Strangers at Dawn (18 page)

“I’m not angry.” He raked her with angry eyes. “What I am is amazed. You said yourself that William was an animal. How could you have given yourself to such a man?”

Her fingers curled into claws. “You don’t care about William.” Then, because she was torn between anger and hurt, she added for good measure, “Or the others. Is that what is making you angry; Max? You’ve heard about my legion of lovers and you’re sorry now that you didn’t take me
when you had the chance? Well, what’s stopping you? You must know that I’m not fussy.”

With lightning swiftness, he reached across the table, and his long fingers bit into the soft flesh of her arms. “If I thought for a moment that you meant that-”

“What?” she taunted, angry past caring.

“Don’t test me, Sara, or you may not like the result.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed, her breathing labored and audible. Every harsh line on his face warned her that his control was ready to snap. She’d heedlessly provoked him, but she’d never imagined he would react with such violence.

Max let her go and abruptly stood up. He, too, was appalled at his reaction to her taunts. Never would he have believed that he was capable of threatening a woman in such a base manner. How could he, Max Worthe, who’d been raised to treat all women with courtesy if not chivalry, have threatened her? And what was it about this woman that could arouse him to such anger?

He took a long, calming breath. “It was an empty threat. I hope you will believe that.”

She was silent.

He should say more, but he didn’t know how to apologize for something he didn’t understand himself. “All this,” he said, “is a long way from an exclusive interview for the
Courier.
Shall we return to neutral ground?”

She spoke quietly and without hesitation. “Yes, I think that would be best.”

He moved to the fireplace, preserving as much space as possible between them in that small room. He didn’t want to remind her of his superior strength.

“So where do we go from here, Sara?”

She gave a tiny shrug. “I’m to meet up with Miss Beattie in Salisbury. Of course, I thought I’d be married to Mr. Townsend by then and could produce a marriage certificate for my attorneys. Now …” She shook her head, “I suppose
we’ll return to Bath and I’ll choose one of my other prospects.”

He kept his voice unthreatening, when what he really wanted was to roar at her. “You’re determined to go through with this marriage of convenience?”

“It’s the only way.”

“You’re going to divide your father’s fortune equally among his children, even his stepchildren? You expect me to believe that?”

She smiled faintly, and reaching under her collar, extracted a chain with a key attached to it. She undid the chain and offered him the key. “Maybe this will convince you. It’s the key to my bag.”

He took the key from her, then reached for the leather bag. Inside, there was nothing but legal documents. They were drawn up by a firm of solicitors in London, and were obviously the marriage contract Townsend would have signed. It was extremely complex and on his first reading, Max merely scanned each page. Sara had not lied to him. She’d divided everything equally amongst all her siblings.

He looked at her thoughtfully.

“What?” she demanded.

“Why didn’t your father make a will like this? Why leave it all to you?”

“He trusted my judgement, and he didn’t trust William. He wanted to protect Anne, I suppose. I don’t really know.”

He was missing something important here, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe he hadn’t been asking the right questions.

The trouble was, his mind was blunted with fatigue. He’d been up half the night worrying about her while she, by the sound of it, had been treated like royalty in the city jail.

He cast a baleful eye upon her.

“Satisfied?”

“I’ve only glanced at it.”

“Take all the time you need.”

She stretched, got up and began to wander around the room, eventually settling herself on a settee on one side of the fireplace. Max went back to studying the legal papers, reading every word slowly and carefully.

S
ARA STRETCHED HER CRAMPED MUSCLES AND
slowly opened her eyes. The room was flooded with sunlight. Sounds ran together in her mind: the
clip-clop
of horses’ hooves over cobblestones; muted masculine laughter outside her window; songbirds. She thought she smelled coffee.

When her blanket began to slip, she reached for it and her hand closed around something small and hard. A silver button, she remembered. It wasn’t a blanket that covered her, but Max’s coat. She wasn’t in her bed, but curled up on the settee in the little parlor. It hadn’t been a dream, then. Max had covered her with his coat and kissed her on the brow.

“Max.”

“I’m here.”

His voice acted on her like the report of a pistol shot. She gasped and hauled herself up.

He was towering above her, with the light behind him. “We’re too late for breakfast,” he said, “but I ordered coffee. They’ll bring us something to eat shortly.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s past noon. We’ve both overslept.”

She took the cup he offered her. “What are those?” she asked.

Max looked at the table. “Those,” he said, “are the sandwiches George brought me last night while you were sleeping. And you were wrong, Sara. He knows well enough what ‘carnivore’ means.” To the question in her eyes, he replied, “They’re chopped liver, rare, chopped liver. Almost raw, in fact.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “Is George still alive?”

“He was too quick for me. By the time I’d taken my first bite, he had vanished into thin air.”

He was different this morning, she thought, more like his charming self. And that’s when Max Worthe was most dangerous.

Max slumped into a chair and rested his booted feet on the seat of another chair. He’d removed his neck cloth and opened the top buttons of his shirt. He looked casual and unthreatening. But she was wiser now.

“It’s amazing what a few hours’ sleep will do for you, isn’t it?” he said. “My head is as clear as a bell.”

“Really?” she murmured.

“Yes, really. I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last hour or so, and I’ve found a solution to your problem.”

She said slowly, “What are you talking about, Max?”

“William Neville. You think he’s stalking you. I, on the other hand, am convinced William is dead. Therefore, it must be someone else. Just think about it, Sara. Why would William disappear like that? What did he hope to gain?”

“Maybe he wanted me to hang for his murder.”

“Why send you notes? If he’s alive and wants the Carstairs fortune, why is he holding off?”

“For revenge! That’s how his mind works. He wants to see me suffer.”

“Revenge for what?”

She cursed herself silently for being caught out, and she frantically searched her mind for a reason he would accept. “For breaking off our affair. For telling him that I was going to marry Francis Blarnires,”

His lips thinned in a disapproving line. “All the more reason, then, to flush this stalker into the open.”

“Get to the point, Max.”

“The point is, we can’t be sure who this stalker is, and we can’t know what his motives are. Maybe it has nothing to do with your father’s will; maybe it’s more personal than that.
So, marrying Townsend or any of your so-called ‘prospects’ wouldn’t do you a bit of good.”

Stalker.
The word made her shiver, but it was the right word. Stalkers tracked their prey till they finally cornered them, then the hunters finished them off.

“It has to be William,” she said. “No one else has a motive for wishing to harmme.”

Max had his own ideas about that. He said mildly, “If he wants revenge, Sara, he won’t care whether you’re married or not.”

“I wasn’t going to hang around and wait for him to show up. I’m not stupid. I would have handed my proof of marriage to my solicitors and run off to America with Anne.”

His charm swiftly evaporated. “And you’d go on running for the rest of your life. Or do you plan to change your name again and go into hiding? You’d always be looking over your shoulder, you know that, don’t you?”

She shivered. “I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”

“Well, think about it now.”

Her eyes narrowed on his face. “Where is all this leading, Max?”

He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back, balancing his chair precariously on two legs. He said quietly, “I told you. We should be trying to flush this thug into the open. Once we know who he is, we can deal with him.”

We.
This was what she had feared. The
Courier’s
special correspondent wouldn’t give up easily. “You want to come to Stoneleigh with me?”

“Who else is going to take you on? You can forget about your prospects in Bath. You don’t imagine Townsend is going to keep his mouth shut? He’ll make hay of what happened here in Wells. He’ll exaggerate my involvement, make out, I suppose, that there is something between us.”

“That wasn’t my doing, it was yours!”

“It doesn’t matter whose doing it was; the damage is done. Don’t you understand? I’m trying to help you.”

She briefly closed her eyes and thought of all the obscenities she’d heard on her brothers’ lips but could never say herself.

“How?”

He smiled. “Simple. We more or less follow your plan.”

He had managed to confuse her. They couldn’t follow her plan unless she married, and she couldn’t believe he would go that far just for a story. She said carefully, “I won’t marry you, Max.”

“God forbid!” He seemed genuinely shocked. “You don’t imagine I want to marry every pretty girl I’ve ever … kissed?”

She was incredibly hurt. “I was thinking of my fortune,” she snapped.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “you do think about money a great deal of the time, don’t you? Don’t marry a poor man, Sara. You’d only make his life miserable.”

He brought his chair down with a thud to ret squarely on the floor. “Now about my plan. I’ll play the part of your betrothed. We’ll be the happy couple with stars in our eyes and a wedding to plan-not that it will ever come to that. There’ll be no talk of having your husband sign away his rights to your fortune. As far as anyone will know, once the wedding takes place, control of your fortune
will
pass to me.” He grinned. “That ought to stir up a hornets’ nest. But more to the point, I’m convinced that William or whoever he is will show his hand, and I’ll be ready for him.”

Her worst fears had come to pass. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him to go to hell, but she had too much to lose to be swayed by anger. She didn’t want to see her name blazed on the front page of his newspaper; she didn’t want the
Courier
to stir things up at this point. All she needed was a little time.

Then she would tell him to go to hell.

“Have a care, Max,” she said and smiled. “For all you
know, you may be tangling with a woman who has already done murder. What’s to stop me from murdering again?”

His brows rose slowly. He stared at her long and hard, and finally, he grinned. “Then kill me now, Sara, because that’s the only way you’re going to get rid of me.”

He was impossible! He was unbearable! But what really rattled her was that he was as immovable as a brick wall.

Eleven

C
ONSTANCE STREATHAM-CARSTAIRS, AS SHE
now styled herself, twitched the drawing-room curtains aside and looked out. The long avenue of old oaks drooped miserably under the weight of their sodden foliage, like mourners at the graveside of some departed friend. The melancholy vista did nothing to lighten her melancholy frame of mind. She could have wept in frustration. It was true, then. Sara really was going to be married. It was
all
in the letter she’d received yesterday by express. Sara would be arriving today with her betrothed. And once the wedding took place, once Sara’s husband took control of the purse strings, Constance did not doubt that the Streathams would be out in the cold.

Then she’d be stuck in this dreary prison for the rest of her life. Tears of self-pity filled her eyes. It was so unfair. She was only thirty-six years old. She’d married a rich man with every expectation that her life would be glamorous beyond anything she had ever known, and she’d ended up in this godforsaken backwater, friendless and unappreciated, all her hopes in ruin now that the letter from Sara had arrived. She might as well be locked up in New gate.

She hated this house. Longfield had not been refurbished to please her, but to gratify her husband’s conception of how a country squire would live out his days. While other rich men were building stately marble homes in the neoclassical style, Samuel Carstairs had purchased a dilapidated Elizabethan manor with dark oak paneling, smoking chimneys, and depressingly small windows that barely let in the light. The stags’ heads and antlers that adorned the Great Hall, as well as the gloomy portraits of no one knew whose ancestors, had all been bought at auction. Only this drawing room and her bedchamber had been refurbished to her taste. The wall paneling had been lightened to a pale gold, and the great beamed ceilings replaced with intricate plaster work in a classical design.