Sweet Enemy

by Heather Snow

  She didn’t knock, simply tested the handle, which turned easily. She pressed the heavy wooden door just wide enough to slip through, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the relative darkness. Dim slivers of light cut the shadow through the ancient slatted shutters but did little to illuminate the interior of the folly. The air seemed still. Yet Liliana’s body tingled with awareness. Geoffrey was definitely here.

  She felt her way toward the daybed, trying vainly to shut out the memories that assaulted her. Geoffrey, smiling wickedly as he’d teased her to the breaking point in this very spot. The glorious bursting release of her very first orgasm. The swelling of tenderness she’d felt afterward that she only now recognized as love…

  The daybed was empty. If her memory served, there was a chair and writing desk off to the left in the “corner” of the round space. She moved silently that direction.

  The soft snippet of a snore broke the silence, and Liliana tensed, coming to a halt. Then she relaxed her stance. He was asleep.

  By the time she reached him, her eyes had fully adjusted to the dimness. Liliana easily made out Geoffrey’s sleeping form, lithe even in repose. She shook her head. His back would be killing him when he woke. One shoulder was scrunched down and wedged between the back and side of the wingback chair, one leg was propped with the ankle resting on the opposite knee, and his head lolled back and to the right. Yet his hand still gripped a pencil, as if he’d leaned back to contemplate something he was writing and had nodded off before he could complete the thought.

  Scraps of vellum littered the desktop. Off to the side, open bundles of letters, the ones from their fathers, lay spread out by date. Had Geoffrey been trying to break the code? Did he not think she’d properly checked all variations?

  She leaned over the desk to see what he’d been writing.

  M A R C N T O Y B D E F G H I J K L P Q S U V W X Z

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  Warm, strong fingers clamped around her wrist, and Liliana jumped with a startled gasp.

  “What are you doing here?” Geoffrey demanded, his voice gravelly and raw. It also brooked no dissemblance.

  She nearly blurted out that she’d been looking for him, but then indignation burned through her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Last time I checked, this folly belonged to me,” he said drily, releasing her wrist and scrubbing a hand over his eyes.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Liliana snapped, glancing down at his masculine scrawl. She slammed a finger down on the cipher. MARCNTOY…Could that mean Marc Antony? “Is there a password? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Geoffrey’s face went blank, but his eyes sharpened and his lips pressed together tightly.

  Her burst of anger turned, and Liliana experienced the sting of betrayal herself. She swallowed, and her voice sounded very small when she said, “You’ve figured it out and you weren’t going to tell me.”

  Geoffrey exhaled a resigned sigh accompanied by the rustle of wool as he straightened in his chair.

  Liliana withdrew her finger and drew her hands together, clasping them in front of her. She brought her shoulders in, too, lowering her head. She’d given him all of the evidence she had, hoping he would see, as she did, that their best chance to learn the truth would be to work together. Even if he hated her. But obviously he’d intended to shut her out.

  Geoffrey rose and walked away without a word.

  Could she blame him? Liliana fought the sting of tears—hurt tears, but also ones of frustration. Yes, she could blame him. Certainly she’d shocked him with her admission. Even wounded him. But did he have no care for her feelings? For her situation? Could he not understand that her father had been murdered, for goodness’ sake?

  Geoffrey returned bearing an oil lamp and a wooden chair and arranged them so that two people could work side by side at the desk. He seated himself in the primitive chair, indicating she should sit in the more comfortable cushioned one.

  She did—before he could change his mind—and tried not to squirm beneath his scrutiny.

  After a long moment, he said, “I thought I had, but I was mistaken.” Liliana listened carefully as he explained his theory about a key and told her that he’d thought he’d found it in the name of the book his father had kept the secret letters in.

  “But nothing I tried worked,” Geoffrey concluded, his voice flat and impersonal, businesslike. His tone scraped her heart, but she was glad that he was sharing the problem with her. That was something. Perhaps even enough to build a future on when all of this was over? She tried not to hope, yet it stole into her heart all the same. “And with both men having been dead so many years, I have no expectation that we will be able to break the code.”

  Liliana took in a deep breath. Hope mingled with despair as she considered the possibilities. Focusing on a problem had always been her escape, her saving grace from troublesome emotion. She tried to reason out what she knew. Knowing her father, the password could be any manner of things, yet not knowing Edmund Wentworth, she was at a loss as to a word the two men might agree upon. But…if what Geoffrey said was true, that his father had been absentminded and would have left himself a clue…

  “What if you weren’t wrong?” she asked suddenly, the tingling excitement of discovery pushing out the feelings she couldn’t deal with right now.

  Geoffrey frowned. “I told you, I’ve—”

  “Tell me how the password is supposed to work again,” Liliana said, grabbing a scrap of vellum and his discarded pencil.

  “Take the key word and write it out, omitting letters you’ve already used. Then fill in the rest of the alphabet,” he said.

  Liliana started writing.

  M A R C U S N T O I B D E F G H J K L P Q V W X Y Z

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  She wrote the cipher out again on a different scrap of paper. “Here,” she said, thrusting it toward him as she reached for one of the letters. “Try this.”

  Geoffrey took the cipher, glancing down. “What is this?” he asked, a winged brow rising—not in challenge, she thought, but in curiosity.

  “My father was a scientist,” she answered. “He would have insisted on Latin. Marcus Antonius.”

  A corner of Geoffrey’s mouth rose a fraction as his head bobbed a sharp nod. “Of course,” he muttered, and grabbed a letter of his own.

  Liliana gauged the length of the letter she held. The words flowed in narrative, which would be terribly difficult to construct if each word was used in the message. “Try the first letter of the first word of each sentence,” she suggested, and bent her head to her task.

  A trucelike silence swelled between them, broken only by the scratchings of lead on vellum. Given all that had happened in the last twelve hours, Liliana was amazed by the feeling of comfortable camaraderie that settled over her. Being married to Geoffrey would have been like this, she knew, both of them passionately working together toward common goals…

  A terrible ache formed in her heart and she shook her head to disabuse the notion. She couldn’t think of what she’d tossed away by foolishly keeping the truth from him for so long. Instead, she jotted letters by rote, not paying attention to any patterns until she reached the end. As she finished the last mark, she sat back in the chair and held the message before her eyes.

  FRMTYESPRICEARRMIDOCTWTHPCEFORXCHNGE

  Liliana straightened. Not perfectly formed, but definite words stood out. This was the right password, she was certain. FR. Father? No, that didn’t feel right. FRM. Farm? Firm? No. From? That could be. She looked at it again. From ‘T,’ yes price. ARR…arrive?

  Arrive mid Oct with piece for exchange.

  Heaviness descended, covering Liliana like a shroud. Price? And it said “piece.” That sounded like more than just information. What had her father gotten involved in? It couldn’t be good, given the secrecy surrounding it and how it turned out—for both men. She glanced up at Geoffrey.

&nbs
p; He, too, had finished his letter and was contemplating a message of his own. That there was one was clear, given the grimace lining his mouth and the tired, sad downturn of his eyes.

  Liliana’s heart ached for them both.

  “What does yours say?” she asked quietly.

  His eyes snapped to hers and Liliana tried not to recoil from the pain in them. She suspected he saw similar hurt in her own, as his mouth softened.

  “As best I can make out, it says, ‘Authentic corselet, belonged to Cleopatra, emeralds in gold. Exchange for asylum and funds for life. Advise offer.’ ”

  Liliana read her message aloud as well, which seemed to follow his. She scrunched her face, her mind reeling. Whatever she’d been expecting, it certainly wasn’t this. “Treasure?”

  “Egyptian treasure,” Geoffrey clarified. “It fits my father, at least.”

  “But not mine,” Liliana said. “He never showed any interest in such things.” She looked back at her message, staring at the initial T. T would be neither Edmund Wentworth nor Charles Claremont. So who could it be? These letters were the ones her father had written, the ones she’d found amongst Edmund Wentworth’s things. So that meant T was known to her own father, as it seemed he was the one brokering whatever exchange was meant to happen. But her father associated only with other scientists.

  Liliana gasped. “When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he took with him one hundred and fifty French scientists. They were called the savants. Napoleon ordered them to catalogue and classify every aspect of the country.”

  Geoffrey nodded. “I remember,” he said. With his mind distracted by the mystery, it was as if he forgot his anger with her, and his tone was one of easy intimacy. It caressed Liliana’s battered heart like a lover. “When things got hairy, the coward abandoned them there. They were stranded in Egypt until British troops ‘rescued’ them in 1801. Of course, we relieved them of all of their findings and treasures, including the Rosetta stone, and sent them home empty-handed.”

  “Exactly,” Liliana said, excitement and hope finally bubbling through her gloom. “After my mother died, my father stayed in England with me, but before that he traveled extensively throughout the continent, studying and lecturing. He could have easily met and befriended one of those scientists who would later become a savant and…Oh!” she exclaimed, a memory surfacing. “Triste. My father shared rooms with a French scientist named Triste at university. He used to talk of his old friend, when I was little. The T must stand for him.” Without thinking, she grasped Geoffrey’s hand and a bolt of current shot through her, raising gooseflesh.

  Geoffrey stiffened at her touch, his face once again going blank. He pulled his hand away and stood, the wooden chair scraping against the stone floor.

  Liliana’s throat tightened, tears once again stinging her eyes. Her hand still burned where she’d touched him, but Geoffrey had gone cold. He paced beside the desk, one hand gripping the vellum he still held and the one she’d touched balled into a fist.

  “So what if Triste was a savant,” he said, his voice equally cool, “and was able to retain this…corselet? He’d have returned to France in an upheaval, with Napoleon about to declare himself emperor and gathering all wealth to himself.”

  Liliana stood as well, unable to keep her seat. She tried to make her voice sound as impersonal as his so he wouldn’t see how his rebuff stung. “Yes, and Triste would no doubt be bitter over being abandoned in Egypt for those long years and might think the treasure should be his alone—”

  “So he gets in touch with his old friend.” Geoffrey stopped before her.

  “My father.” Liliana nodded.

  “And asks him to find someone in England who would be willing to purchase the piece so he can start a new life here,” Geoffrey finished. He raked his fingers through his black hair and blew out a breath. “It’s thin.”

  “It’s reasonable, given what we know,” Liliana countered. She pulled one of the bundles of letters to her. “Now we need to decode the rest and see if we’re right.”

  Geoffrey narrowed his eyes and Liliana held her breath. She resumed her seat, determined to remain until the mystery was solved. She wouldn’t leave, even if he ordered her to. Even if he tried to physically toss her out on her bottom. But she prayed he wouldn’t.

  He dropped into the chair next to her. “Fine.” He snatched the letters she held but thrust another stack forward. “However, I will decode the ones from your father, and you, mine. That way, neither of us is able to hide anything from the other.”

  Liliana swallowed, knowing by neither he meant her. She accepted it, knowing he didn’t trust her. Might never trust her again. She was only grateful he hadn’t fought her staying, because she’d known very well when she’d given him all of her evidence that he could have her tossed off of the estate. It had been a risk she’d been willing to take, showing her trust in him. Whether he would ever see it that way was yet to be determined. She nodded her head and set to work.

  Long minutes passed, each of them scribbling furiously. An odd peace stole over Liliana. Their savant theory grew more and more feasible with every message she decoded, and while she still was unsure what had gone so terribly wrong that it had ended with her father’s death and possibly Geoffrey’s father’s, too, just knowing she’d been right to pursue her instinct acted as a balm on her ragged, conflicted feelings.

  There was no clue as to how Charles Claremont and Edmund Wentworth met, as by the time they started using coded letters to communicate, it was clear their scheme was already afoot. As Liliana read on, bits and pieces of the story unfolded. A price agreed to, a plan for T to bring the piece to England himself. A date set. Then, a snag. T being watched, unable to escape France. Scrambling for another plan. Agreement to pay a bribe to one of Napoleon’s government officials for safe passage of the piece to a university in Belgium, where it would be sent on to her father, hidden amongst scientific papers, with T to follow at a later date.

  And then…

  Liliana’s breath caught as she stared at the next decoded message.

  HVARRNGDFORSONTODLVRPKGASHEPASSESBRDR

  Have arranged for son to deliver package as he passes border.

  She put the letter down, her hand shaking. When she glanced over at Geoffrey, he watched her intently, likely drawn by her gasp. Yet his usual robust coloring had washed pale, and she knew he must be reading similar messages from her father’s side of the communication.

  “Did you know you were paying a bribe?” she whispered.

  Black lashes dropped, even as Geoffrey shook his head in a slow denial. He looked as if he were going to be sick. “Father asked me deliver a vase, told me it was a priceless antique he wished a friend of his in France to have, but because of the war, he couldn’t send it through normal channels. The bribe money must have been inside, but I never knew it.”

  Liliana searched Geoffrey’s face. Lines of sorrowful anger marked his features. She believed him. At the same time, she longed to reach out to him, to pull him into her arms and give him comfort. In only a few hours, everything he thought he knew had been turned on its head. He must be reeling.

  When he raised his eyes to her, Liliana’s breath caught at the anguish in them. “Do you know what this means?” he rasped.

  Liliana shook her head, yet the hairs on the back of her neck tingled to life.

  “It means I committed treason.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “T

  hat’s ridiculous. Of course you didn’t commit treason,” Liliana insisted, a deep V forming between her chestnut brows. She sounded almost offended for him, and yet the expression on her face spoke of concern, of compassion. She looked rather as if she wished to reach for him, and Geoffrey felt an almost undeniable pull to let her, to lean on her. He placed his hands on the edge of the desk and shoved, pushing himself away and gaining his feet. These last hours had thrown him more than he wanted to handle, and as far as his feelings for Liliana were concerned…well, they vacillate
d like the pendulum of human nature, from good to evil, love to hate…hope to regret. He couldn’t trust anything he was feeling at the moment.

  What he could do was focus on how to handle the most recent blow.

  “Intentionally, no. But do you think that will matter to my political opponents? Or to the men I’ve been working all year to convince to invest in employment opportunities?” His face tightened as he clenched his jaw. The weight of every ex-soldier he’d seen starving, suffering, slowly dying before his eyes seemed to bear down on him. He gritted his teeth against the crushing burden. “Christ, all it would take is a whiff of scandal and everything I’ve worked for will be for naught.”