Sweet Enemy

by Heather Snow

  He turned his glare upon Liliana and she flinched. He closed his eyes, marshaling his emotion. This wasn’t her fault. Hell, she’d been a child when all of this had happened. He’d been barely a man himself. Yes, she’d brought it to his door, had ripped his heart out by the way she’d chosen to go about her investigation, but really, hadn’t she done him a favor? At least now he knew what the blackmailer must have against his family. However, that was none of her business. As far as she was concerned, they were the only two people who knew of this sordid affair.

  When he looked upon her once more, Liliana hadn’t moved. She looked so achingly beautiful as she sat there with her face open and imploring. His heart twisted. No, it wasn’t her fault, but damn, how he wished he’d never laid eyes upon her. Had never kissed her satiny skin, never ran his fingers through her silken tresses, never breathed in her crisp, clean scent.

  But he had—and much more. That alone obligated him to do what was right by her. The fact that he had inadvertently been involved in the death of her father only compounded his duty. By marrying her, he’d make up for her loss in some way.

  Liliana stood, her moves graceful and slow, never breaking eye contact. “Then no one ever has to know.”

  He scoffed. If only it were that simple, but someone else already knew. Worse, he knew. Knew how she’d been wronged. Knew how she’d used him. Knew how his father had used him, had duped him, had potentially made him party to murder.

  “I know you don’t believe me, Geoffrey, and I don’t blame you, but I would never do anything to hurt you.” Liliana winced and looked away. Then she straightened her shoulders and took a step toward him. She reached out to her left and snatched one of the decoded letters from the desk and held it out before her. “I plan to stay until we discover the truth. I need to know what went wrong, what really happened to my father, but then”—she crumpled the letter in her hand—“I’ll disappear. You’ll never hear from me again, if that’s what you want, and I’ll never tell a soul. You can trust me on that. I lo—”

  She clamped her mouth shut and cleared her throat.

  Geoffrey narrowed his eyes. She’d almost claimed to love him again. At least she’d stopped herself from uttering the lie. But then, she didn’t need to pretend to love him anymore, did she? Still, the truth and magnitude of her deceit knifed through him anew.

  Liliana began again. “I…” Her eyes suddenly widened, her face taking on a look of horror. “Oh no, Geoffrey. Someone else does know. A man—he tore apart my father’s library. Everyone thought it a robbery at the time, but he could have been after the treasure.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  Damn. Another person? Or was this the blackmailer, searching either for the treasure or for more evidence against him? Was there even a chance to keep all of this quiet?

  “We can’t worry about that until we’ve solved the rest of the mystery.” Geoffrey reached for her closed fist, which still held the crumpled note. He gently pried her fingers open and took the letter, detesting that the mere touch sent a sweet ache through him. He let her go and smoothed the vellum out. “How many more letters have you to decode?”

  Her lip trembled and dropped, but she gamely said, “Three.”

  He had only one left. He nodded to her chair and sat himself. “Then, let’s finish this.”

  The last message from Claremont indicated that the piece had arrived from the university in Belgium, and he inquired about making the exchange. Geoffrey sat back in his seat and steepled his hands, touching his index fingers to his lips. It should have been simple, so what had gone wrong? As angry as he was with his father for lying to him—for duping him into committing an act of treason, for God’s sake—he didn’t see the man as greedy, willing or even able to kill for money—

  “Here,” Liliana’s voice broke through his thoughts. “Your father has set up a meeting with mine, for December twenty-third. Father was to bring the treasure and exchange it for the money, which he would then hold for Triste.” She stood and paced beside his chair. Apples and lemons wafted to him as she passed, and despite everything, desire poured into his veins. “Yet the meet was moved up two days, and my father was killed. Why?”

  A cold chill slithered over Geoffrey. “Your father was killed on the twenty-first of December of aught-three?” He swiftly calculated. That was little more than a fortnight before his own father died, an awful coincidence. Or was it? What if his father hadn’t died of natural causes?

  Liliana watched him, empathy etching her features…not surprise, as if…“You knew our fathers died less than three weeks apart?” he cried as he leapt to his feet, outrage boiling in his gut that she would keep something like this from him. “Since when?”

  “Since we visited Witherspoon in the village,” she said quietly. “Your father’s valet told me he suspected your father was poisoned. He smelled almonds on the body…which speaks to cyanide.”

  “And you said nothing?” Christ. Too many things hit Geoffrey, and he backed away.

  “I tried to yesterday, but you wouldn’t let me—”

  “You’ve known for days!” He narrowed his eyes, seeing Liliana as if for the first time. “Did you even care for that old man’s health? Or did you just use him for information like you did me?”

  Liliana winced and looked down.

  Geoffrey tunneled his fingers through his hair. She was nothing he’d thought she was. Everything she’d done, everything he’d loved about her was a lie, and yet his heart still ached, still yearned. Why couldn’t he hate her instead?

  He turned his back on her, striving for control in the silence.

  “If I could go back and do things differently,” she said softly, “I would. But I can’t. All I can do is see this through. We’re so close. I know it.”

  He faced her, his emotions once again tightly laced. “You’re right.”

  Liliana’s shoulders relaxed and she briefly closed her eyes, and then, like the pragmatic scientist she was—or the cold, calculating one—she returned to the problem at hand. “I can’t figure out why, when they’d gone to all of this trouble to send unsigned coded messages, the last note from your father was in plain English and bore his seal, where the other ones didn’t. Do you think perhaps he didn’t send it?”

  Geoffrey frowned and reached down to the desktop. He raised the letter in question and examined it closely. “No, it’s definitely my father’s handwriting.”

  “But it makes no sense. Could the letter have been forged?” Liliana tapped a finger against her mouth, her brow furrowing in thought. She stopped before the desk and tossed the last of the letters she’d been decoding down, blowing out a frustrated breath. “And what happened to the treasure? These papers can’t tell me, and the only people who can have been dead for fourteen years.”

  “Perhaps not.” The words slipped out without thought, and yet as Geoffrey uttered them he accepted that Liliana had the right to know everything. He might abhor her tactics, but he understood her motives, now more than ever, with the very real possibility that his father might have been killed as part of this sordid mess as well. He regained his seat and gestured toward her chair. “Please, sit.”

  Liliana obeyed and he told her of the blackmail attempt. She listened, eyes widening, as he explained everything from the missing money to the current threat to his attempts to uncover the man’s identity. Oddly, sharing the story with Liliana felt natural, like a relief, like telling a friend or a…lover. But he knew the feelings not to be real. Damn her for taking that away from him.

  “So the man who broke into my home—he could have been the blackmailer?” she asked.

  “Yes, or more likely working for him. I’ve been wondering why his threat was so vague. He must not have solid proof or only have part of the story and is hoping that my desire to preserve my political reputation will be enough for me to roll over.”

  Liliana’s curved fingers tapped the desk. “Yes, but perhaps the part o
f the story he has is the part that we are missing.” Her voice rose with hope. “Are you close to discovering who he is? I can describe my intruder for you, though I don’t know how much help it will be if he was only the blackmailer’s accomplice.”

  Geoffrey straightened. Perhaps it would give him at least something to go on. “You saw him?”

  Her lips flattened into a grimace. “Not well. I was sort of…grappling with him at the time.”

  Geoffrey lost eight years off his life as Liliana related the tale. She could have been killed! There was one good thing about their marrying…at least she’d be under the protection of a man, as she should be, not fending off dastardly henchmen on her own. A mirthless smile raised the corner of his mouth. “You know, for a brief moment last night, I thought perhaps you were in league with the blackmailer, searching my library for substantiation. Little did I know you were, only not for a villain but for yourself.”

  Liliana colored. “Well, I suppose that can be forgiven, considering I originally suspected you must have been involved in this scheme. While you were, you didn’t know it.” She crossed her arms in front of her as if hugging herself and exhaled a sighing breath. “What a pair we are. We were both right about each other, yet so very wrong.”

  Geoffrey considered her words. Was he wrong about her now? Just the possibility that someone had killed his father, too, had sent such rage through him that he could understand Liliana’s motives. But did that make her different from his mother?

  He let his eyes slide over her. Exhaustion rimmed her features but made her no less beautiful. But beauty was only skin deep. Liliana still had used and hurt people to get what she wanted.

  Still, he couldn’t deny the sexual energy that hummed through the room now and had since he’d first opened his eyes and saw her standing over him. He was just so confused, had been hit with too much too fast.

  I’ll disappear. You’ll never hear from me again, if that’s what you want…

  Was that what he wanted? Or could he forgive her deceit? Could he trust that her lies were a onetime occurrence, caused by special circumstance, and make a life with her? He knew he had to marry her—it was his duty, his obligation, given that she’d been a virgin daughter of the ton. The right thing to do. But with this between them, could their marriage still work as a partnership or would it never be more than an empty shell?

  He longed to reach out for her, to cup her chin, look into her eyes and just ask her. But he wouldn’t. The fact that he wanted to so badly even while so emotionally raw only illustrated the power she held over him.

  What the hell was he thinking? He clamped down on his feelings, wishing he’d never even considered the idea of love. If he opened himself to her as he’d been on the path to doing before she’d revealed her deception, it was only a matter of time before she realized that power. It would be only natural to wield it when she wanted something, even if she did it in a way completely unlike his mother.

  He would reset the terms of a union between them to protect himself, and only—

  Liliana slapped her hand down on the desk. “Aveline.”

  “What?”

  She stood, gesturing with both hands as if her mind were running faster than her tongue. “The day of the musicale, the day he departed, I saw Aveline sneaking out of the library. I thought it odd then. Remember? I asked you about him later, but I didn’t know about the blackmailer so I wouldn’t have made the connection. What if he were searching your home for evidence, too?”

  “Bloody hell,” Geoffrey muttered. Aveline had never been a friend, per se, but they’d been neighbors their whole lives. Could Aveline be the blackmailer? Those years the man had been detained in France at the start of the war were a mystery. What if he’d caught wind of part of these doings while he was over there and capitalized upon it when he returned home? It was possible.

  Geoffrey would need to compare the dates of when money started disappearing to when Aveline returned from the continent. He’d also need to discreetly look into his neighbor’s finances. And his current whereabouts.

  A terrible thought struck. Did Aveline also know about the treasure? Was that why he’d attached himself to Liliana? Geoffrey’s stomach balled as ice doused his veins when he thought of how easily Aveline could have harmed Liliana if he’d thought she had any knowledge of the treasure’s whereabouts. If anything ever happened to her…

  Geoffrey stood, taking Liliana by the shoulders. “Think back to every conversation you had with the man. Did he ask any probing questions, anything else that struck you wrong?”

  Liliana’s mouth shifted to the side and she tugged upon her lower lip in that way she did when she was thinking. “No. Nothing.”

  “Did he ever try to get you alone?”

  Liliana squinted her eyes at him. “No. He was ever the gentleman. He did mention in his note that he’d like to see me again in London, but—”

  “You’re not going back to London,” Geoffrey said. “Or Chelmsford, either. You’ll be staying here.” Now was as good a time as any to tell her what he’d decided.

  Liliana stiffened and pulled away from him. He let her. “That’s ridiculous, Geoffrey. The house party ends tomorrow, and guests will be departing. I can’t very well stay at Somerton Park.”

  “You can if we’re to be married.”

  Liliana’s delicate chin dropped, her pink tongue flashing through her open mouth. “I hardly think—”

  “You agreed last night, before we made love. Or were you lying to me then, too?”

  “N-no. Of course not.” Her head whipped from side to side. “I said, ‘If you still—’ ”

  “Wanted you to in the morning.” He strode over to the shuttered window and threw one wide. A blast of sunshine streaked through the room. “It’s morning, and I still want you as my wife.”

  Her face went slack, but Geoffrey could see her mind racing behind those intelligent violet eyes.

  “But why?” she finally whispered. “Have you forgiven me, then?”

  “No. Nor do I expect to,” he said, even if he could understand why she’d lied. Still, it wouldn’t do to let her know that. Better to set clear boundaries now. He’d lost his way before, but he vowed not to let her under his skin again. This would be a marriage where he maintained the upper hand. One that didn’t involve his heart—once he figured out how to uninvolve it. “But the fact of the matter is, we have made love. You very well may be carrying the next Earl of Stratford as we speak.”

  A streak of satisfaction shot through him as Liliana dropped her hand protectively to her stomach, eyes widening as if she hadn’t even considered the possibility. A picture of a laughing babe, with his black hair and her violet eyes, pierced him and he realized he hoped it were so…a sick testament to his muddled feelings where Liliana was concerned.

  “We will read the banns this Sunday and be married in three weeks’ time.” Once she was his wife, he could protect her, could watch over her, could keep her near. And though he might tell her he married her for honor’s sake, even after everything that had happened, he realized he still wanted her in his life and in his bed.

  “But you don’t trust me?” she asked in a small voice that twinged his heart.

  “No. I don’t have to trust you. As my wife, it will be in your best interest to protect my reputation.”

  He purposely misinterpreted her meaning, and he could tell by the way she stiffened that his words stung. He steeled himself against her pain. It was for the best.

  She stood up straight and looked him in the eyes. “Without trust, there can be no love.”

  A sharp pain burst in the vicinity of his heart. There already was love, but he’d be damned before he ever told her that and gave her the power to manipulate or control his feelings again. And he’d be double damned if he let his love grow any more. He would quash it, viciously. Love did nothing but hurt, especially if you were the one who loved. Watching his father had taught him that.

  He’d been a fool to
ever think otherwise.

  “Love isn’t necessary.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  L

  iliana stared at her left hand where it rested on the table, a large amethyst betrothal ring encircling her third finger. She twisted her wrist and followed the shards of colorful candlelight reflecting through the cut jewel onto her white table napkin. Low murmurs of subdued conversation hovered over the dinner table, punctuated by envious glances and curious stares. Once again, Liliana was seated to Geoffrey’s right, this time not to honor her victory on the tournament field, but as his affianced.

  She touched her fingertips to her temples, where the low throb of a headache had taken root and now grew, fertilized by the blatant scrutiny of the assembled diners. She supposed many, like Aunt Eliza, considered Liliana’s enviable position as Geoffrey’s betrothed to be the ultimate victory.