Upon the dressing table was a box, an inlaid case that held a lady’s small, daily jewelry. Graham doubted his mother had owned any other kind, for the coffers had been depleted years before she’d married into the Cavendish clan. He flipped open the lid with one finger, but the case was empty. Someone had emptied it of valuables long ago, he imagined. Just what his mother would have wanted, her little treasures pawned for more adventures in fatality.
It was a very nice room, but it was just a room. Once this room had meant something to him, as it had even to his father, he imagined, for though his father had never spoken of her, the duke had never married again either. That might have been because he already had his heir along with several spares, or it might have been something deeper. Graham would have liked to believe that his father had been capable of something deeper, once upon a time.
He snorted. Probably not. His father had been precisely what he’d seemed, aggressive and coarse.
Turning to go, he grazed the edge of the little dressing table with his hip. Being rather more elderly than stable, it teetered. Graham caught it with a quick motion, but the jewel case slipped off and fell to the floor. God, he was as bad as Sophie!
He bent to sweep up the case. It had cracked along one corner, the joined wood parting in a thick dark crevice. Graham frowned as he gazed at it. It wasn’t of value to him particularly, but he hated to throw it out.
Then he saw a gleam of metal through the crack. Tilting the case, he shook it, but nothing fell. Looking more closely, he tugged at the ancient velvet lining in that corner, pulling it away to see that it had come unstuck long ago. Beneath it lay a ring of gold.
It wasn’t an especially impressive ring. The stone was diamond but not overlarge, and the simple band and setting showed no particular finesse. For all that, it was very pretty. Merely a simple, unpretentious ring, the sort a lady might enjoy wearing simply because she liked it.
Graham barely remembered his mother. She was a whiff of perfume in his mind, a softer voice amid the manly roaring. Even so, he doubted his mother would have wished him to use this bauble for a betrothal ring. It wasn’t nearly ostentatious enough to offer to a girl he hoped to make a duchess.
Still, he slipped it into his pocket. After all, he needed both a girl and a ring, didn’t he? Perhaps the trick was to find a girl who would fit the ring he already had, not the other way around.
THERE WAS SELDOM a criminal disturbance on the sedate street where was situated the esteemed—even though no one of true importance had thought of them in years—firm of Stickley & Wolfe, Solicitors. The office itself was on an upper floor, above a glover’s at street level and a servant-placement agency on the next. Wide windows looked down upon the street, but the noise, even during the day, rarely ascended so high.
If someone had strolled the street below late that night—for one could with little danger, even so deep in the night—they might have glanced up at just the right moment to see the flicker of candlelight where none should be.
Fortunately for the intruder in the offices above, there was no one on the street.
The tall, once-handsome, now dissipated-looking man standing in the silent office of Stickley & Wolfe, Solicitors, might not have seemed as though he belonged there. After all, he wore dark, common clothing and the secretive air of a thief. Of course, the impression wouldn’t be helped by the fact that it was the middle of the night.
In point of fact, he had every right to be there. Wolfe wasn’t much of a solicitor—in school he’d cheated more than studied and bribed his way more often than either, in addition to holding a tasty spot of blackmail over the dean—but what did his lack of competence matter when he and his very capable partner only had one client?
His partner, Stickley, wasn’t someone he would have chosen himself, but their fathers had been partners before them and besides, Stickley was a genius at nurturing and growing the single trust left in their hands. Under Stickley’s paternal supervision, the fifteen thousand pounds originally left by Sir Hamish Pickering had grown to nearly thirty thousand.
Some of which Wolfe would like to get his hands on.
Now.
The safe wasn’t hidden, for it was a great iron box large enough to hold every one of those thirty thousand pounds—at least, Wolfe assumed it did. He didn’t bother his head with petty little details of the actual money. That was Stickley’s job.
It was also Stickley’s job to parcel out Wolfe’s retainer in equal portions on a monthly basis. This month, the gold had lasted only three days. He’d then coaxed a bit extra out of Stickley, whose prim mouth had pursed at such irresponsibility, but that had only lasted another week.
Now he was down far more than that. He owed people, dangerous people—the sort of people who ran dark, dirty betting establishments full of dark, dirty customers. The thought of his fate if he didn’t repay them spurred him to lift the tools he brought to bash the safe into submission instead of using the numerical combination.
He caught himself after a moment of disappointing exertion, for banging on the safe would do no good. He wasn’t prepared to stage a robbery just yet. Right now all he wanted was enough to placate his debtors until he could get the rest of the money out of Stickley.
The trouble was, he couldn’t remember the combination. He thought it had something to do with his father’s birthday, which he couldn’t remember either. He tentatively spun the dial for a few moments, but nothing came to mind but the memory of his father’s disappointed eyes.
Leaving the safe itself for a moment, he went to his own desk, which faced Stickley’s as if they actually worked together, and threw himself down onto his large richly padded chair. Tossing the tools down at his feet, he rubbed his face hard.
He’d given up drink for the moment, all the better to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, but his head pounded and he felt shaky and ill. He wanted nothing more than a fistful of whiskey or six, but he didn’t dare. Nightmares of waking up dead haunted him.
Idly, he began to search his desk. There wasn’t much in there but dried-up inkwells and quills left over from his father’s time, although he did find a penny stuck in the back of a drawer. Tucking it into his waistcoat pocket, he then poised his elbows on the desk and stared across at Stickley’s empty chair.
How he hated Stickley. From boyhood they’d been thrown together, expectations heavy on their shoulders. Stickley, adroit sycophant that he was, had studied hard and well. Wolfe had chafed at being forced into a profession, for wasn’t there money enough to live a gentleman’s life?
The Pickering trust—a great wad of money left by an uneducated Scotsman who’d overstepped himself, meant for some title-grubbing female descendant. Had there ever been a bigger waste of beautiful piles of gold in the history of mankind? Wolfe’s fingers tingled with greed.
He rose and walked slowly over to Stickley’s side of the great double desk. Stickley was annoying and fussy, but he was no fool. He wouldn’t leave the safe combination lying about in his desk, would he?
What the hell? It wasn’t as though Wolfe had anywhere else to be. His rooms were being watched, he was sure. Besides, he hadn’t paid his landlord in weeks. He wasn’t even sure his things weren’t tossed in the street at this very moment.
So, out of idle curiosity, he pulled open the top drawer of Stickley’s desk.
Precise piles of foolscap were divided by neat lines of pencils and rows of fresh ink bottles. Sickening.
The next drawer held stacks of stationery and envelopes—as if Stickley had anyone to write to!
The third and last drawer held one leather folder tied with cord. Interesting.
Wolfe pulled the folder out and seated himself in Stickley’s chair. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he knew Stickley’s writing as well as his own.
Well, well. Another will. This time it was Stickley’s will. There was a long list of scholarly groups that were to receive this piece or that piece of Stickley’s collection—none of which sounded very
interesting or valuable to Wolfe—but at the end, he read something that made him straighten off the base of his spine in surprise.
Stickley had left everything else—including a sizable pile of savings and all future shares of the Pickering retainer—to his father’s partner’s son. Wolfe. The man who’d tortured his boyhood and made his adulthood as miserable as possible.
“It is what my father would have expected of me.”
Wolfe blinked in surprise for several long moments. Then a slow smile grew upon his handsome, haggard face. Stickley had left it all to him.
What an idiot!
When Stickley came in a few hours later, brisk and prim as only a virtuously early riser could be, he found Wolfe seated motionless on the proper side of the great desk, his elbows braced on the blotter, his chin resting on his folded hands.
“Heavens, you’re up early!”
Wolfe only smiled. “Early. Yes.”
Stickley blinked away his surprise and crossed to his own side of the desk, where he neatly stored away the case he carried to and from work every day. Wolfe idly wondered what sort of work Stickley needed to take home every night, when they only had the one account to worry over. Come to think of it, what did Stickley do during his properly structured work day?
Bored simply thinking about it, Wolfe didn’t bother to ask.
“I’ve been wondering if I ought to send a message round to your rooms,” Stickley said. “We received some wonderful news the other day. The Duke of Brookmoor is up and about! Isn’t that marvelous? Why, he might go on for years yet. We’ll have time to grow the account to a superior size now, won’t we?”
Wolfe, who kept his ears close to mouths that tended toward gossip anyway, had already heard that the present Marquis of Brookhaven had gone to visit his uncle, Brookmoor. He’d also heard that Brookmoor had turned to a new physician and had seemingly achieved a miraculous recovery. Therefore a certain upstart heiress wouldn’t be spending her gold any time soon.
Wolfe didn’t believe in miracles. One got what one wanted by taking it.
He leaned back in his chair, letting it creak as he relaxed into the tufted leather. “Stick, old boy . . . did you change the combination to the safe?”
Stickley nodded, eyes bright. “Oh, yes. Years ago. We had that assistant for a time, remember? Useless lad. After he drank your whiskey and made sick on my desk, I fired him. Then I changed the combination, just to be on the safe side.”
Wolfe didn’t remember the assistant, although he did remember making sick on Stickley’s precisely arranged desk. Good day, that. He gazed down at his folded hands. “Don’t you think I need to know the new combination?”
Stickley blinked. “Whyever for? I can always open it for you.”
Wolfe raised his lidded gaze at last. “What if something happens to you, old friend? What if you step in front of a speeding cart? What if a street thief cuts your throat on your way into work one morning?” What if I beat you to a pulp with your own blasted case?
Stickley drew back at the flat stare emanating from Wolfe’s eyes. “I . . . I made sure that you’d be given everything you need to run the firm, should something like that happen.” He swallowed. “In my will. Would you . . . would you care to see it?”
Wolfe smiled then, a charming show of teeth that had disarmed many a man about to strike and many a woman about to call for help. “Don’t be silly, Stick, old son. I don’t need to see it. I trust you implicitly.”
After all, he knew everything he needed to know.
Chapter Three
Late summer days in London looked much like any other day in London. Rain was wont to fall at any time, carrying with it a load of the soot that hung perpetually in the skies. Damp chill turned more to damp rot in the summer months, and by now it seemed that the smell of the sewers would never be erased from one’s nostrils.
Still, flowers bloomed brightly in green gardens and birds chirped merrily in the trees carefully nurtured around the finer houses. Pretty girls in vivid bonnets strolled arm in arm with dandies, maids and footmen trailing behind, encumbered with parcels.
Even in this less than fashionable neighborhood just past the edge of Mayfair, the denizens of Primrose Street had sought to earn the name. Tending more toward window boxes than full gardens, the terraced houses still wore as many flowers as could decently be crammed in. It was rather shabbily charming if one bothered to notice.
Standing outside Lady Tessa’s rented house at the ungodly early hour of noon, Graham could have cared less for flowers or bloody birds or even pretty girls. He hadn’t slept all night, instead forcing himself to try to read through the piles of papers that Abbot had left behind.
Graham wasn’t a stupid man, he knew that, but he felt like one this morning. How could he possibly inhale a lifetime of information and training in time to save Edencourt?
And do you even want to? Wouldn’t it be easier just to let it lie?
His father had apparently thought so. Graham himself had been inclined to take after his father for the first time in his life—until he read about the conditions in which the few remaining cottagers lived.
His cottagers. His people.
Which was ridiculous, when one thought about it. What sort of idiot system of inheritance would leave him in charge of actual people? He’d never even kept a pet!
Yet the weight of his responsibility, once engaged, would not rest. He had stuffed as much information into his mind as it could handle at the moment, then he’d left Eden House and walked restlessly through Mayfair to this familiar address.
All he could think was that Sophie would know what to do. Which was more idiocy, of course. Sophie was a gently-reared young lady from a little manor house in the country. She was intelligent, that was true, but scholarly translations would not help him now.
Still, Sophie was the only person in London who actually gave a damn about him. This would change, he knew. Once his title was announced he’d be besieged by a sudden influx of “friends.” Not as many as if he were rich, but enough to be very annoying.
Until then, he wanted one more day of being just Lord Graham Cavendish, younger son, a man of charm and leisure and little account. As he climbed the steps to the rented house, he didn’t think to ask himself why he wanted to spend that last day with no one but Miss Sophie Blake.
Graham entered the music room. “Sophie?”
Her papers were everywhere, spread out in some chaotic version of order that only Sophie understood—and beware the person who moved a single sheet!
No Sophie. He was about to look elsewhere when he spotted one of her slippers on the floor next to the window embrasure. Then he saw the stocking-clad toes dangling just past the curtain. His lips twisted wearily. “Got you.”
When he came closer, he realized that she wasn’t hiding. She was asleep, shoes off, paper-covered knees curled up, spectacles awry and all. Graham’s grim smile softened. Poor lass. She was working too hard on her blasted translations—and Tessa was likely making her life miserable, something that Tessa excelled at.
Carefully, Graham cleared the translations from Sophie’s lap and set them aside—keeping them in precisely the same order, of course. Then, with gentle fingers, he removed the spectacles from her nose and from behind her ears.
Without the wire and glass, her familiar bony features seemed rather vulnerable and unknown. She was a true case, this one. Just look at her! Endless legs curled awkwardly beneath her like a newborn colt, ink-stained fingers and bitten nails, hair tumbling loose—
Her hair had given up the fight against pins and gravity and fallen to her bosom in a heavy twisted rope. Curious, Graham reached to ease the twist. Abruptly he found his hands full of amazing silken red-gold. The sensation of her warm hair in his fingers sent an unexpected jolt to his neglected male senses.
His eyelids slid nearly closed in drowsy sensuous pleasure. He let the rope of hair roll over his fist, winding the length until his hand rested just beside her chin. At t
he faint warmth from his fingers on her skin, she rolled her head until her cheek rested on his wrist and palm. A soft, sleepy sigh left her lips, wafting across the sensitive skin of his inner wrist.
In the warm, enclosed space behind the curtain, he became aware of her scent as he never had before. She smelled wonderful, really. She smelled like sensible soap and sun-warmed skin and something else, something girlish and sweet, as if incorruptibility had a perfume of its own.
Her eyelashes fluttered. Graham released her hair and straightened, closing his hand against the loss of that silken splendor. When she stretched and opened her eyes, he stood a proper distance away, grinning down at her in his usual affable way.
After all, it was only Sophie. He was simply overdue for a visit with Lilah, that was all.
“Gray? What are you doing here?”
He tilted his head instead of answering. “You’ve never cut your hair in your life, have you?”
Startled, she reached to feel that her hair had fallen. She reddened as if she had something to be ashamed of and sat up quickly. She seemed so discomfited that Graham politely pretended to be interested in the view from the window until she’d pulled herself together. Once her ginger-spiced locks were tightly wound onto her head, however, he had the inexplicable desire to pull it all down again.
He cleared his throat. Don’t be a cad. She’d die of shock if you so much as hinted at such a thing. His Sophie was completely unaware of the world and all its evils. He meant to keep it that way, even if he himself was one of those evils.
Now she was looking at him expectantly. That’s right, she’d asked him a question, hadn’t she?
Abruptly, he didn’t want to tell her about his family and the title. He wanted to pretend that nothing had changed, just for a few moments more. He’d been so very comfortable with Sophie just the way things were.
So instead of answering her—again—he reached for the first of the pages that rested on her lap. He blinked at the flowing, lovely script there. Had he expected something tight, cramped . . . repressed?
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