She cleared her throat. “I have a friend in New York, and she has informed me that Clara was involved in some sort of embezzlement a few years ago.”
Seger glowered down at Quintina. “I already know about that. Clara explained what happened, and she is innocent. But I am curious to know how your friend came by this information, and if this is the person who sent me a telegram on my wedding day. Who is it, may I ask?”
Quintina glanced up at him. “An Englishwoman I knew a number of years ago. She moved to America to become a governess, and when she read about you and Clara in the New York papers, she felt a moral obligation to inform me of Clara’s background.”
Stopping on the pavement, Seger faced his stepmother squarely. “I would like to know this woman’s name, if you please. This is a matter that must be addressed posthaste. I will not have anyone spreading lies about my wife—lies that concern something that is dead and buried in the past.”
Quintina sighed. “But Seger…I’m not entirely sure that it is dead and buried, which is why I felt it necessary to speak to you immediately. You see, my friend wrote to me about this issue quite some time ago, but I chose not to mention it, because I like Clara very much, and I want your marriage to be a success. But I could not keep it to myself any longer, not after what happened today. Can we stroll again?”
Seger nodded and offered his arm. They walked in silence for a few seconds before Quintina finally spoke. “First of all, I’m not sure that Clara was entirely innocent. My friend informed me that her signature was on certain documents, but that is not what concerns me now. As you said, it’s in the past. What concerns me is Clara’s association with the man who lured her into this embezzlement in the first place. She was engaged to him, I understand.”
“Yes, but Clara severed her relationship with him when she learned about the embezzlement, and he went to prison.”
“But he is out now. Here in London, in fact.”
Seger stopped again. “In London, you say?”
“Yes, but it’s much worse than that. He came to the house looking for Clara, and she went off with him in the coach. Alone. I don’t think she realized that I knew who he was. She said he was an old family friend.”
Seger glared at his stepmother, then uttered an oath and turned to summon his carriage.
Seger walked into the house, where he found Clara sitting alone in the drawing room, gazing absentmindedly out the window.
At least she was there, and not somewhere else.
He approached and stood over her where she sat on the sofa. Eyes wide, she gazed up at him.
“What happened today?” he asked directly.
She stared dumbfounded for a moment, then went pale. “Seger....” Her voice betrayed her trepidation. “You know?”
“Yes. But I wish to hear your description of the events.”
She continued to gaze up at him with dismay, then rose to her feet, wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his chest.
“I tried to find you when I came home, but you had gone out.” Her voice began to quiver. “Oh, Seger, Gordon has come to London.”
He would have liked to see her eyes when she spoke, but her cheek was still pressed to his chest. “I am aware. What happened, Clara?”
“He caught me off guard. I was on my way home from Piccadilly, when he opened the door of the coach and got in. There was no warning. He must have been following me.”
“He got into the coach with you?”
“Yes. I told him to leave, but he wouldn’t.”
Seger reached around to pry her arms off him. He stared at her, trying to see the truth.
Just then, Quintina entered.
Seger held up a hand. “Give my wife a chance to explain.” He turned his attention back to Clara. “He did not come to the house? You didn’t go with him willingly?”
She shook her head.
Quintina stepped forward. “What do you mean, Clara? Of course he was here. Mrs. Carruthers told me who he was, and I watched you leave with him. I watched you from my window upstairs.”
A heavy silence descended upon them while Clara and Quintina stared at each other, as if they were each trying to comprehend what the other was saying.
“I didn’t leave with him,” Clara finally professed. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I did not see Gordon in this house.”
Quintina shook her head in disbelief. “You think both the housekeeper and I imagined it?”
“Yes!”
Quintina turned to Seger and gestured toward Clara with a hand. “Perhaps she wishes to spare your feelings, Seger.”
Clara’s voice took on a more aggressive tone. “I do not wish to spare my husband’s feelings. I did not go anywhere willingly with Gordon Tucker. He stepped into my coach uninvited. Seger, you must believe me.”
Seger’s gaze darted back and forth between his wife and his stepmother. “One of you is not telling the truth.” He looked down at his wife, whose face had gone ashen. He felt a stabbing sensation in his heart. It was fear, and it was sickeningly familiar.
He tried to ignore it and focus on the matter at hand—uncovering the facts.
“I swear on my honor,” Clara said, “I did not leave this house with that man.”
“But what motive would I have to lie?” Quintina asked. “And the housekeeper, too?”
Seger was not about to guess anyone’s motives. He had not trusted his stepmother in many years, yet how well did he really know Clara? She had kept the secret about the embezzlement from him until he discovered it on his own on their wedding day. Now Quintina was telling him that Clara was not innocent after all, that her signature had been discovered on certain related documents.
He didn’t know what to believe. His gut pitched and rolled.
Clara took a desperate step forward. “Seger, please....”
He held up a hand to silence her, then turned to his stepmother. “Leave us, Quintina. I must speak with my wife privately.”
“Seger, I am terribly sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I am glad that you did. Now leave us.”
Quintina hesitated a moment before she walked out and closed the door behind her.
Chapter 21
Dear Adele,
I pray that all will work out between Seger and me. I believe that if I lose him now, after we have come so far, I would never recover from the heartbreak....
Clara
“It seems to be your word against Quintina’s,” Seger said to his wife.
Meanwhile, the thought of Clara in the presence of her ex-lover—whether she was telling the truth or not—made Seger see red. He tried to push the fury away but couldn’t. He wasn’t accustomed to such vulnerability where a woman was concerned. It had been years since he’d felt anything like it. Jealousy was not even a word in his vocabulary when it came to his temporary relationships. His hands shook.
“I am telling the truth,” Clara said. “I don’t know how to convince you, except to ask for your trust.”
“My trust? You lied to me once before about this matter. I would be a fool to offer my trust blindly.”
“I never lied. I told you about Gordon, I just didn’t tell you everything, because we barely knew each other. There was so little time.”
“But you could have found the time if you’d wished to.”
She sighed heavily, collapsed onto the sofa, and buried her face in her hands. “You’re right, I could have. My only excuse is that I was afraid you would change your mind about marrying me, and I wanted you more than anything. If I neglected to tell you, it was only because I was so desperately in love with you.”
He almost laughed at the idea. “Love? You just said, Clara, that we barely knew each other.”
She looked up at him, her eyes red and puffy, laden with a mi
xture of anger and bafflement. “Don’t you believe in love, Seger? Have you forgotten how you felt when you first met Daphne?”
“I spent four years with Daphne,” he replied. “I’ve known you little more than a month. And Daphne has nothing to do with this.”
“But you told me you fell in love with her the first time you saw her. That you decided she was the one for you after a mere week of knowing her. Can’t you believe that I might have felt the same way when I met you?”
He did not want to think about how quickly he had leaped into an intimate relationship at the age of sixteen, how quickly he had given away his heart. “I was very young. You and I are not children.”
She frowned at him. “You have become jaded and you have not let yourself love me, Seger. I deserve a chance to earn your love. I want to be more to you than just a wife in name.”
He suddenly wondered why they were having this conversation, when the issue of her ex-lover still hung in the balance. He paced the room.
“What happened today, Clara?”
She sighed in frustration. “I already told you. Gordon walked into my coach, uninvited. I never met him here in our home. Quintina is lying.”
“Why would she lie? She told me today that she wanted our marriage to be a success.”
Clara spread her hands wide. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s lying about that, too.”
He remembered the day Quintina had explained that Daphne had gotten on a ship bound for America. Quintina had spoken in sympathetic tones and tried to explain and defend her husband’s actions. She had held Seger’s hand as she delivered the news, but he had known she harbored triumph on the inside.
Today, he didn’t know who to believe.
He watched his wife wipe tears from her eyes. Something inside him throbbed with empathy. He hated to see her cry and he did not want to feel this pain that was cutting him from the inside out. He wanted to crush it, like he’d learned to crush all feelings for other people years ago.
He didn’t want to face the possibility that Clara had been dishonest with him, or that she was somehow involved with another man and was lying about it, as Quintina was suggesting.
He didn’t want to face the possibility that she had married him for his title, like so many of her fellow countrywomen did these days, because he could not deny that he’d always felt certain there was something more than that between them. He’d always known Clara desired him in a basic, elemental way, and that pleased him. It had been his justification for marrying her. Desire was something he understood and could handle. Now, everything was falling into question.
He wanted to leave this room, to shut himself off.
He also felt the urge to protect what was his.
Seger walked to the door.
“Where are you going?” Clara asked.
He did not look back. “Out.”
Seger went to five hotels before he found the one that had Gordon Tucker listed as a registered guest. It was an expensive hotel. Too expensive for an ex-prison convict.
He tapped the ivory handle of his walking stick on the man’s door.
A few seconds later, the door opened and Seger found himself standing face to face with his wife’s one-time fiancé, a man who had recognized her passion and had taken advantage of it in the worst possible way.
He was a good-looking man, tall with brown hair and blue eyes.
Seger wanted to strangle him.
“Lord Rawdon,” Tucker said with a vile grin. “I was expecting you. Eventually.”
He opened the door the rest of the way. Seger walked in and glanced around the room. It was familiar. He had been in this hotel—and every other decent one in the city—a number of times, but he didn’t want to think about that. He was a husband now, and the sheer, rock-hard density of that role seemed to fill his entire being.
“I presume you have come to ask me to stay away from your wife,” Tucker said.
“I am not here to ask you anything. I’m here to tell you that she doesn’t want to see you, and that you should leave England today.”
Tucker pulled a cigarette box out of his breast pocket, removed one and lit it. He took a deep drag and blew the smoke off to one side. “I don’t think so.”
Seger moved forward. “Clara belongs to me, and you will be back in prison by nightfall if you choose to ignore that fact.”
“She belongs to you, does she? American women are not little lambs, Rawdon. You should have learned that by now. Clara is a bold and daring woman, and one should not try to put her in a cage.”
“My reason for coming here is not to cage my wife. It is to get rid of you.”
Tucker raised an eyebrow. He sat down on the bed, leaned back on an elbow and crossed one leg over the other. “If you send me back to America, you will make Clara very unhappy. Is that what you want?”
“She won’t be unhappy.”
“Yes, she will.”
Seger wanted to end this conversation immediately by throwing Tucker out the window, but he smothered the urge because he wanted information.
“I understand that you forced your company upon her today,” he said.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Tucker replied. “She received me in her drawing room like the proper lady that she is.”
Seger cleared his throat. She received him?
If that were true, it meant Clara had lied about what had really happened.
But God! Even after hearing Tucker uphold Quintina’s claim, Seger still had trouble believing it. He wanted to trust Clara—all his instincts were steering him in that direction—but how could he, when three people were now saying one thing, while she said something completely different?
He loathed being in this position—in a battle, unarmed, ignorant of his enemy. Unaware of the terrain.
He decided to take a risk. “She didn’t receive you. You forced your way into her coach.”
Tucker rose to his feet. “Is that what she told you? She’s a sneaky one. You probably shouldn’t have married her. I’ll tell you what—I’ll take her off your hands and marry her myself, if you’ll agree to give her to me. A quiet divorce shouldn’t be difficult for a man like you. You’re an aristocrat. You must have connections in high places. I reckon she’d be happier with me, anyway. She doesn’t have it in her to stay in one place for too long. Besides that, we’re drawn to each other.”
All at once, Seger felt a rush of blood pounding in his ears. He clenched his jaw, hauled back an arm, and threw a hard punch at Tucker, knocking him flat onto the bed.
“Bloody hell!” Tucker cried, cupping his chin in his hand.
Seger turned to leave. “Be out of here by tonight, sir, or I’ll be back in the morning to continue this conversation exactly where we left off.”
Gillian heard the hotel door click shut and stepped out of the wardrobe. Heart racing, she smoothed a hand over her skirts and observed Gordon sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching his jaw. He glanced up at her with a feeble expression in his eyes. His lip was bleeding.
“He punched me!”
She crossed over the carpet to stand before him, took a look at his lip, and removed a handkerchief from her reticule. “Here. Use this.”
He reluctantly accepted it. “I thought you English were supposed to be polite and reserved.”
“Not Seger,” she replied. “Well, he’s polite when he wants to be, but never reserved.”
Gordon shook his head. “I don’t know what you see in him. He’s a brute if you ask me.”
“You were plenty brutish yourself.”
He didn’t look up at her. He just dabbed at his lip with her handkerchief.
For a long moment, she watched the top of his head. His hair was a shiny brown color. She liked the way it parted in waves.
“I would have thought you’d be used to fighting,” s
he said, “after being in prison.”
He tried to give her back the handkerchief, but it was stained with blood.
“Keep it,” she said.
He stuffed it into his pocket and stood. He was very tall. He towered over her, and he smelled like cigarette smoke.
“I had a talent for talking my way out of most fights,” he told her.
“I’d wager you did.”
The side of his mouth curled up in a careless grin. “Not this one, though. Seemed more like I was talking my way into it.”
Gillian shrugged. “It’s what you agreed to.”
“Yes, and I also agreed to a hundred pounds. I said exactly what your aunt told me to say, so where’s my reward?”
She paused and looked up at Gordon Tucker.
This man was a criminal. She’d never known a criminal before.
“I have it right here.” Gillian reached into her reticule and pulled out a bank note. She held it between two fingers and waited for him to take it, but he didn’t right away.
His eyes bored into hers.
She felt an electric current surge through all her nerve endings.
Then he smiled, and slowly drew the note from her fingers.
Clara sat up in bed, waiting anxiously for Seger to come home, but he stayed away for most of the night—which gave her plenty of time to think about what happened that day.
Quintina had lied. She had looked Clara in the eye and spoken a complete fabrication. Clearly, she was carrying out some sort of scheme to disgrace Clara. But why?
The answer was obvious: Gillian wanted Seger, and Quintina wanted her niece to have him.
As soon as Clara realized that, she decided it would be best to remain in her bedchamber and wait for her husband to return, for she had no idea what might occur if she confronted Quintina or Gillian. She did not know how far they would take this.
Finally, after spending the entire evening entertaining every possible scenario about where Seger had gone, Clara heard the coach roll up outside. It was almost midnight. By the time he reached her bedchamber, Clara was wound up tighter than a tall case clock.
Falling for the Marquess (American Heiress Trilogy Book 2) Page 25
