“Well,” Ben said, writing down his name, “it does happen from time to time if enough money is at stake.”
“I’d hardly recognize him if I saw him, Ben. It’s completely improbable.”
He nodded, and after a moment of silence asked, “How well do you pay your employees?”
“How dare you.”
Ben closed his eyes briefly, his patience aggravated. “I’m just looking for a motive, Kate. You don’t need to get so damned offended. Make a list of all your employees,” he ordered, handing the pen and paper back to her, “especially the ones who worked at the company before your father’s death.”
Kate dutifully wrote, thinking all the while that this was the most absurd procedure she had ever gone through. There were at least forty men working at the boatyard alone.
It took her several minutes, and when she was finished she handed the list back to Ben for perusal. He read it carefully. “This is everyone?”
“I think so…we’ve had, of course, the odd man who’s worked for us for a few weeks and then left. I will add to that list if I remember anyone else.”
“What about servants?”
She didn’t like where he was going with this line of inquiry. “We’ve had most of our servants since before I was even born—none of them would ever wish me harm, not to mention that, being in my employ, they’d have nothing to gain by ruining me. And besides, none of them know the details of the company.”
“Servants know everything, Kate. Make a list of them. Start with house servants.”
She almost lost her temper but managed, just in time, to restrain it. “Well, there’s Tilly, Mr. Randall, Flossie, Kenneth, Graham—”
“What about your lady’s maid?”
“Mary? Call her ‘companion’ or you’ll invoke her wrath. She knows about my involvement, yes, of course. She knows everything about me…she’s been with us for so long, I don’t think I could hide anything from her if I tried.”
“Does she have any reason to wish you ill?”
“Absolutely not. She wishes you ill, though. Can you squeeze a motive from that?”
Ben chose to ignore that jab. “You said ‘most,’ Kate—which servants are newer to your family’s employ?”
“Well, there is Owens the coachman—”
“Put him down.”
“Why? Owens is extremely loyal!”
“Because he was driving the coach the first time you were abducted, and he was at Peshley when you were abducted the second time.”
“I hate to inform you, Ben, but you were conveniently present on all of those occasions as well. Perhaps I should put you on this list.”
He made no response. He just looked at her disgustedly, shook his head and took the pen and paper back before she could write anything. He placed Owens’s name at the bottom of the growing list.
“And his motive?” she challenged, watching him write.
“Next?” he inquired, ignoring her question.
Kate harrumphed. “You’re the only one who’s gained anything out of this mess. Maybe I should suspect you.”
“I beg to differ, madam. I have gained nothing at all.”
Kate harrumphed once more. “You’re being deliberately rude.”
“And you’re ‘harrumphing’ again.”
“What?”
“I had a nurse once who habitually harrumphed, and it is not a characteristic I would look for in a wife. Where have you learned this habit? Was it from this Mary? This companion of yours?”
Kate couldn’t help it. She began to giggle. The stress of the situation had finally gotten to her, and laughing was the only way to relieve it. She wanted to remain angry with Ben forever—he deserved it—but for just that tiny window of a moment she found it was impossible. “Do not speak ill of Mary, Ben. She will have her revenge, I warn you.”
“She won’t know unless you tell her.”
“I told you, Ben,” Kate said as she rose, “she knows everything.”
With that, she left the room, trying very hard to suppress a small smile.
Kate was upstairs in her former bedroom, dressing for dinner as slowly as possible. She didn’t want to return downstairs and face her husband again, and she stalled by pulling her gloves onto each finger with deliberation, by changing her shoes three times. He was so smug, and she hated him for it. Of course, he had every reason to hate her, too. She’d been a complete shrew to him and had never apologized. But at least she hadn’t completely humiliated him in front of his family. That embarrassing treat had been hers alone.
She hated him and she intended to keep it that way.
But then he had to go and be charming—it was damn hard hating him when he acted like that. She’d been furious, yet with little effort he’d made her smile…he’d practically made her want to forgive him on the spot for everything he’d done. How would she possibly stay sane under these circumstances? How would she stay firm?
She turned around in her seat at her dressing table to face Mary, who bustled about quietly in the background. Mary hadn’t liked Ben one bit since she’d learned about what he’d said in front of her brother, and she could be counted on to stoke Kate’s animosity toward her husband. “I swear, Mary, he’s being completely absurd.”
“Is he, dear?” she replied without really seeming to listen. Kate had been ranting, more or less, about Ben since the day of their engagement and it was becoming a less compelling topic.
Kate gave her a grumpy look. “He won’t listen to me, Mary. I told him that there is no reason to worry, that he has no need to be here and can return to London or do whatever her likes. He insists on staying.”
“Well, in all fairness, perhaps he should. We don’t know that you’re safe yet.”
“He made me compile a list of suspects. Stood over me and watched me do it.”
“Is that so, dear?” Mary’s attention still remained elsewhere.
Kate frowned grumpily. “Do you know who’s at the very top of that list?”
Mary just shrugged and began laying out pairs of silk stocking on the bed.
“You are, Mary.”
That caused her to snap to attention. “The beast!”
Kate sat back, satisfied by that response. So what if Mary wasn’t really at the top of the list. It was just a little white lie. “I know. I think he’s a suspect. I told him.”
“You cannot be serious, my lady.” Mary looked truly alarmed.
Kate rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m not serious—I mean, that is what I told him, but I didn’t really mean it.”
“But why would you even suggest such a thing? Do you never want peace with that man? I’m hardly an advocate for Lord Sinclair, but I long for the days when our conversations did not revolve solely around his faults.”
“Oh, I don’t care if he hates me. And anyway, I was just being cheeky. It is rather odd, though. On every occasion I’ve been abducted or otherwise interfered with he’s magically appeared. A rather strange coincidence, do you not think?”
“I don’t know…perhaps he’s your guardian angel?” Mary asked with a mischievous smile.
“Not very likely,” Kate said with a grumble. Ben was definitely far better at getting her into trouble than keeping her out of it. “But he does have a strange way of turning up unexpectedly. Banging on my brother’s door in the middle of the night—”
“What’s this?”
Kate realized she’d never told Mary about her first, scandalous encounter with Benjamin Sinclair. Better not tell her now. She barreled on. “He was on hand to rescue me from my carriage after my brother’s engagement party—odd, wouldn’t you say? And he was snooping in the conservatory during that storm when I was abducted again. He was even at the lake at St. James’s Park when we went there with Charlotte.”
Mary cocked her head to the side. “The lake?”
Kate realized that she’d also concealed this meeting from Mary, and from Charlotte as well. “Oh…you remember, Mary—we had a picnic
in St. James’s Park and Charlotte took you with her when she went to speak with Lady…oh, whomever she was? Would you believe Ben appeared the moment you’d left? It was as if he’d planned it. I was convinced at the time that Charlotte had somehow arranged the whole thing—she simply can’t help matchmaking.”
“You didn’t tell me about this.”
She sighed. “Well…since I thought—and still think, a bit—that Charlotte had somehow planned the whole thing…both she and you were acting rather suspiciously that day…anyway, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that her plan had worked. I also didn’t want her to try anything like that again because, well, he hardly needed encouragement.”
Mary was looking rather pale. “Charlotte told me nothing about having planned a meeting with Lord Sinclair.”
Kate gave her a funny look. Mary seemed unduly alarmed. “He denies it, too, so it must simply have been another coincidence.”
Mary didn’t seem wholly satisfied with that answer. “He did rather have something to gain by marrying you, I suppose.”
Kate turned around and looked at her reflection in the mirror, wondering if she should rub some ashes from the fire beneath her eyes to make herself look exhausted. Perhaps she might pull her hair back more severely. Anything to dissuade him from trying to kiss her…her will to resist just wasn’t strong enough when he got close. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Mary. I think we’re both aware of how little he wanted to marry me.”
“When he asked you, did he know about your inheritance?”
Kate looked at Mary’s face reflected in the mirror. “I’d only just told him…no, no, it’s impossible. If he didn’t know about my inheritance, then why on earth would he have organized my abduction…twice? He’s my brother’s best friend, for goodness’ sake.”
“He used to be, anyway.”
“Mary, it’s absurd. Now, how do I look? Ready for battle?”
Mary nodded distractedly. “Beautiful, Lady Kate, as usual.”
As Kate walked from the room, her shoulders back as if she was, indeed, making her way into a war, Mary began slowly and silently to panic.
She left the room and walked down the hallway to the servants’ wing. If anyone had seen her they would have known that something was seriously troubling her.
Something very sinister was going on, and the evidence was pointing in the wrong direction.
Chapter Seventeen
Monsieur Richard, the cook, outdid himself for dinner that evening. As Kate sat at the opposite end of the table from her husband, separated by several feet of uncomfortable silence punctuated with steaming silver tureens, she supposed that the decadent feast was his way of celebrating their nuptials. Lukewarm soup and hard bread would have suited her just fine, however. It was impossible for her to enjoy anything just then, anyway. They hadn’t spoken at all during the meal. Ben had merely nodded when she’d entered and she’d nodded back. That was it. The only noise in the dining room was the occasional clink of forks and knives. It was awful.
She glanced at him covertly, pretending to pay attention to her food alone. He’d finished eating and was absentmindedly swirling his wine around in his glass. He looked, Kate was afraid to admit, as appealing as ever. He wore a dark blue jacket and white cravat and somehow his skin managed to look sun-kissed and his hair streaked with blond, even though it was already October. It was dangerous, the way he looked, and her heartbeat accelerated slightly as the familiar warmth entered her body. As if sensing her eyes on him, he looked up. When his gaze met hers, he merely raised a brow in question.
She lowered her eyes immediately. Why did he always cause this reaction in her? All he had to do was look at her and her stomach rolled over and her palms began to sweat. It couldn’t continue like that.
She began cutting her veal with no particular enthusiasm. She hadn’t been hungry to begin with and didn’t know if she’d even be able to swallow without choking, but she needed to occupy her hands somehow. Poor Richard. He’d think his meal had been a resounding failure when her plate returned to the kitchen toyed with but uneaten. Kate forced down a bite and grimaced. Perhaps she could deposit a few mouthfuls into her napkin to be disposed of later so Richard wouldn’t be too offended.
The sound of Ben’s chair sliding back on the wooden floor brought her gaze back to his direction in an instant. He had risen, and when he noticed her gaze on him he looked back disinterestedly and, damn it, raised his infuriating brow once more. “Is something amiss, Kate?”
Yes, she wanted to say. A very big something. The moment she’d been dreading had finally arrived and he knew it. The end of the meal meant the end of the evening. It meant heading upstairs and finding her way into bed…only all her belongings had been brought into the master bedroom…right alongside his. Kate was far too discreet to ask for her things to be moved back to her old room. Not just yet, anyway. Her servants seemed to think she’d found herself a true love match and she just couldn’t give them reason to worry…or to gossip. She could change rooms eventually. Many wives didn’t share bedrooms with their husbands at all, at least after the initial few months. Besides, he couldn’t possibly plan on staying with her that long anyway. He’d leave and things would just take care of themselves.
“Um…have you finished?” she asked rather stupidly.
Ben nodded and began to cross the room toward the door.
“Where are you going now?” Kate asked, trying to keep the panic from her voice.
Ben paused to consider her words for a moment. “I was going to go pour a glass of sherry and take it up to bed. Does that seem strange?”
Her voice sounded small and embarrassed when she answered, “No.”
“Care to join me?”
“No.” She was plenty firm this time.
“Didn’t think so,” he remarked sardonically before turning to leave once more.
Kate rose quickly before he reached the door. “Ben?”
He paused, turned around and waited for her to speak.
She bit her lip and began to wring her hands. When she noticed what she was doing she stopped. He obviously knew what was worrying her. Why couldn’t he just be gallant for once and offer to sleep on the floor? “Well, Tilly told me that she had put my belongings into the master bedroom, and that that is where you have been sleeping as well.”
Ben’s expression remained masked. “Perfectly natural, Kate. We’ve been married for less than two weeks. Usually it takes a married couple at least a month to decide they can’t stand each other.”
“What do we do about it?”
“Would you like to tell her?”
Kate tried to imagine it. Could she tell Tilly? Not without raising the eyebrows of every member of her staff, she couldn’t. And most of them had been employed since before she was born, or not long thereafter. It was just too awkward, and she couldn’t suffer that embarrassment. But could she share a bed with her husband?
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to tell her.”
“You could sleep on the floor,” he offered. “In fact, there’s quite a nice sofa in that bedroom, at the foot of the bed. I’m sure you could be perfectly comfortable on it.”
“I will not sleep on the floor. You were never invited to this house. If anyone sleeps on the floor it shall be you,” she replied, her eyes flashing with anger.
Ben shrugged again. “Then I guess no one will be sleeping on the floor tonight…and you’ll have the misfortune of sharing the bed with me.” With that, he opened the door and left.
Kate stared at the door for a good long while, not moving.
Ben knew there had always been plenty of sound reasons behind his aversion to marriage, but for a brief spell he’d allowed himself to forget them all. He’d let himself think instead—madly—that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. But since he’d actually gone through with it all the reasons had come rushing back. As he sat on the side of the bed, where he’d been waiting alone for nearly an hour, he rehearsed
each one: women were complicated and demanding; a wife interfered with one’s self-determination and limited one’s freedom. He’d always feared that marrying would mean he’d be held down to one spot forever, and he simply valued the rootlessness of travel too much for that ever to be acceptable. And yet even though he knew better, there he found himself, fixed to that spot on the bed, unmoving except for growing alert every time he heard a noise in the hallway, wondering if it was Kate making her way to bed.
In the end, he’d brought the entire bottle of sherry to the bedroom, rather than just a glass. He hoped to be inebriated and at least semi-somnolent by the time she arrived; that way he’d be immune to her beauty, to the sweet way she blushed and lowered her eyes every time he looked at her. In fact, he’d hardly touched the sherry. He was just too distracted, and he was beginning to wonder if she was going to join him at all. Perhaps he had nothing to worry about. Perhaps she’d gone out of doors and was sleeping in a tree.
Why the hell had he forced the issue of sharing a room? He actually rather wished they weren’t, and he could easily have offered to sleep on the sofa. It didn’t matter how furious he was at her, he still wanted her every time he so much as looked at her. Sleeping in the same bed with her would be torture. It was sure to test his willpower to the breaking point and he only hoped he wouldn’t break. And he could do it; he could remain strong. His reaction to her, Ben told himself, was purely physical, and he hadn’t made it that far in life without having control over his base impulses. It’d be difficult, painfully so, but he could do it. He wouldn’t touch her, and it would serve her right, too. Resisting the urge to roll over in bed, gather her into his arms and make love to her would be a victory—not just over his own impulses, but over her desire as well. He knew that he affected her, too. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she breathed just a little bit faster when he looked at her.
A quiet knock at the door pulled him out of his reverie. Kate opened the door only slightly, just enough to slip her slender body through. She shut the door behind herself and stood there, trying not to look at him. She looked painfully shy, something Ben had never really seen in her before.
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