Secrets of Surrender (22 page)

She misunderstood. Her face fell in astonishment, as if the embrace had become dangerous.

He released her and moved away. He looked out the window so he would not have to look at her. He did not want her to see anything else that might frighten her.

“Your carriage is back, Rose. The coachman is done walking the horses. You should go now, while there is still plenty of light. I will walk you down.”

They did not speak on the way to the carriage. She walked beside him like a queen, her posture declaring her pride and position. Her eyes appeared a little moist when he handed her into the carriage, but her anger showed more clearly.

He would do what he could about both the tears and the anger soon. Right now he needed to find out if her disobedience had made her vulnerable.

He closed the door of the carriage and looked in the window. “Burn his letter when you get home. Tell no one else that you received it. If asked, lie. You never saw it. You do not know where he is. Do you understand? Do not disobey me this time.”

Her distant expression melted. She suddenly appeared so sad and dismayed that he wanted to climb in there and soothe her.

“I cannot burn it. It contains a proxy for our solicitor, and he kept it.”

Damnation. Kyle signaled the coachman to move, then walked in the direction of that solicitor’s office, calculating what he needed to do now, and what he needed to learn, and whether the day might come when he would have to trade Timothy Longworth’s neck for Roselyn’s freedom.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

R
ose did not see Kyle again that day. He had not returned to the house by the time she retired. She lay alone in her bed for hours, trying not to listen for the sounds of his step in the corridor or the dressing room next door.

She remained angry enough that she was certain she did not want him coming to her, but she also worried about their argument and his stormy reaction to that letter from Timothy.

Kyle’s anger had been too extreme for the small disobedience. Too big, too fast, too focused. After a few hours of reflection she realized that he had not really been angry about the disobedience at all. His command at the end, and the way he strode away—his anger had been born of worry, not male pique with an errant wife.

If so, what worried him? Something important. The man she knew did not release his determination for small matters. So far she had mostly seen him do so regarding her brother. But if Kyle was bent on revenge, he would not have commanded her to burn the letter with the proof of Tim’s current abode. Instead he would have insisted that she hand it over.

He had not done so. He had not even asked the name of that town from where the letter was sent.

She finally slept, fitfully. On rising the next morning she learned that Kyle had come home late but left again early. Unable to settle into anything that could distract her, she paced the house, then called for the carriage at midday. She had the coachman take her to Hyde Park. There she set off on a long walk.

That helped relieve her restlessness, but did nothing for the sick dread sitting in her stomach. Her entire spirit waited for bad news. She expected their next meeting to be more formal than any they had ever had. She wondered if she could live in a marriage full of practicalities and chilled reserve after briefly knowing more.

After an hour of aimless wandering, she turned and retraced her steps on the park paths. She saw a horse trotting toward her. The man in the saddle rode tall and straight. His garments, his command of the animal, his posture—everything appeared precisely correct.

As he neared she saw the blue eyes that never failed to compel her attention, and the depths that they revealed if one looked into them. She sensed the vitality that affected the air, and the way he controlled his strength lest it be squandered or used for ill purposes.

The knot in her stomach rose. She both feared this meeting and wanted it with impatient anticipation. They had parted so poorly yesterday.

Kyle pulled the horse up beside her and looked down. He dismounted. “We need to talk about yesterday, Roselyn.”

She wished his presence comforted her, but it really did not. She remembered walking beside him on the lane near Watlington the first time he called. Just like then, he fell into step with her and led his horse.

That had been a very pleasant stroll compared to this one. The echoes of yesterday shot like a million invisible arrows between them.

“Are you going to scold?” she asked. She wished he would, if it would remove the distance between them.

“Perhaps. First I am going to explain.” He turned those blue eyes on her. “I should have earlier.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“If I had, you would have declined my proposal. You badly wanted to. You were looking for a reason and my explanation would have given you one. You would have lied to yourself that escaping this life for another on the Continent was the only future worth having. It was what you wanted to believe.”

“How generous of you to save me from myself.”

“I wanted you, Roselyn. I saved you for
myself.
”

Wanted her. Wanted a thing of beauty, a possession forbidden by his birth. She could not blame him for that. She had known the motives behind that proposal.

“You were correct yesterday,” Kyle said. “In part I did not take restitution from Lord Hayden because refusing it allowed me to hold on to the anger and justified a hunger for revenge. I called it justice, but I admit the anger made it something else. I told myself that at least I did not take his money and still seek revenge the way others did.”

She stopped walking and looked at him. She prayed his eyes would reflect something to negate the implications of his last two words.

“Others?”

“At least eight that I know of. A small group of men who do not accept Lord Hayden’s notions of justice. They have an agent following your brother on the Continent, with the intention of bringing him back to England.”

The sick sensation inside her spread. It invaded her heart, making it heavy with dread. “I do not understand why they go to such efforts. To embark on such a quest when the loss has been rectified—” The full meaning of his revelation sliced into her. “An agent—Tim will never escape. He lacks that kind of guile—”

Her mind scrambled through thoughts too sad and desperate to speak. “You were right. If I had known about this, I could not have stayed here. I would have had to try to help him. I could have found him a safe place to live and a way to hide. He will never manage it himself.”

“Then I am very glad that I did not tell you. You would have thrown away your life, and maybe even your freedom.”

She gazed over the parkland, so empty now. So very cold. Her thoughts calmed enough to sort through them. “Who are these men who are so determined to snare my brother?”

“Norbury is one.”

Dear heavens. But then, his use of her had already been an effort for a kind of revenge. He had said as much at that auction.

“Who else?”

“Prideful men. Lords. Men of finance. Merchants…The sort who could lose enough to matter. The kind who would care that Timothy played them for fools.”

His sober, firm words made her heart beat hard. “Men who would still blink at losing twenty thousand, though. Men like you.”

He met her gaze squarely. “Men like me.”

“You astonish me. You proposed to me even while you sought to see my brother hanged? Did you intend to watch to see if you could learn his whereabouts from my mail and—”

“It was suggested. I told you to destroy all the mail, remember? Once we married I was out of it. However, that might have been a mistake.”

“A mistake!” A horrible idea shot through her gathering dismay. “That solicitor. The letter. You went there after I left yesterday, didn’t you? You learned the town’s name, and his assumed name, and you have now given it to Norbury and the others—”

Kyle gripped her arms gently and forced her to look in his eyes. “No, I have not. But everything I have done since you left my City chambers yesterday has been to protect you. You. Not him. I do not seek his head, Rose. I do not want revenge or even justice anymore, because it would bring you pain. But if the choice is ever between you and him, I will not let you suffer when you are innocent and he is not.”

She was beyond words. She did not know whether to weep or scream.

He took her in his arms and she was too lost to object. Warmth flowed to her, and sympathy, and a subtle sadness that only made her frightened.

“There is more, isn’t there?” she whispered. “You did not follow me today to confess. You came to warn me about something.”

Kyle kept his arm around her back so she was close to him while they strolled forward. “I ask that you listen to me, darling. I will explain everything.”

Rose remained shaky within his vague embrace. Her face went lax while she absorbed his tale of the men who wanted her brother. Kyle did not spare himself. Had he not thrown in with Norbury and the others at the start, he would have avoided the hellish decision that might face him soon.

“If I had not removed myself, I would have at least known how things stand,” he explained. “Yesterday I sought out one of the others and learned easily enough, however.”

Her lids lowered, as though one more blow would not surprise her now. “How do they stand?”

He hated telling her. Hated it. “They heard from Royds, their agent. The letter was written weeks ago. He was in Tuscany then. Royds knows Timothy is in the region and using the name Goddard.”

“He will find him, you mean. Perhaps he already has.”

Perhaps. The only good part of that discovery was it meant no one could demand that Rose give over the information herself or that her husband force it out of her, the way Norbury had wanted.

Still, the threat to accuse her of being an accomplice still hung there. There would be no gain from it now, most likely, unless Royds was frustrated in his attempts to track Longworth in all those small Tuscan towns.

“Why did you care so much about the solicitor and Tim’s letter?” Her spirit had been bludgeoned, but her mind had not dulled. “If you were removed from it, if you did not want to know his name and town, why did you react so hard when you learned about it?”

He had come here to tell her everything. To give her the total honesty that she had requested the day she met him in Regent’s Park. He gazed at her distress and weighed what total honesty really meant in a situation like this.

There may be no danger now. If Royds found Longworth on his own, no one would be threatening to name Rose as an accomplice.

“I saw him and demanded that he burn that letter. I said that I would not remove the lien, so the proxy is worthless. It is best destroyed, Rose, so no one knows that you received word of his whereabouts.”

“Did he burn it?”

“I watched it go in the fire.”

That seemed to reassure her. More than it probably ought, but she was too sad and unsettled to parse through the words and see the holes.

Yardley had indeed burned the letter, but only after Kyle himself had read it. And even with the letter gone, Yardley knew it had been written and sent to Roselyn Longworth. Solicitors were sworn to discretion in their clients’ affairs, but if pressed there was no telling if Yardley would keep his silence about the ongoing communication between Roselyn and her criminal brother.

A sword hung over Rose. She felt its edge aiming down.

A sad little ritual began her days. She would relinquish the comfort of Kyle’s embrace when he left her near dawn. She would not sleep much after that. Finally she would go below where he read his mail and papers in the morning room, steeling herself with every step.

She performed the ritual the morning of the dinner party that she would attend at Alexia’s. The notion of dressing for that party, of pretending gaiety and grace, made her nauseated.

She refused coffee or food. Kyle slid the papers toward her. “Nothing.”

Her relief left her limp. She eyed his stack of mail. Nothing in any of that, either, she assumed.

“One day there will be something,” she said.

“We do not know that for certain.”

Of course they did.

Rose pictured Timothy wandering through that Italian town, his sandy hair marking him as English as surely as his language did, foolishly using the same assumed name that he had adopted upon fleeing. She had checked a map and discovered that Prato was not very big and not far at all from Florence.

Royds would most likely find Tim without any trouble at all.

When he did, and Tim was brought back and information laid down, and he was publicly named as a thief, and tried and found guilty—

“Do not dwell on it, darling.”

She looked up. He knew where her thoughts were going.

It would affect him too. His tenuous position, maybe even his success with those estates in Kent, would be damaged by his association with such a big fraud. He never spoke of that. He acted as if it did not matter that his tainted prize of a wife might set him back by many, many years.

That pained her. A good deal of her heartsickness derived from picturing Kyle badly hurt by this marriage rather than helped.

“When do you think you will be leaving for Alexia’s dinner?” he asked.

“Nine o’clock. Thereabouts. I do not really want to go.”

“Once you are there you will enjoy it. You cannot sit in this house waiting, Rose. Since we cannot foresee the future, we should live as we want and expect the best.”

There was truth in that advice. Only she was not sure this party was how she wanted to live her life, even if it was supposed to be.

“I will do my best to make Alexia proud.”
And you too, Kyle.
For all the wanting that led him into this match, he had not had much cause for pride. “Perhaps, if we are going to expect the best, we could host our own dinner soon. One where we entertain some of your friends. I would not like us to forever live in separate circles and different worlds.”

His expression altered slightly. For the smallest instant she thought she glimpsed surprise, even dismay.

“If you like, we can do that.” He stood and leaned over to kiss her. “I will be sure to be here to see you off. You will astonish them all, Rose, just as you have always astonished me.”

“So, you are finally free to see your old friend Jean Pierre. Your lady goes her way, and you go yours, as married life was meant to be.” Jean Pierre offered the slightly inebriated assessment while he lazily eyed the cards on the table in front of him.