Secrets of Surrender (21 page)

“How far has this claim on the property gone, Mr. Yardley?”

The land might be taken soon. She and Irene could lose the home they had known all their lives. They would be uprooted from that soil as surely as plants after the harvest. She had not let herself think about that when a sale meant helping Tim, but now the full implications pained her heart.

Memories came to her, dozens of them, of happy times and sad ones. Of her older brother Ben announcing that he was buying into a bank where he would work in turn, stepping down in the world so they all could live better in the end. Of Tim as a child climbing that apple tree in the garden and pelting her with small fruit when she tried to follow. Of lying on that hill and feeling so dangerously free for an hour.

Of Kyle kissing her for the first time in an unexpected, bold reach across the formalities and differences that separated them.

“Other than the lien itself, it does not appear that any further steps have been taken. It just sits there, much as Lord Hayden’s did. However, it also prevents any sale.”

She turned to face him. He was standing, as was his clerk.

“If this new lien just sits there, perhaps the person who makes this claim can be convinced to remove it. As you can see from my brother’s letter, his situation could become serious if I do not send him these funds.”

Mr. Yardley was too polite to respond but his eyes said it all. Tim in a serious situation would not sadden anyone but his closest relatives. “I think that it is unlikely that the lien will be withdrawn. They are not filed capriciously.”

“I must try, nonetheless. I understand that this service does not appeal to you, sir. I will attempt to do it myself. Please write down the name of this creditor for me. I will write to him, or ask Lord Hayden to do so for me.”

He hesitated. Then he looked at his clerk and nodded. The clerk picked up his pen, bent over his desk, and jotted.

The clerk folded the paper and brought it to her. She tucked it in her reticule and took her leave.

Once in the dry confinement of her carriage she plucked the paper out again. She pushed back the curtain for light and unfolded the note.

She immediately understood Mr. Yardley’s ill ease and circuitous explanations.

She stared dumbfounded at the name of the person whose lien now interfered with the sale of that property.

Mr. Kyle Bradwell.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

K
yle’s visitor left with a signed agreement in hand but none too pleased by its terms. The first result had been assured from the moment the man walked in the door. The latter had resulted from an unexpected determination that gripped Kyle during the negotiations.

Normally he would have sacrificed a few pounds in exchange for a pleasant farewell. Today, however, he had not viewed this purveyor of timber with equanimity. The negotiations had become a game that Kyle was determined to win, not end in a draw.

He watched the door of his business offices close. The paper that had just walked out represented a lot of money. That timber would be coming from Norway. Maybe it had been a draw after all.

He slid out of his frock coat and laid it on a chair. He found it harder now to hide himself on the edges of this new world in which he lived and worked. A vitality had reclaimed him, one that did not like how he had been swallowing his natural character.

Rose had brought this about. He felt like himself again when he was with her. Even in his own thoughts, in his reflections and plans, he had constructed walls and limitations these last years. In attempting to hide the fact that he did not belong, he had lost hold on who he was.

He stood over his desk and looked down on the paper that held the bones of the new agreement. He set it aside and glanced at a page of notes he had made this morning. They roughly charted extraordinary ideas. Daring. Audacious. The kind of ideas that had come in torrents when he was younger. He had not released that side of his character since his first year back from France.

Rose seemed to like the self he was. She appeared to approve of the hybrid man that past and present had created.

The notes faded and he saw only her. He remembered her this morning as dawn broke, her silken hair streaming over his arm and her warmth pulsing into him with her heartbeat. Her beauty mesmerized him as it always had, but it was not some distant woman now stealing his breath. It was not even the lovely lady who had traded her life and the rights to her body in a bid for redemption.

More images came. Erotic ones but also those in which desire played little role. Simple details had branded his brain. The curve of her face in the light of her Oxfordshire garden. Her hand lifting a fork. Little glimpses of beauty and grace popped into his mind all the time. Perhaps he had pressed the lumber seller with such determination because anything less forceful would have dissolved into daydreams about Roselyn.

She surprised him again and again. Not only in bed. That was just a reflection of the other changes between them. He had not expected much of anything in this marriage, least of all from her. He certainly had not anticipated the joy that her company brought him.

She was calling on Alexia today. He wondered if she had returned home yet.

If he went to her right now she would never let him know if he interfered with her day. Maybe she would even put her plans aside and lure him back into the raging desire and seismic fulfillment where he both lost and rediscovered himself.

Perhaps—

A sound from the outer room disturbed his happy thoughts. He walked over and opened the connecting door.

Roselyn paced there, as if summoned by his contemplation of her. Her steps sounded in rhythmic thuds on the wooden floor. She glanced at the scrivener’s podium, then at the door where he stood. She stopped walking and just looked at him.

Something was wrong. It affected her posture and the tilt of her head. It had sounded in those steps. The sparking, brittle lights in her eyes made it clear that his soft, sweet wife was very, very angry.

“I have not been here before,” she announced, as if to answer a challenge that he had no interest in making. “I was in the City and thought that I would visit you.”

“I am glad that you did. If I knew you were curious, I would have brought you here before.”

“Where is your clerk? Is he in there?”

“I do not use one. I write my own letters, and my solicitor ensures that any indentures are composed accurately.”

The thin line of her mouth was too sardonic to be called a real smile. “They are useful in many ways, solicitors.”

“Won’t you come in? There are chairs in here.”

She hesitated, then allowed him to usher her into his office.

She walked around, taking in the views from the windows and the measure of the chamber. Her slow, perceptive gaze noticed the jewel-toned carpet, the mahogany furniture, the tall cases for books and the big, shallow drawers for maps.

“It is very tasteful. Like a men’s club, I would guess. Or a Mayfair library. Unexceptional but also unobjectionable. Like your coats.”

He heard no sympathy in her assessment. This was not the woman in Teeslow who had comprehended better than he had the reasons behind the mold he had adopted. This was a woman who now implied those careful choices were deceptions and calculations. Since they partly were, he was not insulted.

He threw some fuel on the fire. “It is damp and you should warm yourself. Did you visit with Alexia today? Before you came to the City?”

She positioned herself by the fire. “Yes. She is full of plans for me and Irene. She is too good.”

The fire cast a golden glow on her face. For a few seconds, while he watched the way that warmth brightened her eye and flushed her perfect skin, he forgot that her arrival was unusual and that she was angry about something.

She turned to face him fully. “I did not come here because I was curious about these chambers or your business affairs. I should have been. Just as I should have been more curious about your family and about your past. I have been guilty of a terrible self-absorption in my recent life, always seeing events in terms of me, not others. The truth is that I am so insignificant that even matters that touch on me are actually about other, more important things.”

“While no event or action is isolated in its reason or result, you are wrong in saying that you are insignificant.”

“I wonder.”

She did. He saw skepticism in her gaze. She wondered about
him.

“Kyle, I always assumed that all of Tim’s victims, all the bank clients who had seen losses, were made whole. You said as much. Even your aunt and uncle.”

“That is true. They all were.”

“But not all of them received restitution from Lord Hayden, did they?”

“No, he was not bled by everyone.”

“Bled? No one asked for that money from him.”

“He bled all the same.”

She absorbed that. Kyle knew they would not speak of it. The costs to Lord Hayden were an inconvenient, uncomfortable truth.

“I expect that most of those people were very angry, Kyle. Taking Lord Hayden’s money would require that they give up that anger. It would have no anchor once they were repaid. Is that why you did not take it?”

So that was what this was about. “Did Alexia tell you about this? That I would not take her husband’s money?”

“No.”

But someone had. Or else Rose had figured it out herself. He could not imagine how. “Pru and Harold were the victims, not me. I was the trustee, however. I could not accept Lord Hayden’s offer. I do not understand how anyone could. It was not his crime.”

“They could because they wanted their money back, Kyle. The only cost of getting it was to release the anger and to ignore the crime. What did you do instead? Replace the funds for them? Once more invest your own money in the trust?”

“I had a responsibility to them. My poor judgment in banks caused the loss. Of course I ensured they did not lose it.”

“They would not have lost it if you had allowed Lord Hayden to make up the loss. I think you did not because then you would have no excuse for seeking revenge.”

There was a good dose of truth in that. Kyle recognized it now. At the time he had not. In any event, Rose was touching on matters that he could never explain in ways she would accept or understand.

She walked up to him until she stood very close. She peered into his eyes with a curious, questioning gaze. She examined a stranger. “You are no Hayden Rothwell. I daresay twenty thousand would make
you
blink. I think much less would.”

“I blinked long and hard, Rose. I am still blinking.”

“Except that you found a way to cease blinking, I think. If not today, then soon enough.”

Her natural grace and poised demeanor barely held in a fury that blazed through her, visible only in her tight expression and piercing, hot gaze.

He saw something else too. The subtle hardness that he had glimpsed when he first met Rose had returned. She had again donned the armor of pride that had allowed her to survive her family’s ruin and her enforced poverty and isolation.

He reached for her, to draw her closer. To embrace her so that wherever this argument led, it did not take her too far away.

She pivoted and strode beyond his touch. “You are very good, Kyle. No wonder you have been successful. You admit to nothing. You do not speak at all, lest it put you at a disadvantage.”

“I assume that you will explain what has unsettled you so much. I am waiting for you to tell me.”

“Unsettled?
Unsettled?
That is a fine word for it.” Her words sliced across the chamber. She closed her eyes briefly while she found her composure again. “I learned about my family’s property in Oxfordshire today. I know that you have made a claim against it.”

“How did you learn that?”

“How? I discover a duplicity that I never expected, and all you wonder is how?” She began pacing. Her fury flew. His own had begun rising with her revelation too.

“When did you do this, Kyle? After that first visit you made? You examined that house and sized up the land most thoroughly that day. You asked if it was a freehold. Stupid me, I thought you asked as a concerned friend. As my knight in shining armor. You were only calculating your potential gain.”

“That is not true, damn it.”

“You
knew
it was my brother’s. Only I did not know that you were the one creditor who in fact had never truly been repaid. Dear heavens, you even checked the soil to see if it had more value as farms than turned into new estates—”

“
How
did you find out about this?”

She ignored him. Her eyes widened in shock. “Oh, my, I even gave you the name of another man who would buy it all if you could not be bothered to build those estates yourself. You misled me most ignobly. You used me.”

That did it. He strode over and pulled her into his arms. She squirmed in resistance but he held her firmly. She glared up at him.

A memory came to him, of teeth bared to fend off an assault.

“Let me go, Kyle.”

“Soon. You will listen to me first. Yes, I made a claim against that property.”

His admission did nothing for her temper. She twisted for release, petulantly, like a confined cat.

He held her still. “I do not intend to take it. I never did. I made the claim so no one else could, either. And also so it could not be sold.”

She froze. Her eyes met his.

“How did you learn about my lien, Rose?”

“The family solicitor informed me.”

“He would only look into it if you asked. So you must have asked. Why? Were you thinking of selling it somehow, and going to Timothy anyway?” The very notion had his mind howling with primitive, ferocious assertions of eternal possession.

“Of course not.” Realization cleared her surprised frown. “Is that why you did it? To make sure that I never could go to him? You warned I would not, whether we married or not.”

“Short of asking your cousin for the money, it was the only way you might be able to find the funds for such a journey.”

“I said I would not go to him. I married you, didn’t I? I am not so dishonest or so stupid as to make a promise and a marriage and then run away to an uncertain future with my brother.”

She seemed to find some inner calm from her logical explanation.

He did not. If she had not been trying to sell the land for her own purposes, that meant she had someone else’s purposes in mind.

They looked in each other’s eyes and it was all there—the joy of the last two weeks, and the knowledge that they would never be as free together again. He could tell that she knew his question was coming even before he asked it. He felt her body brace against his arms.

“You have received mail from him again, haven’t you? He asked you to sell the land. That is why you spoke with the solicitor.”

Her nod was not demure. Her gaze still held enough heat to challenge him.

She had disobeyed him. That was the least of the urgent conclusions that lined up with swordlike sharpness in his head.

Not only had Rose had contact with her brother, but also she had taken steps on his behalf that could be traced. If anyone wanted to name her as an accomplice, she had just given that person a piece of evidence to make the accusation more plausible.

Kyle emerged from his desperate assessment to find her looking at him with an expression of curiosity and worry. He instinctively held her tighter in reaction to the danger potentially waiting.