Bliss River

by Thea Devine

  "Yes."

  "Good. Do it." He listened for a moment, he heard her footsteps receding, and then he looked back down at the body. What remained of Henry Maitland, drowning in his own blood, just like Lydia.

  Brutal, senseless, amoral act, and for what? He couldn't conceive of a sane reason to murder Henry Maitland. Not one damned reason, and yet dead he was. And for certain by the same merciless hand that had taken his mother's life.

  The wheel of fate—didn't things always come full cir­cle? He was fatalistic enough to believe it, and to trust that instinct yesterday that compelled him to journey here early and fast.

  He just had to make sure there was no sign that some­one had discovered the body or that anyone had been there at all.

  But that was the point of the game, wasn't it?

  Was it? What was he thinking?

  The carriage tracks were a problem, but nothing he could solve in the next five minutes. He merely needed to make sure he hadn't stepped in the blood or was tracking any of it out of the room. He hadn't touched anything, or inadvertently bumped into anything.

  All he needed to do was close all the doors.

  The point of the game...

  Interesting thought, that.

  He pulled the hallway door closed behind him.

  What had they done with the servants? There was not a soul, not a sound. As if everyone had been drugged ...

  No.

  Maybe. He paused at the door and looked around. What if he checked the servants' quarters? Or was that what he was meant to do after finding the horrific scene in the office?

  Anyone would be curious, with the door open and a body in a back room, and not a servant in sight.

  He was ravenously curious, and wary at the same time.

  This scene had been meticulously played out for them. The only variable element was the fact they were here so early.

  What if they had come later? During calling hours?

  What if he hadn't had that gut feeling? What if they'd just stumbled onto the still dead house. The missing ser­vants. The mutilated body. What if they'd gone to the ser­vants' quarters as anyone would, trying to find someone, trying to find an explanation?

  He closed the front door behind him. It was tempting to think about looking for answers. But that was part of the game, human nature, natural curiosity.

  His adversary didn't deem him worthy. Had fully ex­pected that he and Georgiana would fall right into the trap.

  He climbed into the carriage. "Back to Wexley then," he called up to the driver. And to Georgiana, "We're not going to talk."

  She started to protest, and he silenced her, whispering in her ear: "He's gone, Georgiana. Everything else can wait."

  He could just see the house over her shoulder as they drew farther and farther away. Silent house. Deadly house. Tool of the devil. Vanishing finally behind a hedge of yews.

  So now there were two impossible things to be dealt with: their unexpectedly life-shifting kiss, and the vicious murder of Henry Maitland, and the fact that the two things were now inextricably linked forever.

  He wondered if she were thinking about that. It seemed all of a piece suddenly: it had been exactly like looking at the scene of Lydia's murder. The blood. The cruelty. The fact he had been the one to find the body.

  Could Moreton have made the supposition that he would happen upon the murder scene first? He had con­trived it so it would be eminently likely.

  The man was a genius. And more than that, utterly without conscience. He had decided he wanted something and he was systematically going about getting it. It was clearer than clear now that Moreton wanted Olivia, and Moreton wanted Aling, and all of it was almost within his grasp.

  Except that he and Georgiana had come too soon. Found the body too early. Left with barely a trace. Would not be there when presumably Moreton planned to find them with the body, which would have been so incriminat­ing and so hard to explain away.

  Moreton would have been the one to call the constable, and they, together, would have discovered the servants, stupefied and drunkenly unaware, in their beds in their quarters.

  By all that was holy, the man was insidious. And de­praved. There was no one to stop him, not in Bliss River, and not here, if he could have gotten Georgiana out of the way.

  After all, he would have explained, Olivia and he had just come in from South Africa. They'd debarked in Greybourne the previous day, and had traveled up to Medwyn only this morning to be met, on arriving there, by this shocking sight. Henry hadn't even known his wife was about to return, Olivia would have told them, and she would have been overcome and possibly fainted.

  And they'd have believed her too, since she hadn't been at Aling for more than twenty years, and had no reason at all to want to do her husband any harm.

  And Moreton. Well, she would tell them, he was just an old friend, escorting her, keeping her safe on the journey.

  That probably would have been their story. And if Moreton could have caught him and Georgiana with the body, all to the good. Then all the loose ends would have been tied up, and there would have been nothing to stop him from marrying Olivia after a prudent amount of time.

  In fact, there still was nothing to stop him. He would just convince the authorities that an unsolved murder had nothing to do with him.

  But why? Why now? Why England after all those ex­travagantly dissolute years in his libertine kingdom in the Valley?

  What snake had slithered into his Eden?

  He turned the thought upside down. A snake? Or a blight in the garden? Something intrusive, disruptive ...

  Dear bloody hell...

  A creeping fungus—Him. A pestilence, a scourge.

  By all that was bloody sacred, he was the catalyst for everything that had gone wrong.

  Chapter Twenty

  And now it all made some kind of twisted sense, every piece of the puzzle having some value, some reason— at least in Moreton's eyes.

  "He's going to come after us, you know."

  It had been a fraught journey back to Wexley. Charles hadn't been in the least forthcoming during the trip, and Georgiana had no idea what he was thinking. She had been dissolved in secret silent tears anyway, mourning all the years gone and all the years to come that she would never know the man who was her father.

  They couldn't have talked anyway, with the driver lis­tening avidly, and a possible witness to their having gone to Aling, and Charles hadn't nearly finished coming to grips with the notion of his own culpability.

  So in all, it was a deadly and silent trip back to Miss Elmina's boardinghouse, with Georgiana huddled in the corner, shaking with silent sobs, and him staring stoically out the carriage window.

  He had just aired his conjectures about Moreton, and Georgiana was skeptical at best, and beyond thinking him rational about it at this point.

  Moreton didn't want them. Moreton wanted—well, who knew what Moreton wanted, really?

  "Let me say it again," Charles said emphatically, "we were meant to find the body, and he was going to corner us with it, in the office. He could have made an excellent case that you killed your father, and that I helped you. That would have gotten us both out of the way, and he would have successfully committed yet another murder. He must feel invincible right now."

  She ran a weary hand over her swollen eyes. "But why? This doesn't make sense. There's nothing here he needs or wants, and Aling is a liability for a man like him."

  "Absolutely. But fate handed him something he didn't expect..."

  "I think you believe in fate too much," she said waspishly.

  He let that comment ride in the air for a moment, and then he said, "Me."

  Oh, that was too much. Now he bore the burden of Moreton's perfidious deeds? "What?"

  "Me. It occurs to me that none of this would have hap­pened had I not come to Bliss River. It's so clear now: the minute my mother recognized me, she was bound to die. That was what gave Moreton the impetus to come to England
and the idea he might want Aling. Even if he would have to commit two murders to do it. But he had two likely suspects on whom he could pin those two mur­ders."

  "Who? Us? No." She covered her eyes and rocked back and forth. "No."

  "Olivia is free to remarry now. That was the whole point. For him to marry her and disable you. They will come after us, Georgiana. Moreton will be very precise about how much you hated your father and how you had come back to England to confront him. Olivia will run through a litany of hateful things you might have said about him and how you had always resented his leaving you in Bliss River. They will want to question you. Not soon. But sometime, after they investigate further, they will."

  "You're scaring me."

  "He's a frightening man, Moreton; there's absolutely no moral underpinning there. Yet, he can be so personable, one tends to underestimate him. But he is here in England, and he will marry Olivia and they will take over Aling."

  Dear heaven, what an improbability. Those two dis­solute libertines shackled in a conventional marriage, liv­ing a conventional life at Aling? It was impossible to conceive.

  "They won't."

  "They will. Who's to stop them? There's no other family apart from you. You're the only thing standing in their way."

  "He didn't have any brothers or sisters," she said slowly, trying to dredge up what little she knew of inheri­tance factors. "But Olivia wouldn't inherit either"—she stopped abruptly as the next thought almost took her breath away. "Barring any sons, Aling comes to me—"

  That floored him. He hadn't even considered that possi­bility, knew less than she did about how estates were passed. "Good God." He immediately conceived a half-dozen other scenarios based on that fact. "I daresay he never thought about returning to England at all before I arrived, and he killed Lydia. And then you disappeared too—" He thought about that for a moment. And there it was: Georgiana's leaving the Valley was the key.

  "Do you see? He fully expected to execute me and go on as usual in the Valley. But we got away—you got away ..." The succeeding thought was so chilling he almost did not want to voice it. "Georgiana—he killed your father not because he wants Olivia. Olivia can give him nothing now. He'll kill Olivia, too. He killed your father because he wants to marry you."

  "He can't do that." That was her first thought. He was her uncle, after all. He was prohibited from doing that. "I would never ... How could he possibly? Uncles can't.. ."

  "Firstly, no one knows he's your uncle. And secondly, I don't think he knew. This was purely his taking advantage of unforeseen circumstances. He had no idea, no plan until I came into the picture. It was an opportunity pure and simple. Killing Lydia freed him. Your father's death freed the estate so you could inherit. And he will find a way to have all three murders linked to me."

  "But why? Why?"

  "I don't know. Maybe it's as simple as he couldn't go on the way he was going in the Valley. He's getting older, and a man's vigor diminishes after time. Perhaps an estate and a fertile young woman are enough to entice a man like that to get an heir, to leave something behind besides a legacy of lust. Whatever it is, he's into it so deep, he will take it to the end. So we need a plan. We need to go on the offense."

  "This whole theory of yours is an offense. And I'm too tired to make plans." More than tired. Her head was whirling with all the theories and the notion that every­thing that happened hinged on his having come to the Valley.

  "We have no choice. We can't wait on this; otherwise, he will be lying in wait for you wherever you turn, and I might not be around to protect you. We need to be visible; the more visible, the more impossible for him to pull you down. We have to establish ourselves immediately in soci­ety and make him come to us."

  Georgiana had had enough. This was verging on de­mentia. She'd been traveling all this while, seducing—and loving it—a man who might be certifiably insane. "This is crazy, ridiculous. You're sunstruck."

  "In this weather?" Charles asked, amused.

  "Well, cadi, we have no camels to trade for an invita­tion into my father's social set."

  "Well, my lady, it is not only your family who trades with that social set. A prince of the desert who breeds win­ning horse stock has some cachet among them."

  "Indeed, and is that how you style yourself?"

  "That, my lady of the valley, is what I am,"

  "And I am what I am, is that what you're saying?"

  He pulled back on every impulse to just ignore her. It would be easier on both of them if he did. She was indeed what she was and that would never change, even if the queen of courtesans were tricked out like a lady. For a minute though, he let himself believe she could be a queen. For a kiss, he might even capitulate to her. The ache was always there, the erection incessant, and the kiss earlier that day had shifted the bedrock under his feet.

  It was a kiss on which promises were made. Even to someone like her.

  It didn't lessen the danger though.

  "I am saying," he said patiently, "that we don't have a lot of time or money. We need to get ourselves in place, fast."

  She felt the heat drain from the air around them. She felt worn out, and dislocated. Moreton's evil could not be this all-pervasive, and yet—and yet, they'd come thousands of miles, her father was dead and she was the presumptive heir.

  Whatever had been between them was hardly important at this point.

  If he was right. If Moreton was after them.

  "How do we do this?"

  "You could marry me." He threw that out as casually as a puff of air. He wasn't even sure he meant to say that, or something else. But there it was, floating, resonating, the fastest and easiest solution to prevent Moreton from harm­ing her.

  He thought it made the most sense of anything since this misbegotten adventure had begun.

  And she laughed. She just burst out and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Stupid! Gullible! She'd been living in a fog all these weeks with him.

  And now, suddenly and with those words, everything became clear. Bright and clear and irrevocable. So much so, she wished she hadn't given away all her power be­cause those things came so hard won.

  No matter ... there were other ways, other means. And by no means would he trick her into marriage. She might be easy to blindside, but she wasn't that naive.

  "Ah, Charles. Dear, dear cadi—now we finally come to it. Now we have the truth—and the truth is that, in fact, there has always been more than one plan. And that you, too, saw an opportunity, didn't you? An opportunity for a foreigner like yourself to marry and inherit a country es­tate ... You are the next in line, but you know that al­ready, don't you, Charles? You spent enough time in England to be aware of such things. I daresay you did some research on that order before you came to Bliss River."

  "Georgiana ..."

  "Oh, I don't believe you've thought beyond finding a way to coerce me into marriage, cadi. In spite of who and what I am. You would never otherwise marry someone like me. But it now becomes crystal clear why you were so willing to shoulder the burden of taking me with you. You were gunning for an estate and meantime you could have all the sex you could handle besides. Cousins can marry, but you knew that, too."

  "Georgiana ..."

  She waved him off. Treacherous bastard. She didn't know how she was going to survive this, but she would. Even after so many deaths—including her heart.. .

  She'd never believe for a moment he hadn't thought of that connection, of that possibility. Nevertheless, he tried again. "If we were to marry, he wouldn't come after you. He'd have to kill me first."

  "If we were to marry," she spat, "it might be too tempt­ing for you ..."

  He saw her point instantly. "Bloody goddamn hell..."

  "You weren't above plotting your mother's demise—"

  "Well, I've learned a goddamn lot about myself since then; I would never have killed her. My mother?"

  "We can't ever know. We only know that Moreton did murder her, and so
now we come to the bargaining point."

  "Is there one?" he asked grimly.

  "I think so. Your mission isn't yet done, cadi. The queen must be protected at all costs."

  Oh, yes, now she was royalty, icy and imperious, her mind working like a steel trap, snapping on every angle.

  "Go on."

  "We will pretend to be married. With none of the sexual privilege that entails except as it provides security for my­self and the estate until Moreton is brought to justice."

  "That may never happen, Georgiana."

  Her expression grew hard. She lifted her chin. • "Then I'll just have to kill him myself."

  By now, she thought, her father's death had to have been reported. Or had it?

  "That should not affect our plan," Charles said.

  "What was our plan?" Georgiana asked. He didn't have a plan, short of marrying her and then their entrenching themselves as ostentatiously as possible in London. And even then, there was no telling whether that would lure Moreton away from Aling.

  "To establish ourselves in London."

  "Which takes a lot of money."

  "Indeed, and I have no problem with securing an ad­vance on breeding futures from my friends here. I do have friends in England, Georgiana. I do have some reputation as a breeder and a gentleman, no matter how foreign I may look. This is not as impossible as it seems."

  "What seems impossible is Moreton's manipulating everything the way you think he did. As opposed to the way you did, which makes perfect sense."

  His face closed. There was no talking to the queen about any of this now. Her conclusions were set in stone and it would take dynamite to destroy them.

  "I assure you, he did. And he's probably looking for you right now."

  "And you did, and you've got me. So it's time to be mar­ried in public, cadi. I'm ready. When do we start?"

  He started by contacting a gentleman who had been a classmate at Oxford, who was pleased to welcome him and his wife to dinner on the succeeding night, even on such short notice.