“Because I’m not trustworthy?”
“Because he’s a man.” Something hard and hungry glittered in his eyes, putting her on her guard. “He knows we were once engaged, so he’ll assume I’m still tempted by you.”
That took her by surprise. Lord help her, the covetous look he was giving her would stir the very marrow in a woman’s bones. “And are you?” she managed to eke out. “Still tempted by me, I mean?”
Time halted as they stood there, with eyes locked and breaths mingling, so close that a mere lowering of his head would bring their mouths together, too.
Then he tore his gaze from hers and stepped away. “That’s of no consequence. Blakeborough will think I am, which is all that matters. And I know you don’t wish to spoil things with him.”
Vexed that he wouldn’t reveal what he felt for her, she snapped, “Odd, how you always seem to ‘know’ what I’m thinking or wishing.” When her sarcasm made him shoot her a veiled glance, she added, “In any case, no acquaintance of Edwin’s is likely to see you and me in York, so there’s little chance that news of our jaunt will get back to him. I, for one, am willing to risk it.”
“I, for one, am not.”
“You don’t have a choice. You’ve never met Mrs. Patch, which makes it highly unlikely that she’d talk to you, especially with your being Nancy’s estranged brother-in-law and the man partly responsible for George’s death.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “Have you met her?”
“Well, no, but you notice that she invited me to consult with her further if it became necessary. And I’m sure Nancy has spoken of me frequently enough for her to feel comfortable talking to me.”
For a long moment, Dom simply scowled at her, as if somehow that would frighten her into compliance.
It had been a long time since she’d seen that cutting frown. He’d only used it on her once—that day in her uncle’s study when he’d tried to convince her to jilt him. She’d withstood it then well enough, so why he expected her to behave any differently now was beyond her.
“You refuse to leave this to me,” he finally said.
“If it was Lisette in trouble, would you leave it to one of your men? Or would you insist on handling it yourself?”
He hesitated. Then to her shock, he flashed her a rueful smile. “You know the answer to that.”
Of course she did. She could read him, too, after all. “Then I suggest that we leave at once. No point in letting the trail grow any colder.”
♦ ♦ ♦
THE ROAD TO York was quiet—not surprising, since it came from the coast and encompassed only a few sleepy towns and estates along the route. Normally Dom would have enjoyed having just the steady clop-clop of the horses as an accompaniment to his reverie.
But normally Dom didn’t have Jane bumping up against him on the seat. He didn’t have her scent filling his senses, mingling with the smell of the spring grasses and wildflowers. He didn’t have her arm within touching distance. Her very presence put him on edge, which made the silence between them unbearable.
How odd. Dom had never been a chatty sort, and in their youth he’d been happy to let Jane do most of the talking. He hadn’t always even heard what she was saying, too enthralled by the animation on her face to pay attention.
She used to have this way of imbuing every word with emotion. Judging from their argument earlier, she still did, even if the emotion was panic and concern. And accusation.
He scowled. The blasted woman had manipulated him into this trip quite well. It had been a masterful performance, but a performance nonetheless. Not for nothing had he spent the past years uncovering deceptions. Jane was hiding something. She wouldn’t be this alarmed unless there was more at stake than she was saying.
He’d better find out what it was before this went any further. “So tell me, how was Nancy’s mood when last you saw her?”
Instantly she stiffened, heightening his suspicions. “Why?”
“I merely wondered if there was anything to indicate why she would leave Rathmoor Park. Did she seem melancholy? Relieved by George’s death? Angry?”
“Nancy is never angry,” Jane said.
“Unlike you. Who seem to be quite angry right now.” At me, anyway.
“I’m worried, not angry.” Jane leaned away from him, putting the lie to her words. “Nancy doesn’t do things like this.”
“You did say she’s made these jaunts to York before.”
“Yes, but never for more than a day, and never without telling anyone in the family. It’s not like her.” She breathed deeply. “But to answer your question, she has seemed rather melancholy of late. That’s not how someone who is racing off to meet a lover reacts, is it?”
“It depends. Perhaps she hadn’t heard from him. Perhaps she thought he’d given her up, now that she was free. Perhaps—”
“Faith, are you always so cynical?” She twisted a little to stare at him. “You believe the worst of everyone. In your eyes, Nancy is an adulteress and Lord Blakeborough a jealous and distrustful suitor. You seem to see the entire world through dark glasses.”
He kept his gaze fixed on the road ahead. “Until a few months ago, I dealt regularly with the worst specimens of humanity, so I lost the habit of trusting people unequivocally. You would have, too, if you’d ever witnessed—” Blast it, he shouldn’t even have said that much.
“Witnessed what?”
“Nothing.” He’d engineered the end of their engagement precisely to keep her out of the nightmarish world he’d entered, so he sure as blazes wasn’t going to drag her into it now. “It wouldn’t interest you.”
“And once again, you decide what would or would not interest me.” She sniffed. “It must be nice to be able to read minds.”
He shot her a sidelong glance. “It does have its uses,” he said blandly.
She narrowed her gaze on him. “I’m not entirely unaware of what you’ve been doing all this time, you know. I’ve followed your career in the papers.”
Oh, God. Was that good or bad? “I didn’t realize I’d been mentioned all that often in the press,” he said, hoping she’d elaborate.
“Often enough.” A mischievous smile tugged at her lips. “Like that case where you and several armed men stormed a barn full of criminal chickens in the dead of night.”
Wonderful. She really had kept up with him. “Ah, yes, the chickens. Now, that was an attack I’ll never forget.” He cast her a mock frown. “It didn’t help that the weather was fowl.”
She blinked, then burst into laughter. “I can’t believe I forgot your love of wordplay.” Her eyes gleamed at him. “And did the chickens resist your attempts to arrest them?”
“I’ve never seen fugitives so cocksure. But in the end they were too birdbrained to fly the coop, which is how we managed to capture them.”
“And did you wring their necks?”
“No, we left that to the farmer. We figured a bird in his hand was better than two in our gaol.”
She chuckled. “Why did you attack a barn full of chickens, anyway?”
He sobered. “We’d been given what we thought was sound information that the place held guns intended for use at a demonstration in Chelsea. After the Spa Fields Riots, we could take no chances.”
“I assume that you got there and found no guns?”
“It turned out that our information was . . . er . . .”
“Fowl?”
He stifled a smile. “Unreliable.”
“I shouldn’t tease you about it, I suppose. Most of your cases were quite impressive.” She said it almost grudgingly. “I read how you brought that murderer from Spitalfields to justice. And recovered part of the funds stolen from the Bank of England. Oh, and the most spectacular case, when you single-handedly captured the Cato Street conspirators. That one got you lots of attention in the pre
ss.”
“I didn’t do it single-handedly, and we were lucky that day. It could have ended much worse.” Much, much worse.
He felt her gaze on him, probing him.
“Is that where you got the scar on your cheek?” she asked.
God, now she was the one reading minds. “No.” He swiftly changed the subject. “Do you have any theories about why Nancy might have been melancholy?”
Jane frowned, and he thought she might persist in her questions about his past. Then, with a sigh, she gazed ahead at the road. “As you said, Nancy just lost her husband. That would depress any woman’s spirits.”
“Assuming she had a happy marriage. But did she?”
“It was . . . happy enough, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
A flustered expression crossed her face. “You grew up with George. Did he seem like a fellow who would treat his wife well?”
“No.” And that bothered Dom. Because if not for George mistaking the situation that night in the library, Nancy might never have ended up with the arse.
One more sin to add to his conscience. But that didn’t mean he was going to run off on some wild-goose chase to find her while Rathmoor Park, which desperately needed oversight just now, languished. “So it’s not far-fetched that Nancy might have taken a lover.”
“Under George’s nose?” She snorted. “He would have killed her if he’d ever learned of such a thing.”
A chill swept down Dom’s spine. “But if he was willing to let her go off alone to York sometimes—”
“Not alone. She had servants with her.” Her voice turned acid. “And you can be sure that they knew better than to keep anything from him.”
“Then perhaps we should be questioning them.”
“I already did. As I told you, the present maid is a temporary replacement, so she had no information. But the coachman revealed that he always left Nancy and her regular maid at Mrs. Patch’s lodgings and picked them up there when it was time to return. He assumed they went shopping with her great-aunt.”
Jane’s tone turned defensive. “Mrs. Patch doesn’t have horses to stable, so the coachman had to go to a local inn where he and the horses might be fed while he waited for Nancy and Meredith.”
“That still means it’s possible that Nancy went to York to meet with a man, and that Mrs. Patch and Meredith were complicit in the affair.”
“Oh, for the love of— You seem determined to think Nancy some hussy. Why is that? What is it about her that has your back up?”
He tensed. He could hardly say that he knew the woman to be capable of at least one deception. Then again, perhaps he should tell Jane the truth about that. Just clear the air between them.
But it wasn’t as if it would change anything. She was finally betrothed and moving on with her life, which he’d expected her to do long before now. What would be the point of revealing what he’d done? If he learned nothing of use in York today and Jane persisted in this pointless pursuit then he would confess all. But for now, he’d rather not muck with her life any further.
Coward. You’re afraid that you’ll tell her and it will make no difference. That she’ll thank you for setting her free. That you’ll finally have the definitive answer to how she feels about you, and it will be the one you can’t bear to hear. At least this way, you can go on believing she could still love you.
He grimaced. That wasn’t it at all. Not a bit. “I do not have my back up about Nancy. I’m merely trying to prepare you for disappointment in case I’m right about her character. I want to protect you, that’s all.”
She muttered something under her breath about “idiot men,” which hardly seemed an appropriate reaction to what he’d said.
It fairly stirred his temper, which, as always, set him on the offensive. “You still haven’t given a sufficient explanation for why she might have run off.” He couldn’t help the sarcasm that crept into his voice. “Other than your theory that some stranger kidnapped her and forged her name to a note.”
He cast Jane a sharp glance, and what he saw in her face only confirmed his suspicions that Jane knew something she wasn’t telling him. Something important.
“I have no theories,” Jane said smoothly. “Unlike you, I want to see the entirety of the evidence before I make a decision. So perhaps we should suspend this discussion until we have more of it.”
Oh, yes, definitely something important. But it would do no good to continue to press her on it. Once she dug in her heels, she was damned hard to persuade. He’d learned that years ago.
Very well. He could be patient. Because in the end, he always uncovered the truth.
3
JANE LAUNCHED INTO a subject she hoped Dom would consider neutral—how he intended to handle his estate now that he’d inherited. But her heart hammered so hard that she could barely pay attention as he spoke of his plans for new crops and breeds of livestock and what all. Because she feared that he had somehow guessed she was hiding something.
After all, Dom had come by his reputation as a good investigator honestly. Which made it all the more imperative that she not reveal Nancy’s secret until she was sure it had something to do with Nancy’s disappearance. If it didn’t, and Jane broke Nancy’s confidence, Nancy would never forgive her—especially given how Dom was sure to react to the news.
After a while, listening to Dom lay out his plans for the estate began to depress her. It reminded her that no matter what happened, one day he would find a wife and have children of his own, and—
Lord, she hated to think of that, which in itself was awful. He had a right to marry. She certainly intended to. She’d considered remaining a spinster and just claiming her fortune when she turned thirty-five, when it would revert to her.
Unfortunately, she wanted children and she needed a husband for that. She might not love Edwin, nor he her, but they were friends with a deep affection for each other that was far more practical than any passionate and romantic love.
They had an understanding. She was to give him an heir and help his difficult sister, Yvette, find a husband. In exchange, Jane would get babies and a household to manage in any way she saw fit.
Edwin would never try to control her future. He might be something of a curmudgeon, but he was never dictatorial. Unlike the hard-nosed individual at her side, Edwin would treat her as an equal partner in their marriage, consulting her on important matters before he made his decisions. Jane refused to tread the same dangerous path as Mama and Nancy, marrying a man who told her what to do, when to do it, and how to please him in the doing of it.
And because Jane had no intention of giving her heart to Edwin, he would never break it. That was the most important thing.
So why did the very idea of her tidy, arranged marriage dampen her spirits? Because she was a fool. Because despite all her efforts to stamp the dream of love out of her heart, the dratted weed always sprouted anew.
Not this time.
“You said Mrs. Patch has no stables,” Dom remarked. “Do you know what inn the coachman used to frequent?”
Dragged from her woolgathering, she forced herself to concentrate on his question. “Is there one called the Elephant and Church?”
“The Elephant and Castle, you mean.”
“If it’s on Skeldergate, then yes.”
“We can leave the phaeton there. And that will allow us to question the innkeeper, in case Nancy came through there. We’d kill two birds with one stone.” As they reached a long, straight bit of road, he flicked the reins to urge the horses into a faster pace. “How much do you know about this Mrs. Patch?”
“She’s a knight’s daughter related to Nancy on her mother’s side. Her maternal grandmother’s sister, I believe.”
“So, not a blood relation of yours.”
“Exactly. That’s why we’ve never met.”
Uncle Horace was the brother of Jane’s late mother. The siblings had been cits, the children of a wealthy cotton merchant. Uncle Horace had followed in their father’s footsteps. Meanwhile, his sister had married a baron, lending her wealth to Papa’s dwindling coffers. That was why Jane had quite a nice dowry. Not nearly as large as Nancy’s, but certainly enough to make her sought after.
“One thing I should warn you about,” Jane said. “I gather that Mrs. Patch is even more fanatical about her spaniels than Nancy. But given your fondness for dogs, you shouldn’t have any trouble. You were always so good with Archer, though that wasn’t difficult. I’ve never seen a sweeter foxhound.”
Dom tightened his grip on the reins. “He was even-tempered, indeed.”
The note of pain in his voice gave her pause. “I suppose he must be quite old by now.”
“Assuming he’s still alive.”
“You don’t know?”
He stared rigidly at the road. “I had to give him away. Haven’t seen him in . . . some years.”
“Oh, Dom, why? You adored that dog!”
“And where was I to keep him?” His eyes blazed over at her. “I was gone for days at a time, following cases wherever they led. Who was to look after him while I stalked criminals and invaded barns?”
She met his gaze steadily. “I would have. If you had let me.”
Surprise showed in his features before he returned his attention to the road. “You mean, if I had not chosen Nancy over you.”
Sweet Lord, the man was stubborn. “Of course,” she said snidely, annoyed that he persisted in upholding that farce. “In any case, once your business got on its feet, you could have found another dog.”
“I still traveled too much for that,” he said in a dead tone. “It wouldn’t have been fair to the animal.”
Was that the real reason? She had to wonder. He’d deliberately cut both her and his dog out of his life out of some misguided sense of doing what was best for them. What else—who else—had he eliminated?
“Is there anything more you can tell me about Mrs. Patch?” he asked, clearly determined to avoid talking about Archer. “Other than the fact that she lives in Stonebow Lane?”
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