Her smile luminous, she caressed his lips with her fingers. “Hmmm, I am very fond of that particular cave myself. One day, we should visit it again.”
His eyes darkened, and his fingers brushed against her nipple. “If we do, my dear, be prepared to be ravished. Quite thoroughly, in fact.”
Tingling from his touch, Daphne smiled and said, “I shall try to brace myself.”
Charles and Daphne spent three days at Stonegate. They wandered over the house and estate, Charles pointing out the various rooms, items, and areas of interest. They drifted through a dreamscape, lost in each other, falling deeper and deeper in love, aware and yet not aware of their surroundings, of the servants watching them with smiling approval. There were sweetly intimate breakfasts in the morning room; on one day, a gay alfresco meal enjoyed in the garden; and scrumptious meals served in the dining room. Nights were spent in wild, passionate lovemaking, but there were those dark moments that they spoke of Sofia and Raoul. Seeing the pain and guilt in his eyes whenever their names were mentioned, Daphne swore to herself that she would make him happy, make him forget that terrible past, but she knew that her husband’s heart would always bear the scars inflicted by Sofia and Raoul.
“Do you really believe that Raoul is alive?” Daphne asked him that last evening at Stonegate as Charles inspected the contents of the family safe in the room used by his father as an office. The safe was concealed behind a bookcase that easily swung out from the wall—if one knew where to find the catch that released it.
Daphne was seated on a silver and white sofa near the fire, and Charles glanced over his shoulder at her as he took out a large jewelry box constructed of ebony and satinwood elegantly decorated with seed pearls and gilt. “Hmm, I don’t know. Those dead women make me believe that he could be, but I have not been able to find anything tangible that encourages me to think I am right.” He looked thoughtful. “Raoul would need money, and while I’m convinced that Sofia was farsighted enough to make certain he would never want should his true nature be discovered and he was forced to flee, I can find no trail of it. Most telling of all, Nell no longer dreams of him.”
Daphne suppressed a little shiver. “It must have been horrid for her to see him actually killing those poor women.”
Charles nodded. “It was, but Nell is a strong woman.” He grinned. “She’d have to be to be married to my cousin.” He sat down beside her, the box on his lap. “But let us not speak of them. Let me show you all the pretty trinkets that are yours to wear as you see fit.”
Opening the lid of the jewelry box, Daphne gasped at the array of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and other precious stones that gleamed in the candlelight. “Oh! There are so many lovely pieces.”
“Yes, and as my wife, they are all yours.” He touched one or two pieces. “Some of them are very old, but each generation has added to them, and I shall be no different—I have every intention of showering you with jewels upon occasion.” His eyes caressed her. “In the meantime, I think that this emerald necklace and earrings, given to my great-great grandmother by her husband, would look very fine on you.” A sensual smile curved his mouth. “Of course, you would be wearing nothing else.”
“Of course,” she agreed with a becoming flush.
They spent an agreeable several minutes examining the various pieces, but as time passed, Charles frowned. Seeing it, Daphne asked, “What is it?”
“My stepmother,” he said slowly, “loved jewels. She was always buying them…I remember several of them—a sapphire pendant, a diamond and pearl necklace with matching earrings, and many other pieces. They are not here.”
“Do you think she put them somewhere else? Left them with her banker in London? Or with a jeweler to be cleaned, and they have not been returned?”
He shook his head. “No. Her solicitor, as well as her banker, turned everything over to me when the estate was settled.” He walked over to a massive mahogany desk and after opening several drawers, found what he was looking for. He thumbed through a sheaf of papers, and plucking out one, he came back to sit beside her on the sofa. “This is a list of all Sofia’s personal belongings. You’ll notice that there is no mention of any jewelry. And I know her one extravagance was jewels. I may have forgotten some pieces of jewelry she owned, but not all of them. So where are they?” He glanced down at the glittering array of jewelry in the box in Daphne’s lap. “What’s missing would easily be worth a small fortune…and Raoul would need a fortune.”
“Jewels,” Daphne said slowly, “would be easy to hide and transport with no one being the wiser…. She could have given him various jewels to conceal in places that he could easily reach should the worst happen.”
“They would be better than money safely set aside in a bank,” Charles added, following her train of thought. “A small cache here and there would insure that he had plenty of money.” Scowling, he studied the jewels. “It appears that she was intelligent enough not to take family heirlooms, but I see no sign of the many jewels that she bought over the last twenty or so years. The missing items represent a fortune—and that’s just counting the ones I remember. There could have been many I never saw or do not recall. Certainly, they would be fortune enough for Raoul to live where and as he pleased.”
His expression thoughtful, Charles shut the lid to the jewelry box with a snap. He stood up and placed it in the safe. After pushing the bookcase into position, he returned to sit beside Daphne.
“If he is alive, I think we have discovered how he has been living these past three years,” he said grimly. “He had a hunting box in Leicestershire, a suite of rooms both in Brighton and London, a small yacht and a house that he kept at Poole. He could have stashed jewels in any one or all of those places.”
“You inherited his estate as well as his mother’s—wouldn’t there have been a record of properties owned by him?”
“I’m sure that there was, but I never paid any attention to it. Why should I? I believed him to be dead, and quite frankly, in the months following Sofia’s death and presumably his, I just wanted to be as far away from Stonegate and anything connected with the pair of them as I could be. Gerrard, my solicitor in London, handled everything, and from time to time, he would send me letters informing me of his progress in the settlement of the estate.” Charles stared at the fire, his expression remote. “At that time, I didn’t give a damn about any of it.”
“Did you sell the yacht or the hunting box or anything?”
He shook his head. “For all I know or care, the yacht has sunk to the bottom of the Channel. Gerrard takes care of everything not connected to Stonegate.”
“Well, I suggest that you write Mr. Gerrard and find out what properties Raoul did own,” Daphne said practically. “It is probably far too late to do any good, for I’m sure that as soon as he was able, Raoul would have moved swiftly to gather his, er, inheritance—assuming he survived.”
Charles nodded. “And if we find any jewels…”
She beamed at him. “Then it will prove that he is dead and those poor women in Cornwall met their fate at someone else’s hand.”
“It appears that we shall be extending our trip to include a brief excursion to Brighton, with a stop at Poole along the way before we return to Cornwall.” He slanted her a glance. “Unless, of course, you wish to return to your brother and sister? I can join you as soon as I have searched the house at Poole and his rooms in Brighton. I would not keep you from Adrian and April longer than necessary.”
There was something in his voice that made her look sharply at him. She sensed there was more behind his question than polite consideration. Did he not want her with him? Was he, she wondered sickly, bored with her and regretting their marriage? Even as that thought crossed her mind, she impatiently dismissed it. No, it wasn’t that he was bored with her or their marriage; it was something else. A mistress? Again she realized how little they knew of each other. For all she knew, her husband had half a dozen mistresses scattered across the British Isles.
And, she thought gloomily, he wouldn’t be the first husband to seek his pleasures outside of the marriage bed. Yet she doubted Charles was a philanderer, but it was possible, because they had married so quickly, that he had not made a final settlement with his mistress…if he had a mistress. Her only recourse, she decided, was, until she knew what was in his mind, to tread warily. Cautiously, she asked, “Do you wish for me to return to Beaumont Place without you?”
“I want you to do what will make you happiest,” he replied with equal caution.
Now what was she to make of that? Disliking the situation and not willing to fence indefinitely with him, she stood up and shook out the folds of her spotted muslin gown. “If you think that I am going to let you have all the adventure and go off on this, this scavenger hunt by yourself, you can think again,” she said bluntly. “I shall go with you to Poole and Brighton.” She gave him a level look. “I am your wife, and my place is by your side.”
Her spine rigid, she marched from the room, leaving Charles to stare after her in mingled despair and delight. She was coming with him! he thought, elated. Even if, he acknowledged gloomily, she had neatly sidestepped his offer to return to her brother and sister. Had she done so because she cared for him and wanted to be with him? Or because, he wondered with a razor-sharp stab of pain, it was her duty?
Chapter 15
Though Charles came to her bed that night and their lovemaking was as passionate as ever, Daphne was conscious of a faint restraint between them. They pretended otherwise, but it was there, hovering in the air between them like an unwelcome wraith. She wrinkled her nose. Not a fair comparison when held up to Sir Wesley and the little ghost in her bedroom at Beaumont Place.
Having bid good-bye to the staff, it occurred to her, as Charles assisted her into the carriage early that next morning, that she seemed to be surrounded by ghosts in one form or another. Not only the ones at Beaumont Place, but also the shades of Charles’s brother, Raoul, and his stepmother, Sofia.
She cast a glance over at Charles, wondering what he was thinking as he stared out of the window of the coach. Why, she asked herself for the tenth time this morning, had he made the offer for her to return to Cornwall? Didn’t he want her with him? Was he already regretting the bonds of matrimony? Or had his suggestion been nothing more than simple consideration? Whatever the reason, she suspected that it had been more than just consideration—there had been a note in his voice, something in his stance that made her think that there was a deeper meaning behind his words. But what? And why would he send her away? She could think of dozens of reasons, some even logical, why he wouldn’t want her to accompany him, but none of them lessened the hurt that lodged like a thorn in her heart.
“I’m sorry,” Charles said, breaking into her thoughts, “to drag you along on what I am sure is a fool’s errand.”
She smiled uncertainly at him. “I think of it as an adventure. Our first adventure together.”
He picked up her hand lying on the seat between them and pressed a kiss to the back of it. “The first, I hope, of many,” he said huskily.
Giddy with love for him, Daphne smiled widely at him. It didn’t matter why he had offered to send her back to Cornwall, what mattered was that she loved him and they were together. “Undoubtedly, we shall have many adventures in our lives together,” she replied. Her smile wobbled just a trifle. “Some more enjoyable than others.”
His eyes caressed her face, and he kissed her hand again. “Much more enjoyable—I swear it to you.”
Her spirits buoyed by his words, she leaned back against the velvet squabs and settled down for the journey to Poole.
After the long hours in the coach and nights spent in cramped country inns, Daphne was glad when they reached Poole. It was midmorning when they approached the seaport, and Charles ordered the coachman to drive directly to Raoul’s property, just at the edge of town. The property proved to be more extensive than Charles had been led to believe by either Raoul or Sofia. From the main road, amidst the trees and shrubs, he barely glimpsed the rooftop of a house. A narrow, overgrown driveway angled between the trees, and as the coach left the main road, driving toward the house in the distance, it was then that it occurred to Charles that the place might be locked and that he had no key. To his relief, nestled in a bend of the road, was a small cottage that housed a caretaker, Mr. Jacques Robinet. Mr. Robinet was a small, elderly gentleman, hard of hearing if the left-hand cupping his ear was anything to go by. Looking frail enough to be blown over by a strong wind, Mr. Robinet explained, in a heavy French accent that made his speech nearly incomprehensible, that he had worked for Miss Sofia’s family in France and had accompanied her family to England. Anxiety creeping into his voice and his dark eyes darting nervously to Charles’s face, he admitted that he lived rent-free in the cottage in return for keeping an eye on the place. It was obvious that Mr. Robinet was at once awed to finally be meeting the new owner and clearly worried that he might be forced to move.
Charles put the old man’s fears to rest, telling him only that they had stopped by on a whim to inspect the house but that he had no intentions of making any changes; Mr. Robinet’s position was secure. Mr. Robinet was clearly relieved as he placed the heavy brass key into Charles’s hand.
“Merci, Monsieur Weston,” Mr. Robinet said in a quavering voice. “Moi, I will serve you as I did Monsieur Raoul and Madame Sofia. You will see. Merci beaucoup.”
Charles nodded and said, “I’m sure that you will, and I will rest easier knowing that you are here to watch over the place.”
“That was very kind of you,” Daphne said once the coach had pulled away from Mr. Robinet.
“What else could I do?” Charles muttered. “I wasn’t about to throw the old fellow out of his home.”
The two-storied Georgian-style house was set in the middle of a tidy little garden, and as they mounted the steps, Daphne said, “It is a good thing that you did not have Mr. Gerrard sell the place, isn’t it?”
Charles shrugged. “I should have ordered him to do so once the estate was settled, but it simply didn’t matter to me at the time. I told him to continue to pay the bills and that at some point, I would go over things with him and decide which expenses to eliminate. There are probably any number of expenses laid at Raoul’s door that I am still paying for these days.” At her scandalized look, he laughed. “Extravagant, I know, but as you said, rather a good thing, since no one has lived in the house since Raoul.”
Charles and Daphne spent several frustrating hours poking about the stale, dusty space, looking specifically for any likely hiding places for a cache of jewels. They found two, one behind a bookcase in a small library downstairs and another on the second floor underneath a loose board near the bed in what had obviously been Raoul’s bedroom. One held several indiscreet letters written by the wife of a noted leader of the ton, the other an iron key. Charles promptly burnt the letters in the fireplace, but the iron key puzzled him. It wasn’t to the house, so what was it used for? And why did Raoul have it in a hidden place?
From the second floor of the house, Charles noticed a small building at the far end of the garden. In the summer, unless one knew what to look for, the stone building would have been hidden by the rampant climbing rose vine that covered it, but this time of year, with the leaves of the rose just unfurling, Charles could make out its size and shape. He looked from the building to the iron key in his hand, premonition coursing through him.
He needed to search that stone building, but he hesitated to leave Daphne alone in Raoul’s house. He knew that the odds of Raoul being alive were slim to none, but he wasn’t taking any chances that Raoul would suddenly nip out of the woodwork and spirit her away. When he suggested that she might want to wait in the coach for him while he explored the building in the garden, the look she sent him told him better than words that she was not going to cooperate. She would go with him.
The garden was extensive, and in another month or two would have been breathtaking,
but neither one of them was aware of anything but their destination. After his third false start down one of the many winding paths, Charles said grimly, “It is a good thing I spied the place from Raoul’s bedroom window, else I’d never have guessed that it existed.”
“It’s possible,” Daphne said, her hand nervously tightening on his arm, “that he planned it that way.”
“I’m sure he did,” Charles replied curtly, his eyes cold and hard.
After traversing a frustrating array of curves and loops along the way, the building abruptly appeared before them. The path ended in a tiny clearing, the squat, windowless stone building blocking further exploration. The moment they stepped into the clearing, they both stopped as if they had slammed into a wall of steel.
Daphne had never thought herself particularly imaginative, but staring at that ugly little building, she was conscious of an air of evil. Instinctively, she took a step backward.
Freeing his arm from her hand, Charles said in a voice she didn’t recognize, “Stay here.”
Daphne took one look at his face and froze. This tall, black-haired man beside her was an utter stranger—it was as if the Charles Weston she had known and married had never existed. This stranger frightened her, his face was harsh and set in grim lines, but it was his eyes…She swallowed. His eyes were as empty and cold as the North Sea, and she shivered again, taking a step away from him. She did not recognize this man, and he frightened her.
Oblivious to anything but the building in front of him, the iron key held tightly in his hand, Charles walked over to the thick-timbered door in the middle of the building. He knew that the key would fit, and he knew what he would find beyond that door. He looked at Daphne. “Do not,” he snapped, “follow me.”
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