Leslie Lafoy (31 page)

And do what other than pace about her palace? she wondered. Count her piles and piles of money? Fend off suitors who were more interested in her bank account than her hand? Even if one happened along who would do for a husband, there wouldn’t be any children to fill the house with laughter and raucous noise. She’d never have to lie awake at night and wonder if her daughters had secretly had their nipples pierced.

Possibilities. Both good and bad. The only certainty was that she wasn’t going to know the value of Lafitte’s legacy until she made an effort to claim it. To do that, she was going to have to go home. To where it was warm, she reminded herself as a strange kind of numbness crept into her limbs. To where the flowers were blooming and the rain had a definite beginning and a definite end.

Barrett pushed open the gate at the rear of the house. Stepping aside to let her pass, he said softly, “You don’t seem very pleased by your good fortune, Belle.”

It crossed her mind to lie about it, to assure him that fatigue and relief were simply masking her incredible happiness. Chances were that he’d accept the assertion and not press. For the moment. But eventually he would; he wasn’t the sort of man to pretend that he didn’t see. As he closed the gate behind them, she shrugged and admitted, “I certainly don’t feel as I expected I would.”

“Why?”

Moving across the rear yard, she stared at the back door and replied, “Rubies and ropes of pearls would have been easier to convert into actual money, I suppose. A square of parchment doesn’t have the same sort of immediate substance as jewels and gold doubloons.”

“But land can be worth considerably more than sparkling baubles.”

“If it’s good land in a good place,” she countered, thinking that he didn’t sound all that enthused about her inheritance either. “And if someone else hasn’t already made claim to it and settled on it.”

“A good solicitor should be able to clear any misunderstandings as to proper ownership.”

“True,” she allowed as her stomach chilled and quivered. “And I’m sure most would be willing to undertake the work in exchange for a few thousand acres.”

“Do you have any idea of where the land is in any specific sense?”

She didn’t want to talk about it any more, didn’t want to think about it. Doing so did the strangest, most inexplicable and unsettling things to her insides. Taking a deep breath in an attempt to calm her roiling stomach, flexing her fingers in an attempt to bring some feeling back into them, she replied, “No, but that Madison referred to it as Western lands tells me that it’s somewhere west of the Appalachian Mountains, east of the Rockies, north of the Gulf of Mexico, and south of the Dominion of Canada.”

“As I recall the maps I’ve seen of the hemisphere, that’s a fairly large bit of geography,” he observed dryly as he held the door open and allowed her to pass inside.

She nodded, but said nothing as she stripped off her hat and shook out her curls.

“Belle, darling,” he drawled from behind her. “What’s really troubling you?”

Eventually had arrived. And not all that much sooner than she’d expected. “I don’t know,” she admitted on a long sigh, turning to face him. His tilted head and cocked brow prompted her to press her hands to her midsection and add, “Honestly, I don’t, Barrett. I have this hollow, queasy feeling.”

“Perhaps you’re hungry?”

Her smile was tremulous and she knew it. She also knew that she couldn’t muster a better one. “Surprisingly, no. In fact, the very thought of food makes it all that much worse.”
And if you say one cross word,
she silently added,
I’ll cry and never stop.

He closed the distance between them and slipped his arms around her shoulders to draw her against the warmth and hard planes of his body. “Do you think it’s there forever?” he asked softly. “Or might I be able to make it go away?”

His voice vibrated through her, instantly calming her stomach and settling her mind. Wrapping her arms around his waist and nestling her hips close against his, she smiled up at him. “I’m feeling better already. You’re very good.”

As in the cemetery, there was something he wanted to say and couldn’t. Something important. She could see it in his eyes, could feel his tension, his hesitation, resonating through every fiber of her being. Her breath caught, her pulse quickened and heated, she leaned into him and waited, silently willing the words to tumble free.

As though he could hear her unspoken plea, he gave her a faint, apologetic smile and ever so slightly shook his head. Tears clawed their way up her throat, pushing a tiny, strangled cry of disappointment past her lips.

“It will be all right, Belle,” he whispered, threading his fingers through her hair.

She wanted, with all her heart, to believe him. For the moment, though, it was enough to be in the strong circle of his arms, to let him sweep aside her worries and doubts and fears. Tomorrow would bring what it would and she’d do the best she could with it. Tonight …

Tonight, her soul whispered as he gently angled her head and lowered his mouth to hers, was for making love with Barrett Stanbridge, for pleasure and sated happiness, for pretending that it all would never end.

*   *   *

It occurred to him that smiling up at the ceiling was becoming something of a habit. One, he reminded himself, sobering, that he wasn’t going to have a chance to develop any further if he kept tamping down the declaration of his feelings. Three simple words. I love you. Four, if he personalized the statement by adding Belle’s name to the beginning or end of it. And it wasn’t as though he’d never in his life uttered them. He’d tossed them around rather freely in his much younger days, when the women in his life were just as inexperienced as he was and likely to believe him. He’d said them, fully meaning them, only once before.

Barrett frowned as he poked about in the long-closed closet of his memories. He had loved Suzanna. Genuinely and passionately. And with a young man’s fascination for the forbidden and the unshakable belief that love could surmount and conquer all the obstacles life could throw in its path. In hindsight and through older, wiser eyes …

They’d been physically well suited for each other. Just as he and Belle were now. The difference between the past and the present lay beyond the pleasure, though, in the moments they spent together upright, clothed, and outside the bedroom. With Suzanna there had always been the looming presence of her husband, the unhappiness of her marriage, her desperation to escape it, and her dependence on him to save her. And nothing else that he could remember all these years later. They’d existed in the moment, wallowing together in the unfairness of their situation and focusing entirely on taking the one single step that would set them free. They’d never talked of the steps that would come after that one, never talked about the distant future and the days when they were old and gray and helping each other up and out of parlor chairs.

Not that he and Belle had ever discussed those days, either, he allowed. But being with Belle was so very different than being with Suzanna had been. In every possible way. Belle looked back and honestly admitted to making the decisions that had, in the final analysis, turned out to be regrettable. And while she lived in the moment as Suzanna had, Belle didn’t spend her waking moments focused on how life hadn’t measured up to her expectations. No, Belle spent her moments wringing from them all the joy and laughter that she could. But even as she did, she had an eye on tomorrow and where she was going and what life would likely demand of her. Being with Belle was a complicated proposition that had nothing whatsoever to do with their circumstances and everything to do with who they were as people.

He probably wasn’t the ideal man for her. He was used to going through his days and nights alone, never having to be truly accountable to anyone for anything. And, as his friends had often pointed out, he had a tendency to pry into others’ thoughts and motives and then mightily resent their attempts to question his. All in all, he wasn’t the most dependable or open and communicative man in the world. But if Belle would have him, he’d do his best to change what he could of himself, to be the husband she deserved.

But having her accept him required that he first screw up the courage to tell her that he loved her. Why he kept faltering at that was as much a mystery as who had killed Mignon. Three, maybe four, simple words and he couldn’t seem to spit them out. It was, he supposed, a matter of the time and the situation never being quite right in the same moment. He wanted his declaration to be special, memorable in a sweeping, life-altering sort of way. Tossing out an “I love you” before making love to her had struck him as being too much like a caddish ploy. He’d choked it back in the aftermath, thinking that it would sound too much along the lines of a “thank you.” Just casually tossing it out in the midst of a conversation would be to invite her to just as casually dismiss his suit. Bringing it up in a somber, resolute way … Hell, he wasn’t buying a horse or a house. Handing her his heart—and asking for hers in return—wasn’t a business transaction.

Although … Barrett considered the ceiling. Perhaps making a business proposition was the way to start. They worked very well together. They both knew it. And Belle didn’t seem all that excited about the idea of owning land in western America. She could sell it through a solicitor.

Yes, if he couched it in just the right terms, in just the right tone, she might be willing to give serious consideration to staying in London and forming an investigative partnership. If he could keep her close, he could work his way slowly along, eventually overcoming her resistance to another marriage. His parents would have the time to learn more about her and come to appreciate how perfect for him she was.

It could work. It was a damn fine plan, actually. He grinned, thinking that having arrived at such a perfect solution deserved celebration with an expensive cheroot. Turning his head, he pressed a kiss to her forehead and then gently drew his arm from under her while softly saying, “I’m going downstairs for a smoke, angel.”

She murmured in her sleep and gave him a sweet smile of assent. Gazing down at her, his heart overflowed. God, she was perfection; his every desire come to human form. Beauty and intellect, daring and honesty, sweetness and undauntable courage. There had never been, would never again be, another woman like her. For as long as he lived, she would own every measure of his heart and soul.

“I love you,” he whispered, smoothing an errant curl off her cheek. Her smile softly deepened and the tiniest, most satisfied of sighs feathered across her still-kiss-swollen lips. His chest tightened, but he resisted the temptation to take her back into his arms, wake her, and whisper the words again. He had a solid plan already, he told himself, sliding off the bed and reaching for his clothes. And surrendering to ill-conceived impulse was the most certain way of mangling its chances for success.

*   *   *

He’d barely rounded the newel post at the base of the stairs when a man stepped into the darkened doorway of the kitchen. For a split second Barrett’s heart lurched. Even as it did, even as he instinctively reached behind himself for his weapon, he recognized the silhouette.

“It’s me, Mr. Stanbridge,” the man said a bit tardily and unnecessarily. “O’Brien.”

“You’re damn lucky I didn’t shoot you,” Barrett countered, advancing and flipping open the cover of his cheroot case.

His man chuckled and turned back into the kitchen, saying over his shoulder, “No luck to it at all. You never take a blind shot. I wasn’t sure this was the right house. Lord Lansdown gave me the number but I’ll be damned if I could see any.”

So, Barrett silently quipped, being the man O’Brien was, he’d simply let himself in to check. The constables called it breaking and entering. Or attempted burglary. O’Brien called it professional skill and harmless curiosity. However you looked at it, it was a combination of attitude and ability that had made the wiry, bowlegged Irishman eminently useful time after time. “I assume that you’re here because you have a report for me,” Barrett said, shaking out two of the tightly twisted little cigars.

Accepting one of them, Patrick O’Brien nodded crisply. “The boys have been busy. What do you want first? The bad news? Or the worse?”

Barrett struck the phosphorous stick, asking, “There’s no good news at all?”

“Boss, you’re packed in shit up to your eyeballs.”

Well, he didn’t pay O’Brien to gild lilies. Smiling wryly and drawing the flame into the end of the cheroot, he casually inquired, “Would that be the bad or the worse?”

“That’s the part that’s supposed to brace you for what’s comin’,” the other man replied, his teeth clamped around the end of his own smoke and leaning forward to share the flame.

As O’Brien drew, Barrett drawled, “I can hardly wait. When you’re ready, start with the bad, O’Brien.”

“That would be concernin’ your list of suspects.”

“Not a one of them’s in London?” he guessed, tossing the match into the water bucket before leaning back against the cabinet and folding his arms across his chest.

“You should hope.” O’Brien took the newly lit cheroot from his mouth, held it up in front of him and gave it an appreciative smile and nod before clamping it back into place and getting on with business. “You got an Emma and a Rose de Granvieux lodged on Queen’s Gate in Kensington. Sisters, they say. And just between us, they ain’t the most comely things I ever seen. Plain faced, which, bein’ fair-minded men, we both know ain’t an unforgivable sin all by itself. But these two looks like they’s been suckin’ lemons since they was in nappies.”

Barrett reined in his smile. “The de Granvieux sisters, huh? They weren’t the ones I’d picked to be the most logical suspects.”

“And they might not be,” O’Brien brightly offered. “They ain’t here alone.”

Yes, with O’Brien information always came in layers. Often layers within layers. “Oh? Who’s with them?”

“Can’t tell which one of them he’s sweetest on, but Emil Caribe is dancin’ attendance between ’em both most hours of the day. Little prancer, he is. ’Bout this tall,” O’Brien went on, straightening to indicate a height just above his own shoulder. “And real fond of white kid gloves an’ silver threads in his waistcoats. Does this,” he added, picking an imaginary speck of lint off his coat sleeve and tossing it away with an exaggerated gesture of disdain. “Every other breath.”