Miss Westlake's Windfall (8 page)

Tess, predictably, wanted to paint him. “For when Sebastian vanquishes the evil kraken to rescue his princess. Where are my pastel crayons? Or should I use watercolors? Don’t move, Charlie, and don’t fade.”

Chas fixed his eye, the one that was not swollen and lurid enough to send Tess into transports, on Leo, who decided that perhaps he had overstayed his welcome.

“Oh, no, Mr.—Captain—Botheration, Leo. I am not done with the sketch.” Tess saw that he already had his hat and gloves. “Or you’ll simply have to come back.”

Ada and Chas chorused “No,” with Jane rousing herself enough to add an echoing denial. The last thing Jane needed was for some adventurer to encourage Tess in her artistry. The captain would already be sure to tell the world what an odd household they had at Westlake Hall. Then too, if Viscount Ashmead was back to calling, they did not need any jumped-up fisherman on their doorstep, much less a smuggler.

Ignoring all the others, Leo looked toward Tess. “Ma’am?”

“I need you for the painting. You will return, won’t you, sir?”

“Aye,” Leo said with a smile, a bow to the ladies, and a wink toward his lordship.

Ada walked him out while Tess hunted for her drawing pad and Chas assured Jane that he looked worse than he felt.

“You know, Mr. Tobin,” Ada began softly as they reached the door, where Cobble waited to see the caller on his way, “my sister is not like other women.”

“Aye, she’s an artist. Never known a real painter before, nor a poet.”

“And I daresay she has never known a smuggler before. Still, her emotions and enthusiasms ...”

“Be you warning me off, ma’am?”

Ada blushed. “I am not my sister’s keeper, Mr. Tobin. It’s just that her reputation is already so ... so...”

“Squirrelly?”

She nodded. “Nuttier than a whole forest full of squirrels. I should not want to see her laughed at or belittled.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Miss Ada, though your protectiveness does you credit. I’d never hurt the lady.”

Ada looked into his eyes and saw honesty there. The smuggler had brought back the money, too, so perhaps he could be trusted with her sensitive sister. She was almost confident of his motives, morals, and mental state, until he added, “Besides, no one will laugh at Miss Westlake when our opera is a success.”

* * * *

“Leo Tobin is not a proper person for you to be entertaining, dash it.”

“How dare you act rudely lo a guest in my house, sirrah. You have absolutely no right to be telling me who or who not to see. Besides, who are you to be criticizing me for the company I keep, Lord Lowlife? I’m not the one who was mauled about in an alehouse brawl with a bunch of foxed sailors and out-of-work fishermen.”

Jane fled the room. Tess was already gone, mixing colors in her attic studio. Ada and Chas were alone in the parlor, squared off like prizefighters at opposite corners. She had her hands on her hips, he had a glass in his good hand.

“I was not in any tavern fight. I fell off my horse, confound it.”

“Hah, a likely tale. You’d have to have been tossed off down the side of a mountain, then been rolled on by the horse, to look the way you do. Besides, you have not fallen off a horse since you were twelve and took out your father’s stallion without permission. Even then you were hurt worse by the beating you got than by the fall. Moreover, the egg man’s sister’s husband was there that night and he saw you in the rowdy melee. At least you don’t have a missing tooth, like he does.” Ada took a step or two closer to look at his poor face. “Does it hurt?”

“Not at all,” Chas lied.

She came closer still. “And your arm?”

Chas had done without the sling today so he could drive his curricle, but he was holding the tightly wrapped wrist stiffly. Now he wriggled his still swollen fingers. “Not broken.”

“Well, if you expect me to feel guilty about your injuries,” Ada said with a sniff, “you can just think again.”

Chas took a sip of his wine. “Why the deuce should you feel guilty when I was the gudgeon?”

“Jane says that I drove you to drink, and her uncle says that you started the fight to restore your manly pride.”

“Since when do you hold credit with anything Jane and her uncle say? They utter a great many remarkably foolish things, as you well know. Where is the pride in getting beaten bloody? Furthermore, I did not start any fight. I fell off my horse, which was no more your fault than the man in the moon’s. In fact, had the moon been brighter, I might not have lost my footing, er, seat.”

“You are just saying that to make me feel better.”

“What, first I am trying to make you feel guilty and now I am trying to make you feel better? I take it all back, Ada; trying to follow your reasoning is enough to make any man take up the bottle.”

“Then you
are
blaming me!” Her eyes were suspiciously damp.

Chas almost poured himself another glass of wine, but thought better of it. “No, I am my own man. No one drives me to do anything I don’t want,” he lied again. This woman drove him to distraction, constantly. Like now, when she flashed him a sudden smile, going from storm clouds to sunny day in an instant.

“Then you aren’t angry at me anymore, either?”

He had to smile back. “Not if you aren’t still mad at me.”

“I am too glad you came to remember why I was so furious. I was going to write you a note if you hadn’t called soon, apologizing for calling you a jackass.”

“I came to apologize for calling you a turnip-head.”

“I like donkeys.”

“I like turnips.”

“Friends?” Ada held her hand out.

Chas sighed inside, but he took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Friends.” It was something, anyway. “I missed you.” More than he missed using his left hand, or his right eye.

Comfortable with each other once more, they sat down to share the last apple tarts. Between bites, Chas said, “I do have to warn you, Ada, just as a friend, mind, that Leo Tobin really is not the kind of person you should encourage. I realize some women might be attracted by his reputation, excited by the threat of danger, and they might even find him good-looking, in a rugged, weathered kind of way. I suppose he dresses well, and his manners are passable, but, dash it, he is a smuggler!”

“But a very pleasant smuggler.”

“There is no such thing as a pleasant smuggler, by Jupiter, for he would not last long at the trade. I saw the liberties Tobin was taking. No honorable man would have behaved in so ... so warm a manner.”

“Mr. Tobin was only trying to humor Tess. You know how intractable she can be when an inspiration strikes her.”

“Petting the calf,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“He was playacting for Tess so he could impress you. Everyone knows how you dote on your sister.”

“Why, Charles Harrison Ashford, I do believe you are jealous!”

“Of an outlaw? Do not be absurd.” If he were any more jealous, Chas feared, his already discolored skin would turn green, so green that he felt no qualms whatsoever in blackening Leo’s already shady reputation. “You and I are supposed to be friends, are we not? Well, friends look out for each other. I simply do not want to see you taken in by such a scurvy knave.”

“Mr. Tobin seemed everything decent to me, and I did not feel that his kindness to Tess was a sham at all. He seemed quite gentle, almost shy, in fact.”

Chas set his earthenware plate down with a force that would have shattered the fragile porcelain tea set, if it hadn’t been sold months ago. “The man is a blasted free trader! Think of your brother, for heaven’s sake.”

“I am thinking of my sister, for her own sake. You know, it is odd how you have taken Mr. Tobin in such dislike. He speaks quite fondly of you, as if you were as close as brothers.”

“We are brothers, dash it! Unacknowledged, of course, as Leo was born on the wrong side of the blanket. I thought everyone knew.”

“My parents might have known, but no one tells young girls things like that.” Ada paused to take in this new revelation. The idea of the starched-up Viscountess Ashmead having an illicit relationship was too farfetched to consider, so Leo must be a product of the notoriously profligate Geoffrey Ashford, Chas’s father. Now that she thought about it, the similarities in appearance of the two men to each other and to the late viscount’s portrait were even more striking. She should have seen the relation for herself. Anyone could. If anyone could, then Lady Ashmead must. “Good heavens, does your mother know Leo is your father’s ... child?” Ada could not bring herself to call Tess’s new friend a bastard, or even a by-blow.

“Of course, Mother knows. She has always known. That’s why she won’t let Leo in the house, and won’t visit any home he’s welcomed at. She shut every door she could to him, and I’ve had the devil’s own time opening them since I came into the title, I can tell you that.”

“Which must be why your brother thinks so highly of you. Otherwise one might have supposed he’d hate you.”

“Why should he hate me? I wasn’t the one who fathered a child by a woman not my wife. And no, he does not resent me for being the heir, despite the fact that he was born first. Leo was the son who got to be raised by a loving family, not left for servants to rear. He was the one who got to follow his dream and go to sea.” Chas pulled the cuff over his bandaged wrist. It would well nigh kill him if his illegitimate brother got Ada, too. “I am the one who always envied Leo, you see.” He took a swallow of wine. “By the way, what was the scapegrace doing here in the first place?”

Chapter Nine

Ada pushed some cushions aside to retrieve the leather sack. “It’s the strangest thing. Your brother—No, I must not call him that, I suppose—was returning this pouch. It’s full of money, astonishingly enough, that I found in the old apple orchard.”

Chas was looking at the purse as if it contained a coiled cobra. If he never saw the thing again, that was too soon. Ada took his expression for suitable amazement, and continued.

“I thought such a sum of money could only belong to the local free traders, you see, for no one rightfully connected to Westlake Hall would possess such a fortune, nor so little sense as to leave it in a tree.”

Chas was doubtful anyone anywhere had so little sense. Except him, and his Ada, of course. He tried very hard not to raise his voice when he asked, “So you ... gave a large sum of money to a known smuggler?”

Ada was twisting the leather drawstrings that tied the pouch. “Well, I did not precisely know it myself, although I strongly suspected, from all the talk, you know.”

“But you knew Leo, Mr. Tobin, that is? Not even you could be so totty-headed as to approach a possibly murderous, malfeasant, misogynistic makebait?” He tilted her chin up so he could look into her soft brown eyes. “Could you?”

Pretending interest in the last apple tart, Ada looked down, always a bad sign, in Chas’s book. “I hadn’t before, actually, but I do now and he is none of those things, I am certain.”

“No, he isn’t, but you are still a thick-headed turnip, my girl. He might have been all those and more.”

“He
couldn’t have been, not if he is your brother.”

“What has that to do with anything? I never trusted your brother Rodney with one of my sisters. Besides, you didn’t know Leo was related to me at the time, Ada, so stop trying to wriggle your way out of a well-deserved scold. Wherever Leo was, was no place for a lady.”

“Ah, but I knew some of the gentlemen there. I was never in any danger, I swear, so you can stop acting like an old windbags. I even had my brother’s dueling pistol, just in case.”

“Good grief, you weren’t toting around a loaded Manton, were you? Those things have hair triggers, Ada. You could have blown your own fool head off.”

“I am not entirely dim-witted, you know, despite your odious estimation of my intelligence. The pistol was not loaded, of course.”

Chas groaned. “An unloaded weapon makes everything one hundred percent better. What are you using for brains, these days, breadcrumbs?”

Ada brushed the crumbs of apple tart to the side of her plate. “I do not wish to speak more of this.” Not if it would lead to another argument. Now that Chas was here, she remembered what a warm comfort he was to her—not that she had exactly forgotten in the few days he was gone—and she did not want to jeopardize this restored closeness. “Anyway, Leo returned the purse today, which speaks to his credit, I believe.”

It spoke more of the viscount’s threats, but Chas did not say so. He took a deep breath. “Ada, what would you say if I told you that the money pouch was mine, that I put it in the orchard?”

She placed her hand over his. “I’d say that you were trying to protect me from doing anything as foolish as going into the Mermaid Tavern again. You cannot always be watching over me, you know, my friend.”

Closing his eyes, Chas tried again. “But what if I swore I left the blunt there?”

Ada laughed. “Why, I’d believe that faradiddle as soon as I believed you fell off your horse. You know I would never take money from you. Heaven knows how many times you’ve offered to lend me what I need, with no hopes of getting it back. Besides, you would never be so foolish as to leave a fortune in a tree. You might be as stubborn as a mule, but I would never believe you could be that stupid.”

Chas couldn’t believe it, either.

She went on: “Why, anyone might have stumbled upon the sack, or no one, for years on end.”

“I, um ...”

“I won’t ask you how much money is in the purse because your brother might have told you, but I’d wager a shilling you cannot tell me in which tree the pouch was hidden, nor even which part of the orchard.”

That shilling was as safe as a stone house. Chas shook his head.

“There, now stop being so sweet and solicitous and help me decide what to do with the treasure now.”

Sweet and solicitous? She’d just described a favorite uncle. Chas felt anything but paternal, fraternal, or friendly, sitting beside Ada. He could smell the lavender on her clothes, and some light floral scent that was all Ada’s, along with baked apples. He could almost touch one of her soft curls, trailing out of the ribbons again, as it laid alongside her neck. He could nearly count the freckles on her cheeks, they were that close. He could take Leo’s advice and kiss her—if he wanted his other eye blackened.