Fanning the Flame (4 page)

Adam's stomach clenched. Every time he thought of Jillian Whitney lying with the ancient Earl of Fenwick, he felt a wave of revulsion.

"Are you certain that is the case?" Rathmore asked mildly.

"Oh, she never behaved that way, not in front of us. But she was quite a lovely little bit of muslin and his lordship always had an eye for pretty things."

A harrumphing sound came from the open doorway. "Not a word of truth in it. Never has been." The housekeeper, a buxom woman wearing a mobcap and a starched white apron tied over her stiff black skirt, stood frowning just a few feet away. "The gal was good for 'is lordship and 'e loved 'er like the daughter 'e never 'ad."

"Glynis, you are still as naive as the day you started working here as a chambermaid," the butler said sourly.

Another harrumph and the housekeeper turned and stalked away.

"Tell us what happened," Adam pressed.

Atwater didn't hesitate, caught up as he was in the importance of being interviewed by a duke and an earl. "It was getting quite late, but his lordship and Miss Whitney had not yet retired. Most of the staff had already been dismissed, but I was feeling a little out of sorts. I thought I would enjoy a glass of warm milk before I hied myself off to bed. As I passed down the hall, I remember quite distinctly hearing Miss Whitney in the study in conversation with the earl. A few minutes later, I heard the shot. I raced down the hall and threw open the door and there he was, poor Lord Fenwick, lying in a pool of blood."

"Go on," Adam urged, trying to absorb the news that Jillian had been in the study
before
the shot was fired, not gone in
after,
as she had told him, and wondering if he had been duped by a woman yet again. Anger flooded through him. He calmly tamped it down, banking it until later.

"As I said, the earl was lying there covered in blood and Miss Whitney was standing beside him. It was obvious what had occurred."

"And that was. . . ?" Adam prodded.

"There is a set of stairs at the rear of his lordship's private library, just there." Atwater pointed toward an open door in the north wall of the study. "If I hadn't arrived when I did, Miss Whitney would have escaped upstairs to her room and no one would have been the wiser."

"But instead you rushed in and saw her standing over the body."

"That is correct."

"Was Miss Whitney holding the pistol?"

"No. She had dropped it on the floor a few feet away."

Perhaps she had. Since she hadn't bothered to mention the gun, it was more than possible she had been the one to use it. "Did you confront her at that time?"

He nodded. "I said, 'Oh, dear, what have you done?' She denied it, of course, said she had no part in the shooting. That's when I started shouting for help and Miss Whitney took off running. She ran out through the door at the back of the library, down the hall, and out through the garden."

Adam remembered it well. He could still feel her surprisingly full breasts pressing into his chest when he had captured her in the alley. Her struggles instantly aroused him and he'd been hard all the way back to the house.

Now, as he replayed the story she had told him, making no mention of the pistol or her presence in the study before the murder, fury at her deceit tightened a muscle in his jaw.

Clay spoke up just then. "Were the windows in the study kept locked?"

"Not usually. The earl always liked a bit of fresh air, especially in the evenings."

"So it's conceivable someone might have stood outside the open window, shot him, and tossed in the gun."

"In theory, I suppose that could have occurred."

"Did you check for footprints outside the study?" Adam asked.

"The beds beneath that window are gravel, and at any rate, it rained just before dawn."

"Can you think of any reason Miss Whitney might have wanted to see Lord Fenwick dead?" Clay asked.

The butler shrugged narrow, sloping shoulders. "Who can say? Perhaps it was a lovers' quarrel."

Adam ignored the rush of disgust brought on by those words. "Would you mind if we took a quick look around?"

He didn't wait for an answer, just strode toward the ornate door leading into Fenwick's private library. A brief perusal of the wood-paneled, book-lined room showed a mahogany table gleaming beneath a green glass reading lamp and two leather-seated chairs. A chessboard set up with exquisitely carved medieval ivory pieces sat in the corner. Noting the set of stairs at the back of the room, he returned to the study.

"You've been extremely helpful, Atwater." Adam passed him a sizable vowel for his trouble, the coins jingling as the butler curled his thin fingers around them.

"Thank you, my lord."

"Hopefully we'll see the villain—whomever it may be—arrested in very short order."

"Indeed," the butler said.

They left the house and returned to the carriage, Adam's anger building all the way.

"I take it that wasn't exactly the story you got from Miss Whitney," Clay drawled from the seat across from him.

"No."

"Then perhaps she is guilty, after all."

"Perhaps." But Adam couldn't quite convince himself. Not when every time he thought of her, he saw her feeding the ducks, her face etched into the softest, kindest smile he had ever seen.

He thought of the lies she had told and the image disappeared. By the time he had returned the duke to his home, Adam's anger had resurfaced. A memory of Jillian rose into his mind and unconsciously his hand balled into a fist.

Chapter Three

Jillian paced the floor of the drawing room. Like the rest of the town house, it was done in impeccable taste, from the cream brocade draperies and gold-striped wallpaper, to the ivory and gold brocade sofas in front of the sienna marbled hearth. Thick Oriental carpets covered finely inlaid parquet floors, but the most interesting items in the room were the Egyptian artifacts sitting on bookshelves and tables: stonework, jewel-encrusted beetles, magnificently carved figurines.

The study of ancient Egypt had been a passion of her father's. Over the years, he had become a rather well-known expert on the subject and some of his knowledge had, of course, seeped into her. Jillian recognized the stonework as coming from the Early Dynastic period, somewhere around 3000 B.C. The figurines were Middle Kingdom, believed to be some thousand years later.

She wondered if Lord Blackwood had collected the objects during his years in the army, surprised that a hard man like the earl was attracted to such fine, exquisitely crafted works of art.

Mostly, she wondered what he might find out at Lord Fenwick's mansion.

A noise sounded in the entry. Her heartbeat quickened at the rhythm of the earl's heavy footfalls pounding down the marble-floored hall. Then the door slammed open, Blackwood stood in the opening, and the dark look on his face told her all she needed to know.

"You lied to me."

She shook her head, unconsciously backing away.
Dear God, what had they told him?

"You lied to me, Jillian," he repeated, striding toward her on long, powerful legs. "I want to know why."

She swallowed, kept on moving backward. Her shoulders came up against the wall and still he kept coming. "What . . . what did they say?"

"Why didn't you tell me about the pistol?" He was standing so close she had to tilt her head back to look at him and the fury in his face made her heart pound even harder.

"Pistol?" she repeated, then, for the first time, remembered the weapon she had seen on the floor next to the earl. "Oh, dear Lord, I forgot. Last night, I just . . . I didn't think to tell you. Everything was so muddled and I was so frightened that I . . . I could scarcely think."

A muscle tightened beneath the scar on his jaw, and she raced on, hoping to defuse some of his anger. "I noticed it when I knelt beside him . . . it was lying just a few feet away."

"And you saw it when you ran into the study—after you heard the shot."

"Yes . . . that's right."

"So you were outside in the hall?"

"Yes."

He reached out and caught her arms, pressed her up against the wall. He looked utterly ruthless, his anger barely contained, and suddenly she was afraid.

"You were in the study with Fenwick when it happened, Jillian."

"No!"

"The butler heard you talking to him just before the shot was fired."

Her throat closed up. Her eyes slid closed and her knees buckled. If he hadn't been holding her up, she would have slid into a puddle at his feet. She had prayed no one had seen her, that they would believe she had run into the study after she heard the shot. Obviously someone had known she was there.

His fingers tightened around the tops of her arms until it was almost painful. "Why did you kill him? Did you do it in self-defense? Had the earl done something—"

"I didn't kill him! W-we had just finished playing chess. He went over to sit by the fire and I-I went to fetch a book he wanted. The earl had trouble falling asleep so I often read to him before he retired. That night he sent me into his private library to retrieve a copy of a book by Lord Chesterfield. It wasn't his usual sort of reading, but he told me where to find it, and I had gone to fetch it when I heard the shot."

He studied her face for several long moments, then very slowly released her. Fortunately, her trembling legs decided to hold her up.

"If that is the truth, then why did you lie?"

Jillian moistened lips that felt as brittle as parchment. If the earl turned her over to the authorities . . . dear God, it didn't bear thinking about. "I was afraid if you knew I was there in the study, that you would react just as Atwater did. That you would be certain that I had . . . that I had killed the earl."

He assessed her for several moments more. Jillian kept her eyes on his face and her chin held high, praying that he would believe her. Another second passed before he took a step backward. Even with the few feet between them, she could feel the anger emanating from him and remember the imprint of his long, dark fingers on her arms.

"Tell me why I should believe you."

She straightened, fixed her eyes on his face.
Such a beautiful face,
she thought in some distant corner of her mind,
and so disconcerting.
"Because I am telling you the truth, and I believe that in some hidden corner of your heart you know it or you wouldn't have helped me in the first place."

The edge of his mouth barely curved. "What makes you think I have a heart?"

Why did she? Perhaps it was the affection he felt for his magnificent black stallion, or the beautiful Egyptian antiquities he displayed with such care, as if he respected their ancient wisdom.

And yet when she looked into those cold, forbidding eyes, she believed he might be every bit as unfeeling as he appeared.

"I'm telling you the truth. I didn't shoot the earl."

He said nothing to that, simply turned and walked away. He paused near a small round piecrust table near the hearth. "Let's assume for the present that I believe you."

Relief hit her so hard she swayed a little on her feet.

"If you expect me to help you, from now on you'll have to tell me the truth. All of it. No matter how painful, no matter how frightened you are. I'll accept nothing less, and should I discover again that you have deceived me, I will drag you down to the magistrate's office myself."

Jillian shivered, not doubting for a moment that he meant every word. "I've told you everything. At least all I remember. It happened so quickly and I was upset. But I didn't kill him. Whatever reason could I possibly have to harm that dear old man?"

One of his sleek black eyebrows went up. "That is how you saw him? Most of the
ton
viewed him as a miserly old fool, set in his ways, and impossibly self-indulgent."

Sadness tugged at her heart. "Perhaps to some extent he was a bit of those things, but he was always beyond generous with me."

Blackwood's deep voice hardened. "At what cost, Miss Whitney?"

Jillian frowned, uncertain what he meant.

"You took care of him, didn't you? Bent to his wishes . . . whatever they might be?"

An image of his dear, homely face appeared. "Whatever I did for him . . . it was a small price to pay."

Blackwood's mouth looked hard as he turned and walked to the door. "It would seem you'll be staying for a while. You'll need some things to wear."

Jillian looked down at the dark stain on the hem of her gown she had tried unsuccessfully to wash out that morning.

"I've a friend about your size," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

A friend her size.
One of his mistresses, no doubt. A man as wealthy and attractive as the Earl of Blackwood would have any number of women. It wasn't a comforting thought.

"What about the servants? The authorities will be looking for me. By this afternoon your staff will all know about the murder."