Tempting Fate (28 page)

“Just fine?” he asked and bent his head to press his lips against the tender skin on the inside of her arm just below her elbow.

“Er…nice. It feels very nice.”

“Only nice?”

“Well, it is just my arm.”

“I see.”

He rose to his knees, slid his hand around to the nape of her neck, and brought his lips to hers.

There was the softness again, the gentleness, and the need. She scooted to the edge of the trunk and after a moment’s hesitation, let her hands slide up to his shoulders. It was all still so new to her. The kissing, the touching, the way both made her feel wanton and unsure at the same time. She wasn’t at all certain what she should do, or shouldn’t do. But she was sure she wanted to continue doing it as long as humanly possible.

“You’ve the sweetest mouth,” he murmured against her lips, and she felt her heart skip an extra beat in her chest. “I told myself once it would taste bitter.”

She pulled back.
“Bitter?”

He smiled at her. “It shouldn’t come as a shock that I was angry with you at the time.”

“Angry with…you’d thought of kissing me before? Before all this?”

“Once, when I was a younger man.” His grin broadened as he remembered. “We were yelling at each other over something or other, and I had the sudden notion of shutting you up with a kiss. I kept from doing so by convincing myself that you’d taste bitter.”

“You’d thought of kissing me,” she repeated with a slightly dreamy smile.

“I wasn’t yet twenty. I thought of kissing near to everyone
in a skirt who wasn’t a blood relation…. Thought about it quite a lot, if memory serves.”

She brought her foot forward to press down on his own until he winced around the smile. He tugged gently on her hair.

“Jealous, are you, darling?”

She rolled her eyes at him, which wasn’t a particularly convincing denial, but worked well enough to have him standing up with a laugh and opening the paper she’d gone through so much trouble to retrieve from the jar.

“What is it, then?” she asked, prepared to be told she’d made a fool of herself over an old gambling chit or invitation to dinner. But when his face tightened, she stood and edged forward, impatient and nervous. Had she actually found something?

“What is it, Whit?”

Her heart drumming in her throat, she accepted the paper when he held it out to her. She skimmed its contents—twice. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but she’d rather thought it would be something a bit more incriminating than a simple delivery receipt for common house hold items.

Baffled, she held the paper up. “What is this?”

“A delivery receipt for—” Whit leaned forward to read. “—one case beeswax, small; one case port, large; two cases—”

She pulled the paper back. “I can read, Whit, I just can’t fathom why you think it’s important.”

“Look closer, imp.”

She did, but nothing grabbed her as being out of place. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I fail to see the relevance—”

He reached over and pointed at an item. “Two cases Gold Crown Ink.”

“And…?” she prompted. “I’ve never heard of it, but—”

“Gold Crown is remarkably similar in appearance to the actual ink used in the printing of some bank notes.”

She frowned thoughtfully. “If it’s readily available to
anyone who wants it, then it’s not conclusive evidence against him, is it? Perhaps he simply likes the color.”

“It’s not readily available,” he informed her. “It has to be ordered.”

“People order inks all the time, Whit, and for a variety of reasons.”

“Two cases of it?”

“That is odd,” she agreed and looked over the list yet again. There were subtotals and totals at the bottom, invoice numbers, signatures, and the date and means of delivery. She glanced at the date again and laughed.

“This receipt’s almost a decade old,” she informed him.

“I noticed.”

She handed the paper back to him with an amused shake of her head. “If my uncle has been making poorly constructed bank notes for ten years, I should think someone would have noticed before now.”

“I’d thought of that,” he told her, taking the paper and stowing it away in his pocket. “There are several possible explanations. First, he could have been working on the process, attempting to improve—”

“My uncle works at nothing,” she scoffed. “Let alone at
improving
something.”

“Second,” he continued, “he may have had to wait for the remainder of the supplies, or wait until he believed the trail linking him to the supplies disappeared.”

“He hasn’t that sort of discipline, Whit.”

“Third, and my personal choice—he’s been passing them off to someone else who circulates them out of the country.”

“Oh.” That she could actually imagine, particularly since it involved an accomplice. In her opinion, her uncle simply wasn’t capable of committing a complicated crime without someone guiding him along the way. “I suppose that’s a possibility. But you can hardly prove it with one old receipt.”

“No, I cannot. But I’ve most of the week left yet.”

“You’re certain he’s guilty now.”

He considered that before shaking his head. “I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t care for your uncle.”

“Few do,” she pointed out.

“True, but only the two of us are responsible for obtaining evidence of his guilt in a serious crime.”

The two of us, she thought, and tried not to grin at his casual reference of them as a team. It pleased her well enough that she would forgo pointing out that she was looking for the proof of her uncle’s innocence, not his guilt. “You’re afraid you’re making mountains out of molehills—seeing things that aren’t there because you’ve already made up your mind about my uncle.”

“Not afraid exactly,” he argued with just enough affronted dignity to have her grinning after all. “It’s something to be aware of, that’s all. Why are you grinning?”

“No reason,” she lied. “I enjoy seeing you use that great sense of yours.”

“I wasn’t being sensible when I envisioned beating him black and blue over dinner last night.”

“You weren’t being original, either. I have that fantasy at least twice a day during my stays here.”

“You’ve cause enough. I want to send you back to Haldon.”

“We’ve been over and over—”

“I said I wanted, not that I could.”

She nodded in understanding. If it were possible, she’d have them both back at Haldon. “I need to see to dinner before the others return.”

Whit shook his head. “You won’t be coming down to dinner again.”

“It can’t be avoided, Whit. My uncle expects me to play hostess, or his version of it.”

He took her arm and led her towards the door. “I’ll handle Eppersly. Stay in your room and lock the door.”

She was perfectly willing to obey that order.

“You’ll come for me? You won’t search on your own?”

There was a long, telling hesitation before he answered. “I’ll come.”

Whit waited until the baron had a chance to settle himself into his study after the hunt before seeking him out.

“How’s that head of yours, boy?” the baron asked as Whit made his way into the room.

He bit back the instinctive need to retaliate for being called “boy” and took a seat in front of the desk, letting his back slouch and his legs stretch out before him. He hoped it made him look appropriately slothful.

“Still attached to my shoulders, I’m afraid. How was the hunt?”

The baron heaved out a grunt. “Damn poachers. Man can’t find game on his own land anymore.”

“Damn shame,” Whit agreed and congratulated himself for not smiling.

“Don’t suspect you came in here to discuss hunting, Thurston.”

“I didn’t, in fact. I came to discuss your niece.”

“Mirabelle?” The baron scowled. “What the devil for? Seems you’d have enough of her at Haldon.”

“I do, which is why I’m discussing her now.” He made himself fidget with his cravat. “I realize she’s family, Eppersly, but can’t the chit stay in her room for a day or two?”

“Heard you two don’t get on.”

“She’s a bloody nuisance. And she…” He cast a nervous look at the open door before leaning over to whisper across the desk. “She talks to my mother. A man can’t very well enjoy himself around a woman who gossips regularly with his mother, can he?”

The baron twisted his lips. “Can’t, now you mention it. I’ll see she stays in her room.”

Whit didn’t have to feign his relief, though the gratitude
was for show. “It’s appreciated. My father always said you were a sensible man.”

The baron nodded as if he had reason to believe that comment was anything other than the lie it was. “Pity he’s not still here. No need to worry yourself over his censure.”

“No need at all.”

“He went well in the end, though. Had a wager with some of the others, how each of us would go. Won a hundred pounds on your father. The others figured he’d die of the pox.”

“Cuckolding you, was he?”

The baron blinked once, then threw his head back to roar and snort with laughter.

“Your father’s son!” he managed when the greatest part of his mirth had passed. “Had a tongue as sharp as yours.”

“Yes, I recall,” Whit muttered, and managed, just barely, to keep the sanguine expression of a slightly amused, but mostly bored young man on his face.

“We’ll make a proper man of you yet.”

“I look forward to the instruction.” As he might, he thought ruefully, a cannonball to the head.

Twenty-one

F
or Whit, dinner was no more pleasant that night than it had been the night before, but it was markedly less tense for him with Mirabelle safely tucked away in her room.

The men drank themselves half stupid in the space of an hour and wholly stupid a quarter hour after that. So it was with great relief that he saw the last of them drag themselves off to bed before the clock struck eleven.

He swayed and tottered himself as he made his way out of the dining room, but that was for the benefit of the staff.

“Where’z the baron?” he demanded of one of the footmen as he lurched into the hallway. “Good man, the baron. Good man. Where’d he go?”

“To bed…my lord,” the footman replied, sidestepping Whit’s tottering form. “All the guests have gone to bed.”

“To bed! Already? Night’s young.” He gave a forced hiccup. “And they mocked me. Ah, well. Old men. What’s to do? That is…what’s a man…Never mind.”

“Very good, my lord.”

“Where’z my room, then?”

The footman let out a hefty sigh, gripped Whit’s arm and hauled him up the stairs and down the hall. Because he was only willing to take the ruse so far, Whit fished out the key from his pocket himself.

“Got it. Got it. Not a bleeding infant,” he muttered.

“If you’re set then, I’m for my own bed.”

Whit forced the key into the lock after a few bumbling tries, and waved a hand at the footman. “Off you go.”

He didn’t need to turn his head to know the man rolled his eyes before leaving. Couldn’t blame him, really, though a decent footman would have made certain a guest had made it to his bed without first tripping over his own feet and cracking his head open on a piece of furniture.

He listened. The sound of the footman’s steps dimmed and then disappeared up the third-floor stairwell. By the haggard look on the man’s face, Whit suspected he’d told the truth—he was for bed.

It must be an exhausting job, he thought, as he stepped into his room for a candle and stepped back out again, to put up with the likes of the baron and his guests. Then again, the staff didn’t do much besides, as far as he could tell. Plenty of time to rest between the drunken mayhem.

He made the brief trip to Mirabelle’s room and stopped.
For a few long minutes, he simply stood outside her door considering, weighing, arguing, and otherwise working himself into a fine temper.

She had every right to participate. He had every right to keep her safe.

He should keep his word and knock.

He should keep her as far removed from all this as he possibly could.

He should bind and gag her, toss her into a carriage, and send the stubborn woman back to Haldon,
that’s
what he should do.

This was a mission, he fumed, not a Mayfair dinner party. And this wasn’t the same as digging through trunks in the middle of the day. Had they been caught, he could have readily fabricated a believable explanation for why the two of them were in the attic.

He was helping her find a portrait of her mother, or she was helping him find an extra blanket for his room. There’d been dozens of perfectly good excuses available.

But there was no good excuse for two people to be snooping through a room in the dead of night.

Thoughts of what could happen to Mirabelle if they were found out made his hands ball into tight fists.

He wasn’t having it. He wasn’t going to be worrying over her instead of worrying over the mission. He sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the remaining nights of the party, standing in the hallway, arguing with himself.

She’d see reason, damn it, or he’d make use of that bind and gag.

Temper firmly established, he knocked sharply on the door.

At the quick rap on her door Mirabelle rose from her seat by the window and, out of habit, grabbed the heavy candlestick she’d pilfered from the library ages ago. The bolts on her door were sturdy, but still…

“Open the door, imp.”

Relieved to hear Whit’s voice, she set down the candlestick and opened the door.

“Are they all asleep, then?” she asked as she slipped out of her room.

He took her arm and promptly escorted her back inside.

“You’re staying here.”

Taken aback by the brusque command, she did little more than stare at him while he closed and rebolted the door.

“Three locks,” she heard him mutter. “Chit has three locks on her door, but can’t see the sense in staying behind them.”

The insult broke her stupor. She’d had the sense to have them installed, hadn’t she? And it had been no easy feat to time that around her uncle’s comings and goings.

She crossed her arms across her chest and glared at his back. “What the devil has gotten into you?”