The Wedding Night (20 page)

"She loved you, Jack. I would do the very same to protect my son if he were in danger."

There was the motherly sort for you. Missing the point entirely.

"I was thousands of miles from home with no idea where my family had gone. I sold my first nugget of gold and hired a law firm in
London
to find them, the best team I could afford."

"And you didn't hear anything at all?"

"It's been eighteen years. Nothing."

"That's very odd, Jack. And horribly sad." Her soft brow furrowed. "Has this firm checked parish registers in
Yorkshire
?"

"Repeatedly." A cool shiver of guilt rode Jack's neck—a recent memory of Mairey and her expert quest through the Tower, through the ancient records at
Donowell
, turning over every particle of evidence until she had found what she wanted.

He should have fired Dodson.

"There are so many other places to look, Jack. Have they inspected the emigration manifests? Ships leave every day for
America
,
Australia
."

Emigration?
He'd never thought of that and doubted that Dodson ever had or would.

"This is a law firm, Jack?" She was chewing on her lower lip, her gaze fixed on someplace different and glittering with her interminable tears.

"Dodson, Dodson and
Greel
." The bastards. One more year and then he'd get rid of them. The decision freed him some.

"Did these same lawyers clear your name, Jack?" She stood suddenly, and her robe loosened like a curtain, completely irresistible. "Or is the constable still looking for you?"

"I am reprieved, madam."
And failing madly for you
. Everlastingly. How could he ever let her go? Quitting breathing would be simpler, or stopping the tides.

"You bought off the legal system?"

"Absolutely." He laughed at himself, at the grubby coal miner turned peer, and it felt very, very good. "I was still in
Labrador
when I made the New Year's honors list of 1853—an appreciation of my financial contributions to the Empire, so the letter said." He felt better still when he lifted her into his arms, all seven, delectable stone of her, and started toward her room, and was damned pleased with
himself
when she began to nuzzle his neck.

"So I wrote to the lord chancellor informing him of my regrettable past legal difficulties, and he informed me by return packet, six months later, that my youthful offense had been permanently erased, that I was now Viscount Rushford, and would I be interested in the purchase of old
Drakestone
House, and three manors in Lincolnshire?"

"Ah, the royal white elephants."

"A whole herd of them." He was quaking again with desire for her, tempted to stay, to join her in her bed, to finish what they'd begun in the bath.

But beginnings were precious, delicate; they needed strategies and time to plan them.

She puckered a frown at him as he lowered her into her rumpled covers. "Are you leaving the inn, Jack?"

"No. It's two in the morning. I'm going to bed."

She pointed at him and gave an ungainly yawn. "But you've got your clothes on."

"Yes, madam, but I won't as soon as I'm back in my room." He dropped a kiss on her forehead.

"Ah." She was finally blushing, though he couldn't be sure it wasn't a heated flush. "I'm sorry about the bath. I won't do it again."

"Then
I'll
be sorry, Mairey Faelyn. To the end of my days." He closed the door, and listened for the click of the lock that never came.

Chapter 14

«
^
»

D
odson, Dodson and
Greel
.

Mairey felt another wring of guilt as she stood in front of the tarnished brass plaque that marked the law firm's chambers just off High
Holborn
.

She should have at least mentioned this visit to Jack. But he'd been absolutely closed about the subject of his missing family in the week since their return to
Drakestone
House, so she'd let the matter sink below the surface.

The girls had been so delighted to see Jack when he and Mairey had returned, they had run right past her and flung themselves into his arms,
Poppy
climbing to his shoulders as if she'd shinnied up his towering trunk every day of her life.

"We took good care of your fairies for you, Lord Jack!" She 'had the poor man by the ears, bending over to look him in the eye. "The green one's name is Wendell!"

"Wendell? Really?"

"Truly, sir."

If Mairey hadn't been so overwhelmed by the tears that glistened in the dark of Jack's eyes, by his bellowing laughter that rang through the lodge and the smacking kiss he'd put on Poppy's cheek, she might have felt spurned by their desertion. Instead, she was enchanted.

"Sumner helped us plant sweet peas, sir!" Anna waved a seed packet in front of Jack's face, and he'd done his best to follow its bobbing. "And snapdragons!"

"
Lookee
what I can do!" Caro had come zooming down the banister, on a squealing collision course with the floor. But Jack had plucked her out of the air and stood looking at Mairey helplessly, the giggling girl hanging from his hip like a sack of flour.

"Welcome home, Jack." He was just so very fine.

Her sister's hearts were big, and seemed to know by instinct that he needed their fierce hugs and sticky hand-holdings. Just as Mairey knew that he would lay down his life for them.

As he had done for his own sisters, for his dear mother. How sad that they didn't know how much he loved them, how long he'd stood by their memories. His father would have been so proud of him; his mother must have died inside when she'd sent her son away. Jack still didn't understand why he'd been denied the right to make good on his father's pledge, and probably wouldn't until he had children of his own.

Our children
—or they might have been, if this sorrowful tale had been destined to end happily.

No, she couldn't think that. It was selfish and dangerous.

Love was sacrifice, and knowing when to let go. Yet Mairey held more tightly every day to the man. She sought him out every morning, afraid of the stirring in her heart when she caught sight of his dark eyes. His grief and guilt about his lost family were so close to the surface that she wondered how she'd missed them before.

They'd had no more wild embraces, no tumultuous bathtub romps that left her breathless and wanting. And he'd made no more allusions to marriage. That had been a part of the fairy tale: another time, another land, another princess and her dragon.

But Jack was persistent, and he stole a kiss from her at least once a day, in the most bewitching way. He would catch her in the green
woods,
or against her desk in the library, in a carriage where she couldn't escape, or late at night in the lodge when it all felt so right.

But the kisses were hardly stolen from her: they were offered, given freely, begged for in her heart and tucked away for the bleak days when he was gone from her life.

She could at least do this one kindness for Jack before she found the
Willowmoon
Knot: investigate her suspicions of the Messrs. Dodson and
Greel
. If they had been fleecing Jack all these years, he might not be prepared to hear it. But neither could she let the unforgivable fraud continue. Whether he could see it or not, the man had set his heart aside for all those years, waiting to be loved again.

"So good of you to come, Miss Faelyn. Please sit down." Dodson senior and junior might have been twins if there hadn't been three decades between them.

"Thank you." Mairey sat down on the edge of the chair and smoothed her hands over the fine linen skirt of the suit Jack had ordered for her. She'd come home to a wardrobe full of new clothes and had argued against them, but she'd lost out to his logic.

For visits to Windsor, madam
. The scoundrel. She'd lost out to the rareness of the silk that felt like his skin had underwater. But mostly she'd succumbed to his roguish smile.

I'm starved for you, Mairey
, he'd said, and then kissed her deeply, sending her off in a great spiral of yearning.

"Now, then, miss, you've come on the recommendation of a Sir Harold Hayward, dean of
Galcliffe
College
?"

"Yes."
Hayward
's name had been the first to come to her mind when the lawyer's secretary had asked who had referred her. "Dean Hayward said that you'd done some investigative work for a relative of his. Though I'm afraid I can't recall the man's name. A professor at
Oxford
."

"
Oxford
…
Oxford
?
Hmmmm
…" The senior Dodson fiddled with the ends of his moustache for a moment and then brightened. "Ah, yes.
Blaine
, it was. I remember now. A baronet."

Liars! She'd never heard of an
Oxford
baronet named
Blaine
.

The younger scooted his chair closer: a well-turned fellow, classically handsome, but with too-regular edges—nowhere as compelling as the man who let Anna put a flower in his lapel every morning, and took extraordinary care to see that it wasn't crumpled by his day's work.

"How can we help you, Miss Faelyn?"

"What I want to know, gentlemen, is how you would go about finding someone that I have lost."

"Lost?" They were a pair of swivel-necked ravens, nodding at each other.

"It's very sad. You see, for reasons too painful for me to discuss in public, my father
emigrated
with me to
Australia
shortly after I was born, leaving my mother behind with my three little brothers." A family like Jack's mother and his three sisters, lost about the same time as his.

"A sad turn indeed," the elder Dodson said, leaning back in his chair, weaving his fingers together over his sunken chest.

Warming to her performance, Mairey continued. "Now that my father has passed on, I would like to find my mother and my siblings. They're the only family I have."

"Not even betrothed, Miss Faelyn?" Young Dodson was affecting a rakish brow; God knew what was going on behind those overly blue eyes. Biology, no doubt.

"Not even a betrothed," Mairey said, patting her belt purse. "But I have money enough to retain your firm for as long as you require." She leaned forward. "How long would that be?"

"Well, Miss Faelyn," the younger said, rising like a judge and striding toward the bookcase, his hands clasped behind him, "the duration of our search depends entirely upon how detailed the information is that you give us."

"What sort of information?"

"Dates of birth, place of birth, wedding,
uhm
…"

"
Emmigration
records?"

Obviously a new thought. "Yes, very good."

"What other records do you investigate?"

"Well, uh … many."

"And do you examine these records yourselves?"

"Well … no. That is, not usually. You see, our firm deals primarily in wills and estates. We have an operative who investigates claims against inheritance."

"And looks for lost relatives when he has the time?"

"
Er
, yes, but of course he will make time for this," the older Dodson assured her hastily.

"And what is your success rate, gentlemen?"

"Good."

"
Excellent
, Miss Faelyn."

Blue
ballocks
! The Messrs. Dodson, Dodson, and
Greel
couldn't find their collective hat if it were nailed to their collective wooden heads. Damn them all to the very hottest part of hell.

"You've been most informative." Mairey steadied her outrage and stood. She offered her hand, grateful for her deer-skin gloves, which kept Junior Dodson's fingers from touching hers.

"We shall await your business with the greatest anticipation, Miss Faelyn. Shall we say next week?"

Say anything you like, sir
. "Next week it is."

Mairey plunged down the steps and out into High
Holborn
. She'd never in her life met a more cruel and insensitive pair. "Bastards!"

Her explosion brought a scowl from a knot of frock coats standing nearby. But she was so near the Inns of Court that the sight of a cursing client bowling out of a law chamber was no doubt as regular as the
5:12
from
Dover
.

Dear Jack, what they've done to you!
Her skin was boiling; she wanted to scream and weep. He had unknowingly hired a company of buffoons. They knew nothing about emigration registries, or shipping manifests, or factory lists; and they employed an operative who treated Jack's case no better than a hobby!

May their bones turn to salt! They'd stolen eighteen long and unimaginably lonely years from Jack. From a man who needed all the family, all the love, he could find.

He was so very easy to love—her sisters had fallen for him immediately, and
Tattie
.

And me
. Stunned, Mairey sat down hard on a bench to await a hackney.

I love him
. It was true! She loved that he had engineered the daring rescue at Glad Heath, and that the people there thought him a prince; she loved that honey made him weep; that when he looked at her she imagined suckling his milk-scented babies and sliding her mouth across his lips.

She loved him, plain and simple … oh, and as complex as the dance of the stars and the moon.

Impossible.

She wished he'd never come looking for the
Willowmoon
; wished he had taken no for an answer and gone about his treasure hunting on another hill, in another glade, another heart. Not
hers!

She didn't dare let her thoughts wander about
Drakestone
, the home he'd so grandly made for her family. For they came to rest always with Jack and all the happiness that could never be.

She owed him his sisters and his mother, and she would stand by him whatever the news. But she would keep her search a secret from him, for the sake of his pride and his fragile expectations. To raise them and then dash them would only cause him more grief and guilt, and he'd had too much of that in his life.

She'd discovered from Jack that the heinous Sir Cahill had owned a foundry in
Manchester
. It was a leap of logic to think that Claire Rushford might have gone there looking for work after her dear husband was killed, but it was a start.

And Jack had waited long enough.

* * *

"To the left, Sumner, old man! Paddle to the left!"

"You're in the back, Rushford, sir. You're supposed to be steering!" Sumner missed a frenetic stroke and sheeted pond water back into Jack's face.

"Oh, gad!" Jack swabbed a stringy weed off his face with his shirtsleeves,
then
went back to paddling.

The girls were squealing at them from the bank-side, jumping like wind-up toys.

"You're wet, Lord Jack!"

"Look! I found a salamander!"

"I can swim
good
!
C'n
I show you?"

"Don't you dare,
Caro!
" They were muddy from stem to stern. Mairey might be amused when she returned from London and saw the mess—she was ever the one to break the rules—but Aunt
Tattie
was going to skin him alive.

A duck house. Why the devil had he promised to install one in the middle of the pond?

"It's gonna be
the
bestest
duck house in the whole world, Lord Jack!"

That was the reason. Home and hearth and duck ponds. Bless them all. Hope had always frightened him, made him feel weak and unworthy, yet here he was, filled with the stuff, and aching to begin a life together with Mairey. He'd come to the conclusion that marriage was the answer.

"Careful, sir! We're tipping." Sumner was paddling furiously.

He really should have called in
Richmond
to help in the engineering. "Don't move, Sumner."

The little boat was sitting dangerously low in the water, loaded to its gunwales with rocks that would, in a very few nautical yards, become the foundations for
Duck
Island
, the home of the
Drakestone
drakes.