Price of Desire
Page 23
“My error. I cannot find it.”
“And you think I have it?” There was sufficient light for her to see a muscle jump in his cheek. “Very well, you cannot be amused at this juncture. That is too bad for both of us, I think.” She raised the candle a fraction higher to better observe his face. Strain was evident in the set of his jaw and the twin creases between his eyebrows, but Olivia was unconvinced that his problem of the moment was responsible for the weary tension she saw in the tightness around his mouth. “You will have to tell me something more than you cannot find your error. The nature of it would be a good place to begin.”
“I cannot reconcile the accounts.”
Olivia thought she might not be able to suppress the bubble of nervous laughter that came immediately to her lips, but she managed to choke it back and discreetly covered her mouth as she cleared her throat. “Perhaps if you wait until morning and review your records in a more rested frame of mind.”
“You are supposing I will be able to sleep. I assure you, I will not.”
“Have you tried?”
“There is no point. You may as well come with me.”
Light flickered as Olivia’s fingers tightened around the candlestick. For better than a sennight she had slept alone, quieting her nerves in anticipation of this moment, and now that it was upon her what she mostly felt was a deeply abiding disappointment, though she couldn’t have said with whom she was disappointed more. If she had guarded herself better against hope, would his churlishly issued invitation have hurt her heart?
Olivia stepped outside herself, disengaging from any feeling at all. Numbness masqueraded as serenity. “Yes. Of course I will go with you.”
She allowed Griffin to take the candlestick from her nerveless fingers and fell in step beside him. Aware that she was drawing only shallow breaths, Olivia wasn’t surprised she felt a little light-headed when they reached the door to his bedroom. She slowed her steps.
He didn’t.
Olivia stared at his back, then lengthened her stride to catch up with him. “I thought—” She didn’t—couldn’t—finish that sentence.
“You wish to say something?” he asked, glancing sideways.
She shook her head. “It’s not important.” Every part of her that had been numb was now awash in prickly feeling. It was as if the seat of all emotion had fallen asleep and pins and needles were the consequence of waking.
Griffin indicated she should precede him into his study and gestured vaguely toward his desk. A large ledger of accounts lay open in front of his chair. “You may sit there.”
Olivia greeted this direction with suspicion, darting a look from him to the chair and back to him again. “At your desk?”
“Naturally at my desk. It is unlikely that you can work more comfortably elsewhere. The ledger is unwieldy if it is not lying flat.”
“You wish me to examine your account book?”
He frowned. “You are not usually a slow top. Of course that is what I wish. Did I not say I couldn’t find my error?”
“You did.” She picked her way around the stacked books and over the discarded, crumpled pieces of paper lying on the rug and managed to maintain her grave demeanor as she seated herself. Easing into the chair with Griffin’s scent and the contour of his body captured in the soft, gently worn leather was unexpectedly like being wrapped in his arms. She had an urge to draw her legs under her and curl in the cradle he’d unwittingly made for her. It was perhaps fortunate, she thought, that he came to stand directly behind her shoulder, which had exactly the opposite comforting effect.
Olivia looked up at him. “You mean to watch over me?”
In every sense. Griffin did not say it aloud, simply nodding instead.
“Very well.” She leaned forward to take a proper look at the chart of accounts. In very little time she was able to forget his presence altogether.
Olivia had always been aware of the profit at the faro table, but she’d had no knowledge of what the other games brought in each night. One of her eyebrows kicked up as she reviewed the columns devoted to vingt-et-un, roulette, dice, and the private card games. Everything was recorded neatly in Griffin’s meticulous hand. Each page, every column, revealed the faint tracing of his dry quill as he’d checked and rechecked his work.
After Olivia had examined the income, she turned to the expenditures. Once again, she lifted an eyebrow. She clearly saw the costs of operating the hell: the wages of the staff, their board, the liquor bill, the outlay for repair and replacement, and a host of incidentals, many of them recorded in a kind of code that she could not make out.
She picked up a quill but did not dip it in an inkwell. Much as he had done earlier, she used it to make small, nearly invisible ticks next to various items. “You have receipts for all of this?” she asked, pointing to the line for repairs.
“In the box there.”
Nodding absently, Olivia continued her examination. Griffin turned a good profit, she noted, though she could not quite make out where it went save for that portion that he turned back over to the establishment. She imagined that accounted for his indecipherable codes. It was not her place to question anything unrelated to why he was asking her to review his work. She did, however, venture an observation.
“You are singularly mistrustful.”
Griffin stared down at her bent head. Her long cascade of fiery curls tempted him to disregard his judgment and sink his hands into the flames. That would only serve to frighten her, which was the very thing he had been bent on avoiding this last week. To have her name him singularly mistrustful was rather like the accusation of the pot to the kettle. He hadn’t mistaken her reluctance to go with him, nor missed the way her steps faltered when they neared his bedchamber. She would have gone with him if he’d led her there, he knew that, but it wasn’t the manner in which he wanted her to come to him. He had been trying to provoke her interest if she had but the wit to know it.
“Why do you say so?” he asked, curious.
Olivia tapped the point of her quill against the ledger. “Because you do all of this yourself when you are perfectly able to employ someone. That strikes me as mistrustful. You do not administer the affairs of your estate in such a fashion.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you are always here. You must engage the services of a steward or a secretary, someone who oversees the rents and income of Wright Hall and your other properties. They would be sadly neglected otherwise, and it stretches the imagination to suppose you tend to your affairs here with such diligence while allowing every other thing to go begging.” She lifted her head and caught her hair in one hand, sweeping it aside as she turned to look over her shoulder at him. A small vertical crease appeared between her eyebrows as she considered what she’d just said. “I don’t suppose I can have it both ways, can I? If you are by nature mistrustful then it does not follow that you would allow anyone else to manage your other properties, not if you value them as—”
“Perhaps you are simply wrong,” he said, interrupting.
Shaking her head, she turned a bit more in her chair and hit upon the truth she had not seen before. “This is your income, isn’t it? The hell is almost the whole of it. You operate this establishment because it is the lifeblood for all that came before, the bastard child that supports the family’s rank and privilege.”
Griffin stepped back from the chair. His hands fell to his side. For a moment he did nothing save breathe, then his fingers curled into fists and he nodded once. “It is known to only a few,” he said quietly. “You understand that it would…” His voice trailed away. He would not ask for her silence. She did not owe him that. He avoided her hand when she would have reached for him in spite of the fact that he had wanted nothing so much as her unsolicited touch since she’d left his bed. Her touch. Not her pity.
Unfolding his hands, Griffin walked to the fireplace and poked at the flames. He did not hear her cross the floor, only sensed her presence when she was st
anding just behind his right shoulder.
“How did it happen?” she asked.
He shrugged, his attention on the fire. “In the usual way of such things. A long line of heirs dedicated to living outside their means. Bad investments. Failure to respect the land or the needs of the tenant farms. Committing too little money to the property. Daughters requiring dowries. Sons acquiring gaming debts, Bon Street creditors, and mistresses.” He set the poker in its stand. Words came then that were reluctantly given. “Sons acquiring wives who vowed for richer or poorer but could not accept that they must live in reduced circumstances.”
“Your wife?” asked Olivia. “Was she such a one?”
“My mother, actually. My wife made other promises.”
Olivia did not venture a second question regarding her ladyship. To do so felt extraordinarily self-serving. “Is your mother living?”
He shook his head. “She died seven years ago, only a few months after I came into possession of this hell. There are those who say my decision to operate the establishment contributed to her death, though they are kind enough to only whisper it my presence.”
She wondered if he whispered the same to himself. It would not surprise her if he did. He was not the sort of man who shifted responsibility. “Mason told me your father died some ten years back.”
“He did.” Griffin glanced back at Olivia for the first time. “Did he tell you how?”
“No. He regretted his momentary lapse in protecting your privacy.”
“He would, though unlike my financial circumstances, the manner of my father’s death is widely known among the ton.” He did not miss the shadow that crossed Olivia’s features and wished he had not phrased it in a way that underscored her exclusion from that circle. “He was called out for cheating. I believe a great deal of brandy had been consumed and there was also the matter of a slight toward Lord Ashcroft’s wife. Ashcroft took my father to task, swords instead of pistols, and skewered him in front of his seconds and the estimable Dr. Pettibone.”
“Then your father’s cheating was—”
“At cards,” Griffin said flatly. “Although adultery has been mentioned in some versions of the story. It depends on the mood of the wags as to whether it arises in conversation.”
“It cannot have been an easy time for you or your family.”
Griffin was quiet, reflecting. “No, it was not.”
Olivia regarded his strong profile bathed in firelight. His scar was not visible to her at the angle she observed him, but the tic in his cheek was. For all the blunt speech, he was not indifferent to his father’s passing, nor his mother’s for that matter. She inched closer but remembered that he had avoided her earlier and did not try to touch him now.
“How did you come to take possession of the hell?”
“I won it.”
“Oh.”
“At faro. Wright Hall was my marker. This Putnam Lane property was the owner’s.” His lips lifted in a humorless half smile. “Did you think I never made a wager?”
She shook her head. “You might have lost everything.”
“I bet the turn.”
Olivia could hardly believe what he was telling her. Betting the turn meant he’d wagered he could correctly call the order in which the last three cards of the deal would appear. “I repeat: you might have lost everything. You had only a one in six chance of calling the turn of those cards.”
“It paid five to one.”
“I know what it pays. Did you value your home and lands so little?”
“I wagered the house, not the lands. I was not entirely foolish, and Wright Hall was in a sad state at the time.”
“Still…” She let her thoughts go unspoken, certain he’d heard a great many lectures and second guessing regarding what could have been his folly.
“I won,” he reminded her, following the turn of her mind. “That counted for something, though no one was prepared for me to manage the hell, least of all my mother and my wife. But I saw the possibility of finally being done with the creditors, restoring Wright Hall to its former grandeur, and making all the properties prosperous again. Exposing my reputation to another layer of tarnish seemed little enough in the way of cost.”
“Your accounts suggest that you have a successful business here.”
“I do. I’ve beaten back most of the creditors. Wright Hall will always be the work of a lifetime as it should have been for my father and grandfather. As for the properties, they are producing income again, though not yet in a manner that will support all that must still be accomplished.” Griffin turned entirely to face her. “There are always unexpected expenses, losses that cannot be recovered.”
Olivia nodded a bit jerkily, embarrassed at the reminder of her role in both what was unexpected and unrecoverable.
“You take it all too much to heart,” Griffin said, watching her. “I was speaking of neither the damage to your room nor your brother’s debt. There is expense and loss that has little enough to do with this establishment. My sisters, all three of them, needed to make good marriages if they were to be properly protected. Arranging those was no simple matter, not when our father had died in such an ignominious fashion. My mother insisted that each one of them have generous settlements to avert suspicion from our true financial state. Some of the best properties were discreetly sold to provide for them, and I am only now in a position that I might be able to purchase them back.”
“Do your sisters know?”
“I couldn’t say. I’ve never told them, and they’ve never mentioned it to me. They do not approve of my activities here, if that is what you are asking.”
Olivia supposed that it was. His isolation was not so dissimilar to hers. She had not realized that until now. It occurred to her that his sisters didn’t want to know the true cost of their good marriages. If they suspected, they avoided confirmation by never asking the question directly. Olivia understood that. There were questions she was avoiding as well.
She distracted herself by looking back at the desk. Reconciling the accounts seemed more important just now. “I should return to my work. I have not yet examined the receipts.” She turned to go and never knew that Griffin’s hand had come within a hairsbreadth of restraining her.
She went through the receipts carefully, checking her figures against Griffin’s. He was no longer hovering at her shoulder, but had cleared a space for himself on the edge of the desk and set a hip there while he observed her. Nothing she’d heard caused her to revise her opinion that he was mistrustful, but she better understood the reason for it.
Olivia returned the quill to its stand, stoppered the ink well, and sat back. She closed her eyes, rubbed them with her thumb and middle finger, and almost sighed at how good it felt to relieve the pressure building behind them.
“You’re done?” he asked. “You found it?”
She nodded and pointed vaguely in the direction of the ledger. She heard Griffin slide it across the desk toward him. Opening her eyes a fraction while she massaged her temple, she said, “It is the easiest error to make and the most difficult to find. You simply transposed some numbers. Not once, but twice. It speaks to your diligence that it does not happen more often. These accounts are the sort of thing that should be done with a clear mind, not one that has been fogged by obscenely late hours, tobacco, perfume, and drink.”
“There was very little drink,” he offered mildly. “Which receipts were the problem?”
“The carpenter and cook’s accounting of the greengrocer.”
Griffin found both and compared their totals to what he had entered in his ledger. Although he never doubted Olivia was correct, he needed to observe the nature of the mistake for himself. Seeing it, he shook his head, impatient with himself for not finding it earlier. He chose a different quill than the one Olivia had used, dipped it in ink, and began making the corrections. “How is it that you know about charts of account?”
“I managed the household books for my brother.”
Olivia straightened and opened her eyes, alert and guarded now. “You must realize the absurdity of that. As you have pointed out on a number of occasions, I am the daughter of Sir Hadrien Cole. A man of his stature does not suffer his offspring, no matter how ill-favored they are, to be employed in that fashion.”
“Assuming he learns of it, which I believe he did not.” He paused in making corrections to tap Olivia’s nose with the feathered tip of the quill in mild admonishment. “So which of my competitors did you work for? Dunlevy? Parsons? Never say it was Abernathy.”
“I have no idea who those gentlemen are.”
“Perhaps not, else you would know they are not gentlemen.” Griffin resumed his calculations. “I will venture another guess and say that you were not dealing cards in any of the London hells. Bath? Bristol? Do they have hells in Bristol? It seems bloody unlikely.”
“I wouldn’t know. I have never been.”
“You will have to give up your secrets eventually, Olivia.”
“I have been honest with you.”
His glance swiveled sideways. “I did not say you were less than honest, merely less than forthcoming.”
Olivia considered that. The same might be said of him, but she elected not to point a finger in return. Instead, she surprised herself by inviting him to ask a question. “But only one,” she said when his eyebrows rose and his eyes fairly gleamed with interest. “So think on that when you put your poser before me.”
Griffin realized she’d effectively set him back on his heels. There was no one question that stood above the others, therefore he would have to review them all. He chuckled. “I should be used to the sharpness of your mind by now.”
“Yes,” she said. “You should.”