by Gaelen Foley
“When did he die?” she asked softly.
“Nearly a year ago.”
“Was he…may I ask…in the war?”
“No, no, my Drake never bothered with politics. There were those who considered him a rakehell, my dear, and honestly, they were not far off the mark.” She flinched and rested her tea on her lap. “I am sorry to say he spent most of his time chasing pleasure. He died abroad. I told him not to go. But he could never stay in one place. Oh, it’s all been so dreadful. Now the two different branches of the family are wrangling over who will get the title. At least I shall be allowed to live on here until the lawyers can determine which of my nephews has the greater claim.”
“I am so sorry for your loss.” Daphne reached over and rested her hand on the lady’s thin forearm. “It must be unbearable for you, going through all this. I had no idea.”
“I pray you will never know the grief of losing a child, my dear, or watching your darling son go astray. But I fear, alas, it is a common plague.”
Daphne felt a chill steal across her heart. “Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked softly.
The old woman gave her a wan smile. “You already have, just by visiting me. I should have liked my Drake to meet a girl like you. Unfortunately, he wasted his time on unmentionable women and died before he ever fell in love.”
She smiled sadly at Lady Westwood’s words, and leaned back again in her chair. But at least now she was beginning to see a possible reason why Virgil would want Max to come here and check on Lady Westwood. With all the time that Max had spent on the Continent, maybe he had known Drake over there. Daphne did not have the slightest notion what was going on, but she sincerely hoped for Lady Westwood’s sake that the woman’s rakehell son might still be alive.
“Lady Westwood, do you think…your son might have been acquainted with my husband?”
The countess turned to her intently. “Yes, my dear, I’m rather sure he was.”
At that moment, Daphne felt someone watching her. She looked over slowly and saw footman John’s cold stare fixed on her. Goodness, this protective servant did not seem to like her asking questions that might upset his fragile mistress.
A flash of motion through the picture window caught her eye just then. Looking over, she spotted Max astride his galloping horse, charging up the long drive.
“Well, it appears my husband has finally found me,” she remarked in an airy tone. “He is so protective. I had a feeling he might come looking for me.”
“Newlyweds.” Lady Westwood smiled.
“If you’ll pardon me for a moment, I shall go out and greet him, and assure him I’m all right so he won’t come in here scowling like a surly bear.”
She chuckled. “As you wish, Lady Rotherstone.”
Daphne set her tea down and left the drawing room, going out the front door. This should be interesting, she thought, and she braced herself for a storm.
Striding past the great pillars of the façade, she slowly descended the stairs of the front portico as Max rode up to the house, dressed all in black as he had been that day in Bucket Lane.
He was bareheaded, his dark hair tousled, his cheeks ruddy from wind and sun; his pale eyes glittered with anger as he shot a fierce stare her way, pulled the blowing horse to a halt, and swung down from the saddle.
One of Lady Westwood’s stable boys dashed out to take his horse. Max didn’t even look at the lad. His gaze was locked on her.
As he stalked toward Daphne, she quivered half with a spurt of apprehension about his reaction, and half with relief that he had cared enough to come.
Absently, she noticed in wifely fashion that he had left the house without a shave. He must have raced out as soon as he had seen her little message on his mirror. She took a small degree of satisfaction in that. But with that dark scruff roughening his jaw, he looked even tougher and more dangerous than usual; instead of being afraid of him, though, her mind was flooded with images of their wild coupling last night.
As he approached her, she was filled with a disturbing surge of lust for him, despite her anger and hurt and her general desire to throttle the man.
“Hullo, darling,” he said coldly.
Daphne smiled at him, with an aloof lift of her chin as he bent and kissed her cheek, reproach shooting from his eyes.
“Fancy seeing you here.”
“Lady Westwood goes to my church back in Town,” she replied. “Did you know that?”
“Well, my Society girl, you do know everyone, don’t you?” he answered as they stared at each other.
“Everyone but you, my lord. So it would seem.”
He flinched but showed no signs of backing down. “You should not be here.”
“Why? What is going on around here?”
“Be quiet,” he ordered in a harsh whisper as the butler opened the door for them.
“Be quiet?” she retorted in an outraged yet equally soft tone. “How dare you say such a thing to me? May I remind you, you are in no position to be giving me orders!”
“I am your husband! And as for you,” he whispered angrily as he took her elbow and steered her back inside, “you are in so far over your head right now, you have no idea what you’re dealing with. If you blow this investigation for me, you could endanger all of England, so I suggest you keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. Follow my lead; remain calm, whatever happens; and we will settle this later between ourselves.”
“Well, I don’t see how one frail old lady can be such a terrible threat to the realm,” she hissed under her breath as they walked back into the house.
“I’m warning you,” he answered in a low, pleasant singsong just as they strolled past footman John and returned to the drawing room.
“Lady Westwood,” Max greeted the countess, turning on that damnable Rotherstone charm.
Daphne introduced her husband to their hostess.
“Please forgive my appearance!” Max said with a dazzling roguish grin as he brushed off a stray bit of dust from the road. “When my wife did not return from her drive after a couple of hours, I became worried and set out to find her.”
“Oh, I told you I’d be quite safe. He thinks I’m a ninny-head.”
“Not at all, my darling!” He kissed her hand and smiled again at their hostess. “It is a husband’s duty to worry. Dashing off on your merry way. It will not do, my dear. It will not do a’tall.”
Lady Westwood chuckled at their exchange, unaware of the powerful currents of tension that passed between them.
“As I was telling Her Ladyship,” Daphne said, “I was simply driving by and could not resist coming in to visit.”
Max sent her a small frown askance, and the impatient look in his eyes told her just what he thought of her cover story to the old woman.
Of course, she was not the accomplished liar that he was. She gave him an artificial smile in return.
“In any case, I hope we’re not intruding,” he said to the countess. “It’s just like my wife, the social butterfly, to seek out any opportunity for a cup of scandal broth.” He nodded amiably toward the tea service.
“For shame, my lord, we have not been gossiping at all. Certainly not about you,” Daphne assured him pointedly.
“I was just beginning to bore your dear young lady with my tales of Drake.”
“Bore me? Nonsense!” Daphne said.
“Drake?” Max echoed innocently.
Daphne eyed him askance.
“My son,” said Lady Westwood. “I was under the impression that you knew him.”
Max paused. “I cannot recall,” he answered in a friendly tone, and shrugged.
“There’s his portrait,” Daphne said, her suspicions rising. “Does he not look familiar?”
“Well, I might have gone to school with him,” Max said slowly. “But the person I’d remember would have been just a boy. Do you have a picture of him when he was younger?”
Lady Westwood lit up. “Oh, yes! Would you like to see one?�
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“Very much, ma’am. Do not trouble yourself, my lady,” he said quickly when she started to get up. He took note of her stiff movements and shook his head. “Point me to where it is, and I shall bring it to you.”
“Oh, but it’s all the way upstairs in his old room.”
Max flashed his most disarming smile. “Which door?”
“First door on the right at the top of the stairs. But I’ll send John—”
“No need.” He nodded with a warm smile. “I’ll be back in a trice.”
Daphne was fascinated. What on earth was he about?
His explanation seemed simple enough, but in light of Virgil’s letter, she grasped that Max wanted to get into Drake’s chamber, God only knew why.
Well. She supposed that the best way to eventually get answers out of him was to assist.
She endeavored to entertain Lady Westwood while he was gone. But perhaps she should have been more concerned with footman John.
The liveried servant was standing in the doorway with a bristling posture and a bit of a scowl in the direction Max had gone.
“How dear he is,” Lady Westwood was cooing about the perplexing, infuriating, unknown quantity called Lord Rotherstone.
“Occasionally,” she conceded. “I see your footman is as protective as my husband.” She nodded toward footman John, who also heard her words.
Lady Westwood smiled.
“You needn’t look so concerned, John,” Daphne spoke up wryly. “To the best of my knowledge, my husband is not a thief.”
Just a liar.
To her surprise, however, footman John showed no sign of humor at her idle jest.
He returned her smile with an icy stare, then he left the doorway and went after Max.
Very well, he could admit it. He could throttle his wife for being here, but Daphne’s friendly visit to the lonely old lady seemed a good deal less suspicious than if he had simply arrived here himself, as planned.
It figured she knew Lady Westwood. The blasted woman seemed to know everyone in England. His main concern had been for her safety, but the moment he had seen her standing quite unharmed out on the portico, his thoughts had moved to his second gravest worry—her current and understandable fury at him.
The two disparate halves of his life had begun to collide and crumple into each other, and he had no idea what he ought to do.
No, he thought. Correction. He knew exactly what he ought to do. The problem was, it could cost him everything.
Stealing up to the top of the staircase, Max had found Drake’s apartment within Westwood Manor, and was quickly and methodically searching them for anything useful. There was a sitting room, a bedchamber, and a dressing room.
It was possible Drake on his last visit home might have left some telltale sign of whatever sort of leads he had been following at the time of his disappearance.
As Max moved through the apartment searching high and low for clues, he continued to battle with himself over how much, if anything, to reveal to Daphne.
Telling her about the Order would change the whole picture for her, and he did not assume she would be pleased with what she saw. It might only make things worse. Maybe she’d be better off not knowing the burden that lay so heavily on the family that she had married into. He didn’t dare imagine how she might react when he told her that one day, they might have to hand their own son over to some future recruiter, as he had been handed over to Virgil twenty years ago.
Closer to hand, telling Daphne about the Order also meant placing the security of their whole secret web in her hands. Every new inductee into their world of deception became another risk to all of them.
Trusting the woman he loved with his own life was not too difficult. But if he revealed the Order to her, that meant placing Rohan and Jordan and Virgil’s lives in her hands, as well—and through them, all the other agents in the field. They were trained to keep secrets. They’d had it beaten into them. But she was not. Any Promethean could then take her and extract by means of fear and threat and pain whatever information Max had entrusted to her.
With one weak link in the chain, the whole cause could be lost. Oh, God, he couldn’t possibly tell her. His closest friends, the only friends he really had, might hate him for it.
But then again, if he did not reveal the truth of who he really was, he was going to lose his marriage, and the heart of the only woman he had ever loved.
He was holding on to hope like the last strand of a fraying lifeline that she might just let him off the hook. Maybe she would accept not knowing the full truth, like an ordinary wife. But Max knew full well that that was not the sort of marriage Daphne had agreed to in the hayloft of the Three Swans Inn.
He had won her hand at last by promising that they could make their own country, set their own rules, and he had promised to be open with her, as much as possible.
Agonized over what to do, he put the whole tangled matter into a little mental box for the moment, and forged on with the mission at hand.
The question, however, about how much of the truth past generations of Order agents told their wives about their activities made Max wonder if old Lady Westwood had any inkling about the real reasons that Drake had sailed off to the Continent.
His own mother had been told next to nothing. It was customary to keep the women out of it.
God, he was so angry at himself for his carelessness, letting her catch wind of his double life in the first place. How could he be so stupid?
It was so unlike him—almost as if some small, ornery part of him had wanted to get caught. Disturbing thought. It was almost as if he had undermined himself on purpose, against all logic, so that his darling Daphne could finally know him completely, and their love could be whole…
Just then, Max sensed a presence outside the door to Drake’s apartment, which he had closed.
He went motionless, then he glanced at the bottom of the door. Through the faint daylight coming in under the seam, he could make out the shadow of two feet.
Somebody was listening to his movements inside the apartment. When the door swung open abruptly a moment later, as if to take him off guard, Max was already alerted to the fact that he was not alone.
The large footman from downstairs gave him a bow of cursory respect, but the belligerent glare behind the man’s eyes revealed his disapproval. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Ah, yes, excellent.” Max assumed a breezy tone, but the footman did not look happy about his snooping. “Lady Westwood asked me to fetch some…childhood portrait of her son. Can’t seem to find it.”
The footman stepped toward the bookshelf and plucked down a miniature painting in a gilded frame.
Max feigned a sheepish smile. “Ah—of course. Right in front of my eyes.”
“Anything else, my lord?” the servant intoned without a hint of impertinence.
“No, no. Er, thank you for your assistance.”
The footman remained planted in place, making it clear he was not leaving until Max did.
He was eyeing Max’s pockets as though studying him to see if he had taken anything from the room.
Max was well aware that his behavior must seem a tad bizarre. Since he could not think of any fresh excuses off the top of his head to account for his snooping through the belongings of Lady Westwood’s supposedly dead son, he fixed a haughty smile on his face and exited the room, the little boyhood portrait of his fellow agent in hand.
Damn, where could Drake have hidden any final clues he might have left behind before his capture?
The irritating footman shadowed him all the way back to the drawing room, where Max politely handed Lady Westwood the portrait of her son.
She took it and trailed her gnarled hand lovingly over it. “We had this made of him before he went away to school.”
“A very handsome boy,” Daphne remarked.
“He took after his father. So, did you know my Drake, Lord Rotherstone?”
“Yes, I believe we once engag
ed in a rather brutal round of fisticuffs at school.” Max smiled.
Lady Westwood laughed. “That sounds like him. Over what manner of disagreement, do you recall?”
“Some minor point of honor, I believe, though the details have escaped me. It was long ago.” Max noticed the footman still eyeing him suspiciously from the threshold of the room. “Ahem. I almost didn’t find it, but your man there was good enough to point it out.”
“Footman John,” Daphne informed him.
“Indeed, I was just telling your wife how this fellow has become quite indispensable to me, though he’s only been here two months. I hardly know how I ever got on without him.”
“Two months.” Roughly the same time period as their wedding, the day Max had seen Drake. Max’s stare homed in on the man. “Is that so?” he murmured.
Footman John, seemingly in spite of himself, returned his stare the way no common servant ordinarily would dare.
“Where were you in service before this?” Max inquired, moving toward him, putting the two women behind him.
“I worked for a family near Cambridge, my lord.”
“By what name?”
“Lamb.”
“I see. Lady Westwood, what prompted you to hire this fellow? Perhaps a sudden unexpected vacancy on your staff?”
“Why, yes, my lord. How ever did you know?”
Max narrowed his eyes, not taking his stare off the man. “A lucky…guess.”
Without warning, footman John suddenly bolted.
Already expecting this, Max flew into action, charging after the footman—or rather, the Promethean spy.
Daphne’s jaw dropped as her husband tore out of the room hot on the footman’s trail.
“Good heavens!” Lady Westwood uttered some distance behind her as Daphne rushed out into the corridor to see where they had gone.
“Stay back!” Max barked at her over his shoulder—an order also meant for the other servants, who also came rushing onto the scene in a flurry of anxious activity.
Footman John went barreling out a back entrance, and Max was right behind him.