Adele was trying to communicate something Bridget simply could not grasp. Tears were threatening, which would aggravate Cecily no end.
“My sister would expect me to trust these men?”
Adele nodded slowly once, up and down.
“Then I must trust them.”
Bridget turned and left the room, seeing no alternatives—none whatsoever. She had no memory of descending the steps, but all too soon she was standing outside the door to the small parlor, her hand shaking on the latch. She tapped on the door three times—a little death knell for her virtue—then pasted a smile onto her face and swept into the room the way her mother had taught her to.
Only to stop abruptly after two strides. Adele had not lied. Two exceptionally handsome men lounged near the window, their virile, blond beauty making Cecily look exactly like what she was: an aging strumpet far past her prime, trading on nothing more than venal motives and expensive tastes.
“Miss O’Donnell.” The taller of the two set his drink aside and crossed the room. “Deene, most assuredly at your service.” He bowed over Bridget’s hand, his expression gravely attentive. When he straightened, he paused for a moment and perused Bridget’s features with a kind of mesmerizing intensity.
“Your sister will see you safe.” When he spoke French, it was so beautiful to the ear. Bridget had to concentrate to extract the meaning of his words. He must have seen her befuddlement, because the blasted man did not drop her hand until he’d aimed a very solemn wink at her, as well.
Her sister… Bridget curtsied and replied in French, as well. “I’m sure that is so, my lord.”
“Bridget!” Cecily’s voice was shrill with false cheer. “Come meet Viscount Blessings. He is also very partial to ladies of your coloring.”
Even in her innocence, Bridget had to stifle a wince. Would her mother be suggesting the gentlemen examine Bridget’s teeth next?
“Madam.” Lord Deene’s tone was glacial. “Perhaps I was not clear, or perhaps the toll of long years in your profession has limited your understanding, so I will endeavor to speak more slowly. I came here prepared to reach an agreement with you”—he turned to Bridget—“assuming the young lady is willing?”
Bridget nodded, her heart thumping in her chest while Deene went on in insufferably condescending tones. “I will not dicker and squabble while you comport yourself like a whoremonger before such a delicate flower. Blessings, show Madam the jewels.”
***
“I used to tell Bridget to be glad her mother didn’t sell her.” Maggie stared out the window of Deene’s elegant coach, watching the front stoop of the house Archer and Deene had disappeared into a lifetime and twenty minutes ago. “I was such an idiot.”
Benjamin shifted on the bench beside her but kept hold of her hand. “When you took Cecily on, you were not much older than Bridget is now, Maggie. Bear that in mind when you’re flagellating yourself for managing the best you could.”
“But to think I would be more capable of dealing with Cecily than His Grace would be…” She shook her head, worry and regret trying to erode the calm she felt emanating from Benjamin.
“Her Grace made the same mistake—thought she was better situated than Moreland to deal with Cecily—if a mistake it was, and she was no match for Cecily either.”
His arm came around her shoulders, and she let herself rest against him. “I hate this waiting, but I tell myself that this time next week, Bridget and I can be on our way to Italy or Portugal.”
She hadn’t meant to say that, but fatigue, anxiety, and the warmth and comfort of Benjamin’s solid male presence had loosened her tongue.
“Hush.” She felt his lips graze her temple, suggesting he was too preoccupied to heed her words. “You think Cecily will wreak revenge on you for stealing her ticket to a well-heeled old age, but I won’t allow it, and Their Graces won’t allow it.”
“You are such a good man, Benjamin.” She nuzzled the wool of his coat then turned her head to stare again at the well-lit terrace of the town house Cecily had selected for her current venture. Maggie was tempted to close her eyes, but some superstitious corner of her soul suggested if she stared hard enough, then soon she’d see Deene escorting Bridget out of that awful woman’s house and into the safety of Maggie’s waiting and anxious arms.
***
Maggie was growing heavy against his side, paying the toll for sleepless nights, unrelenting anxiety, and more worry than any lady ought to have shouldered on her own, much less when she had loving family—and a devoted fiancé—to aid her.
Now was not the time to argue with her regarding her plan to whisk Bridget off to the Continent, though Ben had no intention of allowing such folly. A coach trotted past slowly enough that Ben caught a glimpse of a lacquered crest on the door, and Maggie struggled upright beside him.
“Are the vultures gathering?”
He let her ease from his side but kept her hand in his. “Not yet. No one with any sense of fashionable manners wants to be the first to arrive, so young Lord Venable will circle the block for a bit before he alights. If Cecily’s guests do start to gather, we have a contingency in place.”
“A plan?” She turned her head to peer at him in the dim glow of the nearby streetlight. “Even for this you had a plan?”
“You were right: no one can be allowed to see Bridget. She deserves as much chance at a decent match as any other innocent girl, so Archer sent over an evening gown sized for Adele Martin’s figure. Adele is young, has red hair, and knows how to deal with amorous men.”
“Adele…” Maggie smiled at him, a great, toothy benediction that warmed a man of shadows in all the best places, and then she finished the job: “Oh, Benjamin, I do love you.” She cuddled into him, to every appearance unaware that she’d just uttered words to send a man’s heart thundering all over inside his ribs.
She sighed mightily, and before Ben could think of a way to point out to her the enormity of her admission, the door to the town house swung open. Deene came down the steps, Bridget on his arm, Archer trailing obsequiously behind.
“Maggie, my love?”
“Hmm?”
“We’ve got her.” He kissed her soundly on the mouth and climbed out of the coach to watch as Deene—with an unhurried casualness for which Ben would make him pay—led Bridget to the coach and handed the girl up. Subdued squeals of feminine glee issued forth, while a footman emerged from the house and, one by one, blew out every lamp on the front terrace.
“You have the documents?”
Deene handed over a ribboned sheaf of papers. “A bit of a tight moment locating another adult male of sound mind, but the butler you sent over from the employment agency eventually served in addition to Blessings. That woman is probably in there still ogling all that paste.”
“And Bridget’s things?”
“When you’re out of sight, I’ll have my footmen nip around back and fetch the trunk Adele packed.”
“Have them fetch it now.” Ben started off in the direction of the town house. “As soon as you have Bridget’s things secure in the boot, take the women to Moreland.”
“And just where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“To finish a case.”
When he got to the door of Cecily’s town house, he didn’t knock. He barged in, located the woman who’d created such mayhem in Maggie’s life, and gave himself permission—just this one last time—to deal in shadows and darkness.
***
“I don’t understand.” Bridget studied her older half sister, a woman she didn’t know very well, for all she did love her. “You are engaged to the very man who’s responsible for extricating me from Cecily’s schemes, and yet you want to go to Italy?”
“I don’t want to go, exactly, but I think a change of scene would do us both good.” Maggie was finding something fascinating outside the window, for she surely did not meet Bridget’s gaze as she offered this balderdash.
“A change of scene.” Bridget glanced
around at the elegant comfort of the first ducal residence she’d ever been inside. They were in some sort of small family parlor overlooking sprawling back gardens riotous with spring flowers. “I rather think this scenery quite nice.”
“We’re not staying here.” Maggie rose from her rocking chair and started pacing. “It has only been a week, but Cecily might find us out—she will find us out, eventually—and then she’ll come seeking all manner of vengeance. I don’t want you here when she does.”
“But you said Their Graces have custody of me. Cecily signed papers, and her signature was witnessed. I watched her sign them, too.”
“Papers can be stolen or lost; Cecily can claim fraud; she can bribe one of the witnesses.”
“Maggie, when did you become such a pessimist?”
This got her older sister’s attention, because Maggie turned her head and peered at Bridget. “I’m not a pessimist, dear heart, but I know what Cecily is capable of.”
“And is this why you won’t marry your earl? Because you think she’ll go after him if you do?”
Maggie, pretty, brave, competent Maggie subsided back into her chair and bowed her head. “She will. She’ll stop at nothing once she understands exactly what has happened. I know this, and I’ve tried to tell Benjamin, but he’s proud, and he’s too good-hearted himself to understand what she’s capable of. He doesn’t listen.”
“Sister?” When Maggie looked up, Bridget pointed to the large, dark, unsmiling man looming in the doorway. “I think he’s listening now.”
***
Ben’s intended looked so pretty sitting in a sunbeam by the window, the light picking out all the fiery highlights in her hair and bringing out the freckles dusting her cheeks.
“Miss Bridget, you are in error regarding one detail.” He advanced into the room and left the door open behind him. “Their Graces are not your guardians, I am. As your legal custodian, I am ordering you to scat.”
The girl blinked at him, her eyes brown instead of green, but otherwise much like Maggie’s. “Scat, my lord?”
“Begone, shoo, be off with you. Your sister and I need privacy.”
Bridget’s lips curved up in a smile that presaged heart-stopping beauty, and then—Ben was hard put not to smile right back—she winked at him and flounced out of the room.
“I didn’t know you were her guardian.” Maggie’s tone was considering, which was better than accusatory. Ben appropriated a seat on the end of the sofa closest to her and chose his words carefully.
In an effort not to rush his fences, he did not take her hand.
“I am hoping such an arrangement is more consistent with your wishes.”
She turned to gaze out the damned window. “It will spare Their Graces a legal connection with yet another person of dubious origins, and this one not even related to His Grace.”
“How are you feeling, Maggie?”
She offered him a small smile. “A little fatigued, to be honest. Events lately have been exciting.”
And she hadn’t gotten her courses. Ben had conferred with both Mrs. Danforth and Her Grace, and while he wanted to simply announce his impending paternity to the mother of his child—the drowsy, sometimes light-headed, occasionally queasy mother of his child—he suspected Maggie herself might not yet understand her condition.
“Will you walk with me, my dear?”
“I thought you wanted privacy.”
“I do want privacy, but with you, I also want to walk in the sunshine, Maggie.” She’d given him that—gotten him over the damned shadows, given him the sun.
He assisted her to her feet and did not inspect her too closely when she paused for a minute as if testing her balance. She remained silent while they wended their way through the house, past unsmiling footmen and enormous bouquets of flowers, through silent hallways scented with beeswax and lemon oil.
The silence struck Ben as peaceful, though he suspected it weighed on Maggie. He waited until they were outside, where the air was redolent of the gardens and full of the sounds of a pretty day—the distant clip-clop of traffic passing by, the warbling of birds, the hum of insects.
“You were thinking of going to Italy with Bridget?”
She nodded but had the grace to look chagrined. “You heard us. I do not trust Cecily to leave you in peace.”
“Hmm. And if Cecily were not a factor?”
“May I at least suffer this interrogation sitting down?” A spark of her old spirit crackled through her words.
“Of course.” He led her to a bench behind a convenient privet hedge and resisted mightily the urge to plead his case with kisses and caresses. He’d spoken the truth earlier—between him and Maggie, the truth in all its forms was going to have to serve. The kisses were honest, but they weren’t enough to build a marriage on such as Maggie’s parents enjoyed.
And he wanted nothing less for himself, or for her.
When they were side-by-side on a bench in a quiet little scent garden, Ben did allow himself to take Maggie’s hand. “Italy, Maggie?”
She did not withdraw her hand—and she still sported his ring.
“Italy or even France, given Bridget’s facility with the language. I want peace, Benjamin, for myself, for her, but also for you and Their Graces. There has been drama enough, and I know Cecily. I get some of my determination from her, my preoccupation with money, my unwillingness to trust.”
“And if I told you she’s right now on a ship headed for Baltimore, would you say you’d gotten this sudden need to travel from her?”
She frowned as if trying to place it on the map. “Baltimore?”
“I have a proposal for you to consider, Maggie Windham, not a proposal of marriage—that offer is still quite valid—but one regarding your future.”
“I suppose I must listen.”
She smoothed her skirts with one hand, the picture of a lady at her leisure. But the other hand, the one wearing Ben’s ring, was clutching his fingers more tightly than she likely realized.
“You can be like Cecily—independent, insecure all your days, leaning on nothing and nobody, seeing all in your path as either people out to exploit you or people you can exploit. She gave birth to you, and it’s reasonable to think you might share some of her characteristics.”
This did not sit well with Maggie. Ben knew it in the way her luscious mouth flattened and her gorgeous eyes filled with distaste. “Go on.”
“Or you can decide that your heritage comes far more from your ducal family. You are as closely related to Moreland as you are to Cecily, and he and his duchess had the raising of you. For the past quarter century you’ve been a Windham, Maggie, and I think that a far more convincing legacy.”
She blinked and stared hard at a bed of lily of the valley just starting to bloom across from them. “I kept secrets from my family, from both of my families. Sometimes it felt like nobody knew me—really knew me—at all, as if I were a living shade. It was the best I could do, though.”
The tension inside Ben relaxed just a fraction to hear her admit this. She’d done the best she could, alone, with the very few weapons and only the assets a single lady could wield, and without allies to speak of.
He withdrew a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket. “These are yours.”
She frowned and took them from his hand. “What are they?”
“Letters from Bridget to you. I haven’t read them, but I assume they are what Cecily had stolen from your reticule, and I’m all but certain she directed Bridget to sign them ‘your loving little sister’ or something equally inconvenient.”
Maggie bent over the letters a little, just a small shift in her spine and a downward tipping of her chin, as if absorbing a blow. “Thank you for these, but how did you acquire them?”
“I parlayed with Cecily, and we reached an agreement.”
“Oh, Benjamin. You cannot trust that woman. She’ll slink away for a time—she left me in peace for a time—and then she’ll strike when you least expect it. She�
��s devious, she’s underhanded, she’s—”
He put two fingers over her lips. “She’s gone. I understand devious and underhanded behavior, Maggie. I very nearly consigned myself to a purgatory filled with it until you gave me a choice.”
“Cecily will take those choices away.” Her grip on Ben’s hand was nearly painful, and in her voice he heard a wealth of unshed tears.
“Cecily will never set foot on British soil again, my love. If she does, I will have her committed for the unfortunate loss of reason often resulting from a life dedicated too entirely to vice for too long.”
He did not want to speak the word “syphilis” aloud, but with a mad king on the throne and many suspecting the affliction had a venereal origin, Maggie would easily make the connection.
She frowned at their joined hands. “I suspect she was losing her reason. Bridget has confirmed the same. She was obsessed and getting worse. All the moving about, the dresses appropriate only to a coquette.” She fell silent.
“You are not to pity her. She left with a bank draft adequate to sustain a modest lifestyle for years to come. Moreover, a few of the jewels in that cache of paste were real. If she’s smart, she can attach herself to some aging Colonial of means and live comfortably all the rest of her days.”
“Why some real jewels?”
“To ensure the contract was binding, but Westhaven wrote much of the description of the financial consideration in French. It lists jewelry, both genuine and for costume purposes. I did explain this to her.”
Maggie was staring hard at the lily of the valley again. “You should not have undertaken all of this, Benjamin. I love you for rescuing Bridget. I hate that you had to deal with Cecily so directly.”
This was a delicate moment, an important moment, and while Ben wanted to get down on his knees before his intended—the way he should have weeks ago—there was more he needed to say, more Maggie needed to hear.
“And yet you dealt with Cecily for years. Without any to aid you and for the sake of a girl you might have turned your back on, you took on that viper and did all that was necessary to protect Bridget, Their Graces, your siblings—some of whom were decorated cavalry, another was skilled in law, and yet you protected them. This is not how the daughter of a scheming courtesan acts, Maggie.”
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