Leslie Lafoy (7 page)

Did she have the strength to endure another tumble into hell? Did she really care whether she did or not? Living long was one thing. Living happily was another. Living for the moment at least offered a hope for pleasure, however fleeting it might be. Would Barrett mind overly much if she used him every bit as deliberately as Mignon had?

After a long moment, Isabella lifted her chin and turned back to solemnly meet his gaze. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew the tattered portions of her cousin’s half of the treasure map, silently laid them on the table between them, and accepted whatever fate would bring.

Chapter Four

There was the common-sense thing to do, Isabella admitted as they moved into Barrett’s study. And then there was the only thing to be done. In the case of enlisting Barrett Stanbridge’s help, the two rational courses were one and the same. He was right; whoever had killed Mignon was likely to come after her next, and if she faced the encounter alone, she didn’t stand any better chance of survival than her cousin had. Added to that was the reality that she didn’t know London, and Barrett did. If indeed Mignon had come to the right place, then Barrett’s knowledge of the city would be invaluable in hunting down the treasure.

It didn’t matter, she reminded herself as she watched him arrange the paper rectangles on his desktop, that every feminine bone in her body had misgivings. After all, their partnership was decidedly temporary even if it didn’t turn out to be strictly business in nature. Once they’d accomplished their task, she’d go her way, he’d go his, and they’d never see each other again. In the meantime, everything would be fine as long as she kept that reality in the forefront of her mind.

Which was damned difficult to do, she mentally groused. Practicality was being shoved aside by the realization of how broad and thick his shoulders were, how nimble his fingers were for a man with such large hands, how full and soft his lips looked, and how his dark hair practically begged to be ruffled.

“All right,” he said, intruding on her self-censure. “Come take a look at this and tell me how it relates to your half of the map.”

He didn’t move so much as an inch as she joined him at the desk. As if he’d deliberately decided to challenge her resolve, he stood squarely in front of the reconstructed map, his feet firmly planted and his hands braced on either side of it, giving her a choice between standing a proper distance off to the side where she couldn’t really see anything, or sidling up beside him and trying to pretend that she wasn’t at all aware of him. One course was patently ridiculous, the other only foolhardy.

She stepped up beside him, reached past his arm, and laid a fingertip on the uppermost center piece. “If you put my half up against what we have here, the full line would read ‘Lies to Cross, Park and Hyde.’” She shifted her finger down to indicate the lower line. “The full second is ‘Lion’s Paw and Gentle Bride.’”

He slowly nodded and she drew back, resisting the brazen urge to step closer to the warmth of him, slip her arms around his narrow waist, and fit her hips against his.

“What abuts these two missing pieces?” he asked, indicating the two obvious holes in the puzzle.

“In the center, squiggles that look remarkably like these.” Reaching past him again, she tapped the empty space at the bottom. “There are another two lines of text right in here. The first half of the first line is ‘Setting sun on…’ The first half to the last one is ‘Fifteen paces to…’”

“That’s it?” he asked in a tone that was both incredulous and frustrated.

Light-headed, she expelled the breath she’d been holding and leaned down to rest her forearms on the desktop. “Just please tell me you see something that would suggest the treasure’s here in London. I really need to hear that Mignon didn’t take off on a wild-goose chase.”

Roses. She smelled like roses; soft and warm and not too sweet. And the nape of her neck, with the little curling tendrils of dark honey hair … Jesus, it would be so easy, so deliciously rewarding, to lean down and slowly take a taste. Barrett straightened, crossed his arms over his chest, and forced himself to swallow.

“‘Park’ and ‘Hyde’ are all that imply London to me,” he admitted, narrowing his eyes so that the map was all he could see. “But that’s a reach. There are probably at least a hundred British cities and towns with streets named Park and Hyde.”

“So you think that these lines represent streets?”

“It’s purely an assumption,” he conceded, watching her nudge one of the pieces into a better fit. She had graceful hands. Swallowing again and shifting his gaze to the wall on the back side of his desk, he shrugged and added, “But they could be rivers or streams for all I know. Do you have any idea of when the map was drawn? How old it is?”

“That’s a subject of considerable speculation.”

“Wills are generally dated.”

“Yes,” she allowed, straightening to stand squarely beside him. “The one delivered to the family lawyers was dated January 1823. Some people say that Lafitte died off the coast of Galveston in the early 1830s. Other people claim that Jean Lafitte became a respectable businessman in St. Louis, lived to be quite old, and passed only in the last ten years or so. In the final analysis, no one seems to be absolutely certain when, where, and how he actually died.”

He should have expected as much; so far not one single aspect of this mess had been clear-cut and easy. And a will some forty years old? If he’d lived some time after that, Lafitte could very well have changed his mind and written another will that superseded it. Isabella Dandaneau could well be chasing after a treasure the man had decided to give to someone else.

Mentioning the possibility seemed a cruel thing to do, though, and so he focused his attention on other, less troubling, aspects of the mystery. “Do the stories ever have him traveling to London?”

With a heavy sigh, she rubbed her fingertips over her brow and replied, “According to the tales, there isn’t a country in the world that he didn’t visit. Whether or not any of the stories are true…” She shook her head and shrugged.

“And there are no labels on any of the lines on your half of the map?”

“None. And no directional markers, either.”

“Why would Mignon have thought the map was of London?” he wondered aloud.

“I honestly don’t know. I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

Her hope was entirely groundless but he knew there wasn’t any reason to point out that fact; it was patently obvious to both of them. “The only thing I can think to do is to find old maps of the city and compare yours against them.”

“And hope that we’re incredibly fortunate,” she added, sounding as though she might be on the verge of tears.

His heart twisted. One set of instincts urged him to wrap his arms around her and assure her that everything would turn out well. Another set fairly screamed in warning. He was caught up in this web because he hadn’t had the good sense to resist the carnal promise of a beautiful woman. Surrendering to the temptation of comforting a sweetly needy one wasn’t going to get him out of it.

Barrett softly cleared the lump from his throat and forced his mind back to his desk. “I’m certainly willing to entertain any other suggestions you might have.”

The only ideas consistently presenting themselves for consideration were those that, in all likelihood, Mignon had suggested before her. Irritated with her lack of self-control, Isabella frowned, turned, and started toward the windows overlooking the street, saying softly, “Lies to Cross, Park and Hyde. Lion’s Paw and Gentle Bride.”

Once a fair distance from the distraction of him, her mind relaxed and a possibility glimmered. “Could they be the names of pubs?” she posed, staring blindly at her reflection in the rippled window glass.

“They might be. But where? London? Liverpool? New York? Are they still standing? How many times have the names changed since the map was drawn?”

And how would they even begin to make a search for the answers? she wondered. “We need to find the two missing pieces. There must be something on them that made Mignon think it was a map of London. Why would she have come all this way otherwise?”

“Maybe she was on her way to somewhere else and was simply passing through the city. Lafitte was obviously of French descent. Paris could have been her ultimate destination.”

Isabella turned the notion over in her mind, knowing it was a logical one but sensing a flaw in it. “No,” she ventured after a long moment. “Mignon didn’t take rooms at an inn. She took them at a boardinghouse. She intended to stay in London.”

“Or,” he instantly countered, “it could be that, knowing she’d been followed, she took the boardinghouse rooms so that she’d be more difficult to find.”

“
If
she knew she was being followed. If I were worried about the possibility, I wouldn’t dine out three times a day and then attend a play in the evening.”

“A good point,” he conceded. “But then, you probably wouldn’t have left the theater with a perfect stranger, either. And you wouldn’t have torn your map into pieces, hidden them around his house, and then left them behind when you slipped away in the morning.”

“No, I wouldn’t have. So why did she?”

“I don’t know. She was your cousin. Why would she do those sorts of things?”

There was no rational reason to protect Mignon’s reputation. Aside from the fact Mignon hadn’t cared overly much about it while living, she was now past caring at all. And Barrett Stanbridge had to have had some realistic notion of the kind of woman Mignon was before he’d propositioned her at the theater.

“The dining out and the going to the theater…” Isabella supplied. “That was the way Mignon lived. So was spending the night with men she didn’t know.”

“And here I was thinking that I inspired her to embark on a brave new adventure,” he drawled. “I’m crushed, you know.”

Isabella grinned. Oh, yes, she could almost hear the devastation in his voice. Almost. Sobering, she considered the one part of the puzzle for which she had no ready answers. “But she had to have known she was in danger or she wouldn’t have hidden the map. So why didn’t she hide herself instead? Why was she willing to be such a public presence? It doesn’t make any sense. Not even for Mignon.”

“Well,” he said ruefully, “I must admit that—from the very beginning—she struck me as a woman who didn’t so much as breathe without having a larger plan for it.”

She looked over her shoulder to find him leaning against the edge of his desk and watching her, his arms still folded across his chest. “You’re very astute,” she offered.

His dark eyes sparkled as one corner of his mouth quirked up and he replied, “It’s an occupational skill. Most of the time I use it purely for show. It tends to impress the clients.”

Yes, she could see how people would feel confident in handing their problems to him. Nothing really seemed to deeply ruffle his composure and he had the most delightfully distracting smile. When he grinned like that …

Isabella freed her gaze and returned it to the calm haven of the window glass. Her mind slowly followed suit, allowing her to once again focus on the riddle Mignon had left for them to solve. “She was working with her half of the map. Which is why she didn’t put it in a bank vault as I have my half. The next logical question is why she chose to hide it here.”

“Perhaps it was a matter of first opportunity,” he posed. “Maybe no other man had made her an offer in the course of the day.”

Isabella couldn’t tell whether he was tossing out possibilities as a sort of devil’s advocate or because he truly thought the idea had genuine merit. “Mignon didn’t believe in being passive about invitations,” she explained as diplomatically as she could. “If she needed an opportunity, she created one. And I assure you that very few men ever declined to oblige her.”

“Then something or someone at the theater must have alarmed her.”

“Someone she recognized,” Isabella offered, thinking aloud. “Someone she wouldn’t have expected to see and whose presence could only be explained by the fact that he’d followed her from home, that he was the one who had tried to steal the map before.” She nodded slowly, accepting the fit of the pieces. It was right; the only way all of Mignon’s actions made any sort of sense. “Seeing him there made hiding the map an immediate necessity.”

And made him the marked man, Barrett wryly, silently added. He should have questioned his good fortune; he’d known just by looking at her that she was the scheming sort. But he hadn’t thought twice. No, he’d blithely offered her his arm, considered himself lucky in escaping his parents’ plans, and let himself be used. If she hadn’t been killed the next morning, no great harm would have come from his shortsightedness. But she had to have known that she’d be in danger the second she struck out on her own. If only she’d asked him to protect her. If only he’d looked past lust and …
If, if, if.

Barrett raked his fingers through his hair, shoved himself off the edge of his desk, and headed toward the credenza and the decanter set. “Would you care for a sherry?” he asked as he reached for a glass and the scotch.

“I’d prefer bourbon if you have any.”

Bourbon?
He grinned as he filled his glass. Part of him was utterly stunned that she’d so casually asked for hard liquor. Another part wasn’t the least bit surprised. “Whisky and gin are your only other choices,” he declared, getting her a glass. “Which poison will it be?”

“Whisky, please. Neat.”

Damn, a woman who not only consumed spirits, but didn’t want them watered down to do so. What a rarity. He filled her glass to the level of his own, wondering if she played cards, too. As a betting man, he’d wager that she did. And well. She’d be an unpredictable player, her mind running at full tilt as she chatted and smiled and bluffed her opponent down to his unmentionables.

Her game was poker, he decided as he met her at the midpoint of the room and handed her her glass. Barrett lifted his own in salute, saying, “To luck.”

“Wagonloads of it,” she countered, clinking her rim lightly against his. “We’re going to need it.”