Asher lowered the magazine to glare at her. “You were on stage at the Moulin Rouge?”
“I was just dancing,” Lady Briarwood answered, lowering her head.
Asher made a frustrated noise and turned a page in the magazine. Louis tried to scoot closer to see what horrible things Lafarge had printed about the McGoverns, but before he could, all of the color drained from Asher’s face and he slapped the magazine closed.
“Burn this,” he said, thrusting the magazine at Lady Evangeline. “Burn every copy of it you can find.”
“I can’t very well track down every copy that has been printed,” Lady Evangeline said, looking as worried as it was possible for a woman to look.
“What seems to be the problem?” Louis asked, moving closer to Asher even as Marshall leapt up from his seat to stride toward them. Damien and Sebastian abandoned their breakfasts to come to Asher’s aid as well.
“The problem is that Les Ragots is pure filth,” Asher said, unable to stand still. “And the man who publishes it needs to be hung, drawn, and quartered.”
Louis couldn’t stand the suspense for another moment. He moved to Lady Evangeline’s side, holding out his hand for the magazine. Lady Evangeline reluctantly handed it over, pink splashing across her pale cheeks.
Louis scanned the pages, looking for whatever had set Asher off. Most of the pages were taken up with photographs of Lady Briarwood and descriptions of her evening at the Moulin Rouge. Louis had been there, and it was obvious at a glance that a great many of the details contained in the article were falsified or completely fabricated. It was the shorter article on one of the opposing pages that caught his attention and gave him pause. That article was simply titled, “Will the McGovern Secret Be Revealed?”
With a frown, Louis sped through the article. As with everything else Lafarge printed, it was vague and contained very little information, but it hinted at a mountain of scandal. The way it was phrased could have been twisted to suggest the McGoverns had financial troubles or sexual perversions, or even treasonous skeletons in their closet. It said nothing and said everything at once. Louis might have disregarded it, if not for Asher’s reaction.
“This is Lafarge’s doing,” Louis said, hoping his friend would find some sort of comfort in the words. “This is simply how Lafarge operates. He whispers and suggests without saying anything and lets his readers draw their own conclusions.”
Asher glanced in Louis’s direction, meeting his eyes with a look that said there was far more to the words on the page than hollow rumor-starting.
“Monsieur Lafarge needs to be stopped,” Lady Evangeline declared, stomping her foot. “This is unconscionable.”
“Yes, he should be stopped, and we should be the ones to stop him,” Lady Briarwood agreed.
“But how can we stop him?” another of the lady cousins asked.
“The only way to stop a man like that is to expose him for what he truly is,” Damien said, sending Asher a look of support.
“With all that he’s said and done, he could never stand up if we all stood against him,” his sister, Dorothy, agreed.
“So we must drag him out into the light, expose him to the same treatment he’s dished out to others, and let public opinion squash him,” Lady Evangeline said.
“Yes.” Lady Briarwood took up the cause, a fervent light in her eyes. “We need to lure him into confessing his true nature and snap the trap closed around him.”
“If he’s so fascinated with us, we should give him what he wants.” Lady Evangeline pushed past her brother to stand by Lady Briarwood’s side. “We should plan a party, a bacchanal, to lure him to the castle. Then we will call him out in front of all of Paris society and watch him burn.”
“Fantastic,” Lady Briarwood said. “We can call it our goodbye ball. Everyone in Paris will want to attend.”
Louis eyed the ladies skeptically as they launched into plans for a ball. Excitement for the idea grew quickly, but Louis had his doubts. Asher and Marshall appeared to have their doubts as well, but Damien and Sebastian were drawn into the excitement of planning.
Louis made his way inconspicuously around the table to where Solange sat, observing the whole spectacle with wide eyes. He knew even before he reached her that she would share his assessment of the situation.
“Whatever they plan, it isn’t going to work,” he said quietly when he reached her.
“Lafarge will expect something like that,” Solange agreed.
“Which is why we must take things into our own hands and bring it all to a conclusion before your dear cousins can damage their reputations even more,” Louis continued.
Solange glanced up at him, the fire that had drawn him in at first sight back in her eyes. “Lafarge won’t have a chance to destroy the McGoverns if we destroy him first,” she said.
“And destroy him we will.” Louis nodded.
Chapter 5
Solange hadn’t felt so much certainty about her chances of finally bringing Lafarge to justice until after she and Louis decided to take matters into their own hands. Lafarge had made a critical error in threatening the McGovern family. Not only were the McGoverns themselves capable of far more than she suspected Lafarge knew, they had friends. Friends who would fight to keep them safe. Friends who weren’t afraid to get their hands a little dirty.
The plan she and Louis hatched involved exposing Lafarge for the crimes he had committed, not just against the two of them, but against a host of others. They had agreed to seek out Lafarge’s other victims and to convince them to come forward en masse. But that task was something Louis had to do on his own. Solange didn’t have the connections or introductions to the people whom they would truly need on their side. As soon as she recognized that Louis’s plan involved her sitting on her hands for at least a day while he visited members of the French nobility, she knew she needed to act on her own.
Which was how she found herself on the doorstep of Lafarge’s Parisian house by midmorning the next day, ringing the bell and praying that her ambitious plan would bear fruit.
“I’m here to see Monsieur Lafarge,” she told the pinch-faced butler who answered the door.
“Monsieur Lafarge is not at home,” the man said, attempting to shut the door on her.
Solange stopped him with a firm hand on the door’s handle, stepping into the entryway so that he would have to shove her aside in order to shut her out. “Tell him his daughter is here to see him,” she said, glaring at the man.
The butler hesitated, studying her through narrowed eyes. For a long, anxious moment, Solange thought he was going to physically remove her from the premises or call for some of the toughs she’d seen the night Damien McGovern and Lord Gregory had tried to gain entrance to the offices of Les Ragots to do the job for him. But to her surprise, the butler drew in a breath and stepped back, gesturing for her to come inside.
“Wait here,” he said in a low growl, turning and leaving her in the chilly entryway.
Solange did as she was told, hugging herself and glancing around the dim interior of Lafarge’s house. From what she could see, the man’s home was as cold and forbidding as he was. There was no charm and no life in it, just wealth and ostentation. It gave her a bad feeling that she couldn’t shake during the long, painful time she waited for the butler to return.
At last, the man came back, his scowl as dark as ever. “Come with me,” he said, barely looking at her before turning and retracing his steps down the silent hallway.
Solange pressed a hand to her stomach and followed. The confrontation she had dreamed of for years was finally about to happen, but she couldn’t decide whether she was more excited or terrified. The dark tension that seemed to infuse the walls of the home she walked through didn’t help her anxiety at all.
“In here,” the butler said as he stopped in front of the door to a stiffly formal office at the end of the long hall.
Solange held her back straight and her chin up and turned the corner into the office
. Lafarge sat behind a desk, scribbling something on a loose piece of paper in front of him. His desk was piled with ledgers, newspapers, and copies of his own magazine, all arranged in precise order. A gold inkwell with an old-fashioned quill sat on one corner and a tiny replica of a guillotine graced the other corner.
Lafarge didn’t look up when Solange entered the room, or when she marched straight up to the desk and said, “Monsieur Lafarge, your reign of terror is over.”
She waited. Lafarge continued scribbling. Prickles broke out down her back. Anger welled up in her gut. She refused to be ignored.
“You have threatened the wrong family,” she went on, raising her voice. “The McGoverns will not be brought down by a paper tyrant like you.”
Lafarge blew out a breath in what sounded like a dismissive laugh. At last, he put his pen down and glanced up at her. “The McGoverns will be brought down by their own foolishness and misdeeds.”
A thread of panic swirled in Solange’s chest, but she tamped it down. Perhaps she should have investigated exactly what Lafarge was holding over the McGovern clan’s head before rushing into her confrontation. But it was too late now.
“You destroyed my family, sir, and I will not let you destroy another family that I hold in highest regard,” she said.
Lafarge leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and tapping them to his thin lips. He studied Solange with narrowed eyes, as though amused by her threats. His silence taunted her, but as much as she wanted to ball her hands into fists at her sides—or use one to punch the smug look off his face—she stood straight and tall, refusing to be intimidated.
“You look like my aunt Monique,” he said at last, his grin as haughty as could be.
“I am no part of you or your blood,” Solange snapped, tilting her chin higher.
“Oh, but you are,” Lafarge said. “You’ve got the Lafarge family spirit as well. Why else would you have pursued me across two continents only to stand before me, railing like a child who has just discovered how unfair life is?”
Solange shook with rage. She had not taken the risk of confronting the man to be belittled and reminded of the wrongs that had been done to her.
“I am giving you a chance to surrender,” she said, taking a step toward his desk. “Your time is up.”
He laughed as if she’d told a ribald joke. “It is quaint of you to think so, but you are wrong. My time has only just begun. I’ve decimated the ranks of the French aristocracy, and the English are next, beginning with your precious McGoverns.”
Nothing was going as Solange imagined it would. But in the back of her mind, a tiny voice whispered that she had planned the whole thing badly, been ridiculously foolish for approaching the lion in his den, and was about to pay the price in humiliation.
“You underestimate your enemy,” she said, scrambling for a way to gain the upper hand. “I’m giving you a last chance to stop publication of your filthy gossip rag and to leave Paris.”
Lafarge laughed harder and shook his head. “Who are you to dictate those sorts of terms to me? You haven’t even threatened me. Why should I end a lucrative operation that provides me with immense personal satisfaction on the word of a silly girl?”
“Because I am not just a silly girl,” she said. “I am the woman who will end your life, as you have ended the lives of too many before me.”
“You think so?” The amusement flashing in his cold eyes was infuriating. “You are nothing but a byproduct of a plot I grew bored of.”
“You destroyed my family,” Solange growled.
“So what?” Lafarge shrugged. “Who cares about some tribe in a backward country no one cares about?”
“I do.” She took another step forward. “And I will have my revenge for everything you did.”
“Really?” He tapped his fingers against his mouth again. “And how do you propose to do that? Did you bring that little gun of yours to shoot me? Have you sent your friend, Lord Sinclair, to do the dirty work for you? Do you have clever plans to expose my identity to all the aristocrats I’ve wronged over the years so that they will attack me all at once?”
Solange gulped. He’d guessed everything they’d planned to do and likely more. He was several steps ahead of them already, which meant the danger to herself, Louis, and the McGoverns was greater than she’d imagined.
“I’m giving you one final chance to end your operations at once or suffer the consequences,” she said in a tight voice.
Lafarge let out a sigh. “I don’t have time for this. Durand, take Mademoiselle Lafarge to the trophy room,” he called past Solange to the butler, who had watched the entire confrontation from the doorway.
“Very good, sir.” The butler nodded, then came forward to clamp a surprisingly strong hand around Solange’s arm.
“I will take my leave of you,” Solange said, trying to shake the man off. His grip was like iron, though, and she couldn’t break away from him.
“I should thank you for making my job easier,” Lafarge said, picking up his pen and looking at the letter he’d been writing instead of her. “Usually I have to work much harder to collect my trophies. Thank you for walking right in and surrendering.”
“I have done no such thing,” Solange protested as the butler pushed her out of the room. “I came here to give you a chance to leave while you can, not to—”
She wasn’t able to finish her rant. The butler yanked her out into the hall and dragged her back the way she’d come until they reached a side corridor.
“Get off of me. Let me go,” she shouted at him, pulling and twisting and doing everything she could to break free. “Unhand me at once.”
Her struggles were as useless as beating against a marble statue. The butler’s strength far outweighed hers. She stumbled along as he brought her to an unmarked door, opened it, then practically tossed her into the room. She fell onto a rich, oriental carpet, scraping her hands and bruising her knees as she did. Before she could recover enough to stand, the butler slammed the door and locked it with an ominous click. Solange was trapped.
If there was one thing Louis was certain of, it was that he would do whatever possible to protect Solange from whatever evil forces assailed her. And no forces were more evil than Lafarge. All he cared about was ending the stress and torment Lafarge had her in. After that threat was removed, he would do whatever it took to keep her in his life permanently, as his wife. Damn the consequences society would likely rain down on him for picking such an unusual bride, but he’d never felt the things he felt when he was with Solange with anyone before, and he doubted he would feel those things with anyone after her.
Those feelings were foremost in his mind when he knocked on the door of Lafarge’s Paris home, determined to bring an end to things before Solange became any more involved than she already was. He’d called on several of Lafarge’s victims throughout the morning and received an overwhelmingly positive response to his and Solange’s plan to form an army against the man, but if he could bring Lafarge to heel without having to cause a scene, he would.
It was a long time before the door was answered. Louis had to ring the bell and knock several times before a harried butler opened it. The man was red-faced and sweating just a bit, as though he’d run through the house to get the door or been involved in some sort of physical exertion before answering.
“I’m here to see Monsieur Lafarge,” Louis said as formally as he could.
The butler sent him a resentful look, as though his day were already difficult enough, and shook his head. “Wait here,” he said, letting Louis inside, but only as far as the entryway.
Louis waited, his hands clasped behind his back, but something about Lafarge’s house didn’t feel right. He wasn’t sure if it was the knowledge that a salacious press was running somewhere on the premises or that Lafarge was plotting away close by. His unease could even have come from the knowledge that his mother’s brooch might have been in the next room, within his reach. Whatever it was, the hair on th
e back of his neck stood up and his senses felt raw.
“Monsieur Lafarge will see you,” the butler said once he returned. He gestured for Louis to follow as he made his way swiftly down the hall.
Louis had to walk fast to keep up with him, something else that didn’t seem right. For a moment, he thought he heard banging in a room tucked away somewhere in the house, but it stopped before he could place what it might be.
When they reached the office where Lafarge sat behind a desk, signing his name to some sort of letter, Louis approached him boldly.
“Monsieur Lafarge, I have come to ask—no, demand—one final time that you return what is rightfully mine and that you shut down your press and your nefarious activities at once.”
Rather than looking startled or alarmed, Lafarge merely glanced up at him and let out a long sigh. “Does no one have anything better to do today than threaten me with hollow promises of vengeance?”
The question knocked Louis off-guard. “This has gone on long enough,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back and facing Lafarge like a general on a battlefield. “I demand you return the brooch, pack up, and leave Paris or I will be forced to use the considerable influence in my power to bring you down as you have brought so many others.”
Lafarge glanced up at him with a bored expression. “And how do you propose to do that? By involving the law?” He shook his head. “The law wouldn’t dare to move against me. I have too much information that certain people would not want to get out.”
“There are more ways to bring a man to justice than the law,” Louis insisted.
“Mob justice, perhaps?” Lafarge stood with a laugh, crossing to a table that held various decanters of deep red and amber liquids. “The thing about the mob, Lord Sinclair, is that they fear themselves as much as they hate whoever holds the axe above their heads.”
“Perhaps individually,” Louis said, twisting to face him. “But not when they come together with a united cause.”
Last Chance for Paris Page 5