The Spinster Who Saved a Scoundrel (The Brethren Book 5)

by Christi Caldwell

  Rubbing her gloved palms quickly together in a bid to bring more warmth into the chilled digits, Francesca considered Lathan as he forked manure and soiled hay into the cart. He wouldn’t be reasoned with. He was one of those who saw the world in black and white, with everything existing in absolutes. She’d known him these several days and had gathered as much about the gentleman.

  Francesca stepped into the neighboring stall so that she could see more than his back. “When I was a girl, my father and I would pay a visit to one of Papa’s friends. He was a… gentleman.” A baron, to be exact.

  Lathan briefly paused, that slight hitch in his movements the only indication he listened. But he listened, and Francesca took that as permission to continue. She caught the wrought-iron bars and drew herself slightly up. “I could never understand why my papa was friends with one such as the Baron Mooring. Classmates at Oxford, they were the unlikeliest of friends,” she said wistfully. “The baron was boorish. Papa was polite. The baron was rude to his daughter. My father was only ever kind and supportive of me. The baron was unkind to his staff.”

  Lathan paused to dust the back of his hand across his brow. “And your father was only generous and good?”

  He was being surly. He was hurting. As Lathan returned to his work, however, Francesca refused to take his bait. “Exactly. For some reason, my father enjoyed our visits to the baron’s estates.” When she’d been a girl, Francesca had resented her father for wanting to keep company with Baron Mooring. “During one trip, the baron’s head housekeeper accused me of pilfering things from the kitchen.”

  Lathan forked another pile of manure into the wheelbarrow. “You?”

  She gave a toss of her head. “Me.”

  This time, he didn’t feign apathy. He stopped and rested his hands on the handle of his rake. “I take it Cook’s pastries went missing?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes.”

  “Of course, you wouldn’t steal treats. Daughter of a viscount, what need did you have? And even if you had, what manner of lord would begrudge a child pilfered pastry?”

  Francesca crooked a finger through the slats, urging him over.

  Lathan hesitated and then limped closer to the wrought-iron divider between them.

  “You are correct,” she said when he stopped before her. “I didn’t have a need to take the pastries.” She held his gaze. “But I took them anyway.”

  His red brows went arching up. “You?”

  She stifled a smile. Yes, shock had been the response her actions had received… from everyone. Her father included. “Me.”

  Lathan scoffed and went back to mucking out Honor’s stall. “Surely you aren’t comparing stolen treats to—”

  “I’m not talking treats, Lathan,” she said calmly. “I’m talking… everything.”

  That halted him mid-forkful.

  She felt his question, but didn’t require he ask it. “Everything. The bread, the apples. The salt. The pans.”

  “The pans?”

  “Packed it all up I did.” She smiled, still feeling the same pleased-with-herself sentiments she’d had that long-ago day. “All of it.”

  “You,” Lathan shot back, “emptied out a baron’s kitchens.”

  Francesca gave a solemn nod. “I did. You might even call me a thief, then.” When he’d discovered her subterfuge, the baron certainly had.

  “But… but…” Lathan stammered.

  “Why?” she supplied for him. “The gentleman wasn’t feeding his tenants. He was shorting them payments. I decided if he wouldn’t do right by the people who depended upon him willingly, then I should make the decision for him.”

  He gave her a wistful look and limped back over. “A veritable Robin Hood you were, then,” he murmured, touching his fingers to the same bars her right palm rested upon.

  Francesca shrugged. “Call me what you will. A thief is a thief is a thief.” She gave him a long, pointed look. “Aren’t I?”

  He froze, and behind the rims of his spectacles, she saw his mind working, piecing together precisely what she’d intended for him to hear.

  “It’s not the same thing at all.” A muscle ticked at the corner of his tense mouth. “You’re comparing apples to coconuts.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed. “And yet, they are both fruits. Granted, one is far more exotic, growing upon a tropical palm tree, and the other is more common. But both are fruits and therefore not so very different.”

  A pained laugh shook Lathan’s frame, and he pressed his forehead against the bars. “I don’t know a single person in the whole of the damned world like you, Francesca Cornworthy.”

  Heat spiraled to her heart. Likely, his words weren’t intended as a compliment, and yet, that was precisely what they were… words that painted her as unique and not like every other dutiful English daughter.

  “I don’t pay attention to gossips, Lathan. I’ve come to appreciate that Polite Society is either a lot wrong, a little wrong, or somewhere in between, but invariably, they are never right.”

  “What if I said this time they are?” he asked gravely.

  His quietly spoken question brought her up short.

  Francesca quickly found herself. She couldn’t believe that. Not because she wished to delude herself, but because a man who’d shown her nothing but kindness was incapable of absolute darkness. “I’d say there was more to whatever story is yours.”

  He started, surprise flashing in his eyes.

  Ah, so he had expected her to believe the worst of him. It spoke to how he’d been treated by the world. And a pressure squeezed about her chest.

  Bitterness soon replaced that earlier shock in his gaze. “You’re wrong. My story is as straightforward as the world believes.”

  “Nothing ever is, Lathan. And I’d trust something as complicated as treason would be even less so.”

  Why was she defending him?

  Why was she making excuses for him?

  Because she wants to believe something different than what you’ve already told her. She wanted to see good where there was only bad. And light where there was only dark.

  In that, she proved herself yet again more forgiving than anyone he’d ever known. Not even the man who’d sired Lathan, or the woman who’d given him life.

  He clenched and unclenched his fingers around the wrought-iron bars. The cold bit into his callused palms, a welcome distraction.

  “From the moment I left Oxford, I served at the Home Office.” He deliberately withheld mention of the Brethren. He didn’t specify that his role had been with one of the most elite and secretive branches within the organization. “It was all I wished to do.” And all he’d ever wanted to do. And still, to this day, shut away and isolated from the rest of the world, he spent all his time working through a code that the British government might one day use. “I was never a man they saw as one to serve in the field. But books?” He lifted a finger. “Now, books I understood. And words. And keeping notes. I thought how important those assignments were.” He couldn’t keep the cynical smile from forming on his lips.

  Matching his movements, Francesca leaned her forehead against the bars so their brows touched. “You speak as though it was somehow of lesser value.”

  With that, she proved intuitive once more. For that hubris, that arrogance on Lathan’s part, had been what had set him up for his fall.

  “I wanted it to be more, though,” he said quietly, his gaze moving away from hers. “I saw myself rising within the ranks, doing more than note-keeping, and entering the field. To…” His throat worked painfully. “To bring down the subversives bent on destroying England.” In the end, that was precisely what he’d become—a subversive. And he couldn’t make himself say as much. Not to her. At least, not with those direct words.

  Fingers touched his own through the bars, Francesca’s glove cool upon his equally cool hand. That joining, her touch, was a gentle urging for him to look at her.

  In her eyes, there was none of the customary judgment he
’d come to expect. Just a patient glimmer that encouraged him but didn’t force.

  It was why he found his voice and the ability to continue.

  “My superior, the man I worked directly under from the moment I was hired at the Home Office… I was in awe of him and the role he served.” The Marquess of Tennyson had represented everything Lathan had aspired to. Everything Lathan wished to be and, in terms of a career, wished to have. “The work he did with government affairs… There was nothing he couldn’t handle.” He chuckled, still filled with the same awe and appreciation he’d felt the moment he’d first sat across from Tennyson. “But in terms of his personal life?” He shook his head wryly. “The gentleman couldn’t have been any different. He had a black reputation. A foul mouth. A propensity to bed any and every willing woman whose path he crossed. He drank too much.”

  “He hardly sounds like a reliable sort to lead at the Home Office,” she noted.

  Francesca’s assumption had been Lathan’s mistake, too.

  “I never saw that. Not at first, anyway. I only knew the work he did, and I was of the opinion a man shouldn’t be judged for how he carried himself during his nonworking time.”

  Francesca tipped her head slightly. “What changed your opinion?”

  “Not ‘what.’” His teeth came together sharply enough to rattle his jaw. “But ‘who.’ A man named Rowley.” Nearly two years later, while just speaking that name, Lathan’s loathing for the viscount was as potent. Shame, fury, resentment all twined and twisted and wrapped like vines about his insides. Rage, with Rowley… with himself. For second-guessing his own best judgment and letting himself instead be swayed by another person’s ill opinion. How very weak Lathan had been. “The gentleman my superior answered to planted seeds of doubt and suspicion.”

  “Why would he do that?” she asked with her usual inquisitiveness.

  “Rowley’s profits took a hit when the slave trade was abolished. He believed my superior would advance the end of that horrid institution altogether.”

  “And did he?”

  “He did.” That was what had set Tennyson apart from Rowley and so many others. He might have been a bounder before Society, but in the matters of life and Crown and Country—the things that mattered—he’d been only honorable. Lathan swiped a hand through his hair, eager to have the telling done. “Of course, I didn’t know all of this, their conflicting views on slavery and the profit Rowley stood to earn by its continued existence. All I heard was what I wanted… Rowley suggested my allegiance made me blind.” A paroxysm tightened his chest, and he rubbed at it. “And I was.”

  Francesca was silent for a long moment. “He convinced you the gentleman you worked for was disloyal to the Crown.”

  He nodded jerkily, and then, correcting that movement, he shook his head. “No. He didn’t convince me.” Lathan thumped a fist against his chest. “I allowed myself to be convinced. That is a crucial distinction. And in the end”—his voice emerged hoarse—“I was the traitor. Not my superior.” Not the Marquess of Tennyson. “Me.”

  He braced for her to make the same hasty exit she had last night.

  And he’d understand it. Because even he didn’t like his company.

  And yet, even as that telling had killed whatever favorable opinion she might have had of him, and he’d forever miss having just one more person see him the way Francesca had, there was also a peace in having shared the truth with her.

  He’d not spoken about his betrayal of Tennyson or that night in the marquess’ offices when he’d taken a bullet. He’d not spoken of the agony of his recovery, or his eventual impressment and the hell he’d endured aboard that ship. With anyone.

  Something about this woman made him able to speak of all those darkest moments… and not be consumed by them.

  At last, Francesca released the grip she had on the bars and started from the empty stall.

  She joined Lathan in his.

  “You made a mistake,” she said simply. A sound of impatience escaped him, and he made to cut off whatever undeserved defense she intended to give, but she took his hands firmly in hers and squeezed. “This Rowley fellow, he knew what he was doing. He concocted a scheme of betrayal based on avarice and greed. Those are traitorous acts. You? You made a mistake,” she repeated, this time more insistently, as if she was trying to will him to hear whatever it was she heard. “That doesn’t make you a traitor, Lathan. That makes you human.”

  “Why are you saying this?” he asked, his voice a shredded whisper. He worked his gaze over the serene planes of her face.

  She smiled gently. “Because I believe it. Because I speak the truth.”

  She couldn’t.

  Lathan made to pull away, but she maintained an impressively firm hold of him. Lathan tried to pull a different truth from her, the only one that made any sense. “You expect me to believe you don’t care about what I’ve done,” Lathan said flatly. That, in all the world, he’d found the one person who didn’t give two damns about his mistakes and the life he’d lived. Who didn’t give a jot about the gossip.

  “I wouldn’t say I don’t care, but rather…” Francesca chewed at her lower lip. “I care as it affects you and that it haunts you. I care in that you are living in isolation, punishing yourself because of a mistake, while the true crimes belong firmly with another.” She wrinkled her nose. “That Rowley fellow. And… if I can be honest?”

  Was she ever anything but? It was just one reason he’d come to admire her as he had.

  Francesca didn’t await permission. “Your superior, the devoted-to-his-craft fellow? He’s not blameless here either. How a person conducts oneself in life matters. You’d every reason to your doubts.”

  There was something so freeing in simply being with her… and sharing everything with her.

  He sighed and gave his head a sad shake. “Do you wish to know the absolutely laughable part of it all?”

  “Is there only one, though?” she asked, tipping her head.

  He chuckled and lightly cupped her cheek. “Oh, Francesca.” How refreshing she was in her lack of artifice and cynicism. Mayhap that was what made it so very easy to speak to her. “Despite knowing I don’t deserve to be out with the living, I still hold out hope that I can prove myself useful to the Home Office.”

  Her features grew solemn. “I don’t find that laughable.” Then an understanding filled her eyes. “That is why you are working on a code.”

  Lathan chuckled. “Foolish, isn’t it? Believing anyone, particularly the Home Office, would forgive me those crimes. And yet”—he lifted his palms—“that is all I want.” Stop talking. He was rambling, when he’d only ever been in control of his words.

  Her eyes were full of sadness as she looked at him. “You think in proving yourself to the Home Office that you might undo your past. But, Lathan, there’s no changing our pasts, only our presents and our futures.”

  He let out a sound of frustration. She didn’t understand. “And that is why I intend to make myself useful to them. It is a way of altering my future.”

  “Because you think this is all you want, Lathan?” she pressed and held his gaze with her own. “Or is it simply that you don’t know anything else?”

  Her question threw him off-kilter. What was she saying?

  She ran her hand over his cheek in the manner of his earlier caress. “Perhaps you just miss the life you lived, but it’s really the only one you’ve known.”

  He puzzled his brow. “What else is there?” What else could there be?

  “A wife,” she said ever so softly. “A family.”

  Unbidden, an image whispered forward, a bucolic imagining that included her and some equally chatty little girl.

  He froze. Good God, where had that come from? What did he have to offer anyone, let alone a woman such as Francesca Cornworthy? And children? All he’d leave them would be a legacy of shame. “That’s not my future,” he said flatly. He’d never wanted that life. Why should he let himself consider it now, wh
en it was an absolute impossibility?

  Francesca moved her eyes over his face, like one seeking out hidden truths… ones she’d never find. Not from him. “Because you think you don’t deserve it, or because you want something else?”

  “Because it’s all I know, and it’s all I intend to ever know.”

  Did he imagine the glimmer of disappointment in her pretty eyes? He didn’t want any regrets between them in this instant. Not when she’d given him the greatest of gifts.

  “Thank you, Francesca.”

  She moved closer to him. “Why do you thank me?”

  “Because you’ve listened. Because you’ve let me talk.” And more, she’d not cared about his crimes. Everyone cared. Everyone. There wasn’t anyone, from the vendors on the streets of London, to his family, to the men he’d worked with at the Home Office, who hadn’t cared about Lathan’s role with Rowley.

  What was more, when she spoke as she did about the decisions he’d made, Lathan could almost believe her.

  “We are friends, Lathan.”

  Friends.

  Was that what they were? They’d been strangers just days ago, and now she’d become the only soul he felt comfortable with.

  He touched his brow to hers. “Friends,” he murmured.

  For the first time in a long time, he felt something so unfamiliar, so foreign, and yet, so very welcome. Peace.

  And yet, silently, secretly, he found himself wanting “the more” she’d dangled out there.

  Chapter 12

  Bake a favorite treat.

  Having stolen down to the kitchens ofttimes as a child, Francesca had always been drawn to the cozy warmth: the soft heat that had radiated throughout the room, the fragrant scents that filled the air and made it the most inviting area in the entire household.

  What she’d failed to appreciate or know was just how damned hot it actually got.

  Her sleeves rolled up, Francesca rubbed the back of her arm across the sweat dotting her brow.

  She’d awakened early that morn to fire up the ovens, and they were now fully heated.