our murderer might be,” he lied, deliberately directing his thoughts down a less troubling path. “How long did it take you to discover that Mignon had left New Orleans and then go after her?”

Over the clinking of stone and glass, she supplied, “Two days to hear that she was gone and then another two to put my affairs in order and negotiate passage. Why?”

“Did anyone else leave town in that time?”

“New Orleans is a big city, Barrett. Not as large as London, of course, but it’s certainly not so small that you see everyone every day. Added to that, and as you might have surmised, I didn’t socialize in the same circles as Mignon.”

He nodded, his hands working as his brain turned the puzzle pieces over and over. “Someone made several attempts to steal both halves of the map in New Orleans, correct? From both you and Mignon.”

“Yes.”

Collecting the pots and pans from the stovetop, Barrett continued, saying, “So that tells us that someone knew that it had been torn in two. Who knew that?”

“Me, Mignon, the lawyer who actually tore it, and whoever Mignon told about it. That latter number could well be in the thousands once the story rippled from person to person.”

“And would everyone who heard about it believe in buried pirate treasure?”

“In New Orleans?” She laughed. “Yes.”

“But would they believe deeply enough to make genuine, repeated efforts to get their hands on the map?”

A few seconds passed and the amusement had left her voice when she replied, “What you’re saying is that someone tried to steal the map because they know—for sure and certain—that there really is a treasure and that it’s worth the risk.”

He nodded, his mind racing through the tangle of possibility. “Let’s assume for the moment that the last part of Mignon’s half of the text doesn’t say
London
.”

“I’d really rather not. It’s too depressing.”

Smiling and ignoring her uncharacteristic pessimism, he placed the last pot in the drying rack. “From what you’ve told me,” he countered, reaching for a towel to dry his hands, “the family attorney sounds like a man who wanted to be as fair as he possibly could.” Turning, he leaned back against the edge of the sink and watched her set to work with the beater. “Would he have given either one of you the advantage of knowing the treasure was in a specific city?”

“No.”

“So my assumption stands a good chance of being a valid one. And if the text doesn’t say
London
, then the question becomes why she came here to look for it.”

“I’ve asked myself that question many a time. If you come up with an answer, I’m going to be slightly piqued.”

“No you won’t. You’ll be hugely impressed,” he countered, grinning and tossing the towel atop the dishes. Stripping off the apron, he asked, “Who, other than Lafitte, would know that the treasure hunt was in London?”

“We don’t know that it is, Barrett.”

“Look at the situation from the perspective of whoever tried to steal the map in New Orleans,” he posed, dropping the apron atop the towel and moving back to the table. Turning his chair, he straddled it, folding his arms across the back.

“They failed and the repeated attempts put both you and Mignon on guard, making further attempts that much more difficult and even less likely to succeed. So what to do? Why not go for the easier course and give one of you a hint as to the general location and then follow along and snatch the treasure from you when you find it? Let you do all the work so they can reap the reward without expending much effort.”

Her brows knitted, her hands pausing, she slowly nodded and said, “They knew that the place was London, but not where in London. Mignon and I, between us, knew the details of where to look, but didn’t know in what city. Mignon would have been the logical one of us to nudge. She had the money to travel quickly.”

“And the greed that would have made her jump at the chance to get to the treasure as fast as she could,” Barrett added. “Before you had a chance to catch up to her and demand your half of it.”

“She would have been so busy moving forward that she wouldn’t have bothered to look back for me or to question too closely the motives of whoever pointed her this way.”

“Exactly. And it would have been a perfect plan except that Mignon saw them—most likely by accident at the theater—and realized that she’d been manipulated. She hid the map, and when they confronted her, trying to repair the breach in their plan … I doubt they intended to kill her. Dead people can’t talk, can’t tell you what you want to know. I think the interrogation simply went out of control and couldn’t be reined in.”