by Mari Carr
Weston smiled grimly. “The Admiralty plans to burn me. They created the Wesley Derrick identity and they can take it away just as easily.”
Rose straightened. “Tabby—will Tabby be okay?”
“Yes,” Tristan said. “We’re aware of Miss Anderson’s condition and needs, and have no hold on or control over her situation.”
Marek was frowning, but Rose nodded and stood. “Let’s go.”
“Ms. Hancock, you too are free to go, though you’ll have to leave England,” Tristan said. “When I arrived yesterday it looked like you were attempting to escape. And based on the reports of the altercation from yesterday, you aren’t here willingly.” Tristan raised his brows. “Though I’m not quite sure who was keeping you prisoner and who was rescuing you.”
“Don’t worry about it, Blondie,” Rose said. “First Weston kidnapped me, then Marek. I’m just a very kidnappable sort of person.”
“I wasn’t kidnapping you, I was rescuing you,” Marek protested.
“I saved you from being crushed by several tons of cave-in,” Weston growled.
Rose just raised her dark brows, looking at each of them in turn.
Tristan, looking a bit miffed by the “Blondie” comment, said, “Just to be clear, everyone is here willingly?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“At least until someone else kidnaps me.”
Marek snorted out a laugh and Weston grinned. Damn, he loved this woman. She wasn’t the girl he’d fallen in love with. She was hard in some ways, bitter—and had every right to be—but she was funny and wry and smart. The woman she was now wasn’t the woman she would have been if he’d managed to get them both out twelve years ago, but she was one hell of a woman.
Weston pushed away from the sink. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Fifteen
The recordings were housed in a small village in an even smaller library just outside of Poole in Dorset. They drove by Luscombe Valley Nature Reserve, and parked in a large lot shared by a yacht club, the library, and a small restaurant with an outdoor eating area that extended over the water.
Tristan’s large SUV was conspicuous in the lot, which was filled with Audis and BMWs. There were a few Peugeots, which probably belonged to the people who worked at the restaurant, yacht club, and library, rather than the patrons of any of the three.
It was overcast, and the wind coming off the water cold enough that Weston shivered as he climbed out of the front passenger seat. He clenched his teeth in frustration as the rest of them seemed to take their time getting out.
They’d had to swing by the cottage, which added nearly ninety minutes to the trip. If Tristan had been able to drive them straight from Hampton Court to Poole, it would have been a two-hour trip on the M3. Instead they’d had to head south on the M23, toward Brighton. They’d stopped at the cottage for five minutes, just long enough for Marek to collect his wallet, passport, and luggage. Then, much to Weston’s frustration, Marek had insisted on returning the rental car.
The man was a damned Boy Scout, who seemed immune to Weston’s repeated assertions that they didn’t have time for this.
Once the rental car had been returned, they got on the M27 headed east, paralleling England’s southern coast. It was two hours until they reached the library.
Weston was perilously close to yanking everyone bodily out of the car before the back doors opened and Marek and Rose climbed out.
Rose was still wearing the long white nightgown, but Marek had fished a clean button-down shirt out of his bag and given it to her. She’d tied the tails together at her midriff and rolled up the sleeves. If the light hit it right the silhouette of her legs was clearly visible. Weston had grabbed her shoes for her. Maybe another woman would have looked weird, but Rose looked like a model, or maybe a celebrity—the kind of person who was so beautiful that when they wore what would otherwise be an odd outfit they looked stylish.
Marek looked trim and equally stylish in a black T-shirt, zip-up jacket with the discreet logo of an expensive hiking company, and jeans.
In comparison, Weston was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. He could have changed when they’d swung by his cabin, but he didn’t because they didn’t fucking have time for any of this.
“Wes, are you okay?” Marek asked.
“Can we please go?”
Marek and Rose shared a look. It was a knowing look, and implied a kind of intimacy, not just between the two of them, but between the three of them.
He needed to calm down. He’d successfully squashed his sex drive for years; it would be a bitter sort of irony if here, at the eleventh hour, he fucked everything up because he let his dick do the thinking.
Rose nodded to him, looked around, spotted the building with the small “East Poole Historical Library” sign and started walking. Weston took two quick steps to catch up and walk beside her, Marek and Tristan falling in step behind them.
Rose uncrossed her arms and let her hand dangle between them.
Weston tentatively brushed her fingers with his. She caught his hand, interlacing their fingers. Weston felt the touch on every nerve ending in his body, as if he’d just woken up, after years of sleeping.
Once inside, he told the man at the front desk who he was, and asked for Elliot Neal.
Mr. Neal appeared a few minutes later. He was a short, almost squat man. He wasn’t fat, but instead looked as if a giant had put a hand on his head and pressed down, compacting him. His head seemed wider than it should be. He had to be in his seventies, and walked with a slight limp.
“Mr. Neal?” Weston asked, sticking out his hand.
“Aye, aye. Though call me Elliot. You must be Wesley Derrick.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Elliot, boy, Elliot.”
Being called “boy” only reinforced the urge to refer to the older man as “sir”.
“And who are these?” Elliot looked at the others.
“My friends,” Weston said. “They’re interested too.”
“Eh?” Elliot looked at each of them in turn. Tristan had, thankfully, left the sword in the car. Elliot’s expression said he doubted the story, but he didn’t comment further. “Well then. I thought you were coming before now, but I still have it all out and ready.”
“I’m sorry about the last-minute change in plans.”
“No bother, no bother. Follow me.”
The library was small and absolutely crammed with books. There was barely three feet between the tall two-sided bookcases. The cases didn’t match—some were elegant dark wood, others olive-green metal.
The front desk was exactly that, a large desk, and the man working at it had papers spread all over the surface, giving the impression that he should have been in an office somewhere, but they’d shoved his desk out here so it could do double duty.
Elliot led them through an aisle of stacks to the back of the building. Here, there were large windows that had a glorious view of the water and the boats lined up along the branching piers of the yacht club.
Warm sunlight spilled in, and this seemed like a different place than the cramped, musty front of the library. Under one window was a blond wood table, the surface bleached nearly white by the sun. On it sat two banker’s boxes, a small comb-bound manual, and three old cassette tape players with even older-looking headphones.
“Here you are.” Elliot picked up the comb-bound manual and handed it over. “You said you’re looking for memories from nineteen forty-two. This here is a list of everyone we recorded, and a quick note about what they were saying, and what year they were talking about, if they remembered that.”
Weston took the manual with an internal groan. This was going to take forever. His plan had been to rent a room in Poole and spend a week going through it all. Now he had only hours.
Elliott looked around. “I’ve got three, but I’ll see if I can find a fourth player. It’ll go a mite bit faster with all of you listening.”
Weston’s blood r
an cold, and he twisted to look at Marek, Rose, and Tristan. He could be a moron sometimes.
Tristan couldn’t be a part of this. Even if all Weston told him was that they were looking for any information about a Spanish ship that docked here instead of Dover in the early days of the war, that might be enough to pique Tristan’s curiosity.
Tristan could, if he wanted, place a single call and have members of the Masters’ Admiralty, which probably included tons of historians and scholars, piece together the story of the Esperanza. If the Masters’ Admiralty learned the secret, then Weston had no leverage over the purists, because if they knew, they would take action. When he’d been young, he had wanted explosive, wild revenge. But now…now he just wanted to quietly blackmail his parents. If either the Trinity Masters or the Masters’ Admiralty knew, something big would happen. Before now he hadn’t been willing to risk that because Rose and Caden could have, maybe would have, been collateral damage.
But he no longer wanted the Admiralty or the Trinity Masters involved. The safest way, the only way, was to keep the information secret and use it as needed.
Something must have shown on his face, because Marek put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll help.”
Tristan nodded in agreement.
Rose met his gaze and her eyes widened. She understood the very large problem. She winked.
Weston didn’t dare respond, not with Marek and Tristan looking at him.
“I’m not helping,” she declared. “I need real clothes. Underwear. Socks.”
“I can go with you,” Marek said.
Tristan frowned.
“You did tell us we were free to go,” Marek pointed out.
Damn. He needed Tristan gone, not Marek. He trusted Marek. Maybe it was foolish to do so, but he did trust the other man, after what had passed between the three of them last night. Marek’s help might, just might, make this a manageable task.
And right now, Marek was, without meaning to, being a huge pain in the ass.
“Yeah, just give us the car keys, Blondie,” Rose said. “We promise to bring it back.”
“No,” Tristan said.
“Then we’ll all go.” Rose gave Weston a significant look.
It took him a moment to figure out what she’d set up, but he got it. “There’s not enough time for me to do this on my own.”
Rose sighed, “I’m sorry, Wes, but I need…I need to feel normal.”
Either she was a very good actress or that statement was more than just a way to manipulate Tristan. It was true.
“Of course, Brown Eyes.”
“Since you don’t want us taking your car, Blondie, you can take me shopping. And Marek, you help Wes.” She crossed her arms again. “Either that, or I’m going to start walking until I find a place, and then I’ll either have to steal the clothes or exchange sexual favors for jeans.”
Her words made Weston wince and Marek frown, but they were exactly the right thing to say to Tristan. He wouldn’t let Rose go alone.
“We’ll be back as soon as we can.” Tristan clapped Weston on the shoulder. “Don’t leave.”
“Rose, do you want me to come with you?” Marek asked with concern.
“No.” She shook her head. “I know it’s silly when we’re on a deadline, but I just…” She plucked at the slinky white skirt. “I can’t keep walking around in a nightgown and shirt.”
“Of course,” Marek said. He pulled out his wallet and passed her a few pound notes.
She took the money, folding it into her palm. “Thank you.” Turning to Tristan, she said, “Shall we?”
Once Tristan and Rose were gone, Weston practically threw himself into a chair and flipped open the manual. It was forty pages long, and there were three to six entries on each page. That meant there were somewhere between a hundred and twenty, and two hundred and forty different tapes. Elliot had told him over the phone that most were thirty minutes, but a few were longer. On the low end, that meant there were sixty hours of tapes.
“I’m going to go through the book, try and identify the most likely ones. You pull them.” He scanned the first page, then flipped to the second.
“Weston, what aren’t you telling me?”
With a wince, Weston looked up. Marek was standing, hands braced on the back of the chair on the opposite side of the table.
“Just…just help me find the tapes.”
Weston grabbed a pad of paper and pen that Elliot had left for him, then kept scanning. After a moment, he heard the chair legs scrape as Marek sat. Weston jotted down three possible names from the first five pages, ripped off the sheet and passed it to Marek. Without a word, Marek pulled one of the banker’s boxes over and flipped off the lid.
They worked in silence for half an hour. Weston had identified twenty names—individuals who, based on the information in the manual, had talked about what was going on in 1942, or mentioned ships or the water. He’d put stars by the ones who’d mentioned anything oceanic.
When he looked up, Marek had already sorted them into two piles. The larger of the two were the tapes he’d put asterisks by.
Twenty tapes. Best case scenario, there was only ten hours of audio. Worst case, it was twenty hours or more.
Even at only ten hours, there was no way he could do this alone. He had to have Marek’s help.
Which meant he had to tell Marek what they were looking for.
You trust Marek. He was so used to doing things alone, he had to keep reminding himself of that.
“You remember what we told you, about the purists.”
“I remember.”
“It’s a bit too much to go into right now, but I’ve been…I’ve been looking for a way to blackmail them. They have a secret, something they’ve been protecting for a long time. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to find that secret.”
“And once you knew this secret, you were going to threaten to expose it, unless they released Rose, Caden, and your sister Tabitha?”
“Something like that,” Weston evaded. He wanted to trust Marek enough to tell him the truth, but he couldn’t let a little bit of heavy petting fool him into forgetting that Marek had ties to the Masters’ Admiralty. He might not be a member, but he had enough family influence that they’d sent a knight to find him after he’d gone off the grid for only a few hours.
What Weston planned to do was blackmail the Andersons. He had a gut feeling that Marek would be more of a “let the light shine on the truth” sort of person rather than a “beat them at their own game” blackmailer.
“Here.” Weston pushed the smaller stack, the one that was memories from 1942, to Marek. “You listen to these.”
“What am I listening for?”
“Any mention of a ship, the Esperanza, docking here or being seen here.”
“Esperanza? A Spanish ship?”
“Yes. It would have been flying the Spanish flag.”
Marek looked at him, his eyes dark, one cheekbone streaked with golden sunlight from the windows. Marek was an incredibly handsome man. Whole. Fit. Strong.
Weston grabbed a Walkman and put the headphones on. Rather than popping in the first tape right away, he went back to the manual, rereading the entries for each of the tapes. Using the scant information listed for each one, he put them in a rough order, with the most likely tape first.
By the time he had that done, his hands were trembling from the adrenaline his body was dumping into his bloodstream. This was it. He had to find the information.
It had to be here. He needed proof.
The first hour passed, with nothing on the first two tapes. He didn’t dare fast-forward in case he’d miss something.
Marek was methodically working through his own stack of eight tapes, two of them carefully set to the side. He had a sheet of paper and was jotting notes in a blocky all-caps handwriting.
Weston slid in the third tape. According to the notes, Frances Sheridan had been the East Dorset wharf master’s youngest daughter, and one of the first
women to enter the workforce as part of the war effort, working as an engineer and building ships.
He’d ranked this one highly, because he was hoping that she’d talk about her father, the wharf master.
It started with a bit of murmuring, probably the person handling the recording giving her instructions.
“Fine, fine,” said an older woman’s voice. The audio quality wasn’t great, and her voice was soft with age, but he could hear her well enough. Weston settled in to listen.
I’ll start then, will I? My name is Frances Sheridan. I never married. I’m seventy-five years old. My father was the wharf master, back when there was still good fishing here. Small vessels, the water here isn’t deep enough for the big ships.
She went on to talk about how she’d been the first woman to step forward and offer to go to work, back when only unmarried women between the ages of twenty and twenty-three had been allowed to join. She’d gone to work building war ships. Some of the work she described was that of an engineer, which she acknowledged, though she said she never had a title like that. She was a fisherman’s daughter at heart, and she knew boats, and what the ocean wanted from those who dared to ride her.
Weston forced himself to keep listening, though the tape didn’t have what he’d hoped for. He was nearly forty minutes in before he heard the muffled voice of the interviewer ask a question.
“What do you remember about Poole, what was happening here during the war? What was the feeling?”
There was a beat of silence on the tape before Frances responded.
All I remember of Poole was in the early years. Once I left in nineteen forty-two, I didn’t come back until the war was over. I was here during the blitz, and for six months after. The feeling? We were terrified, losing the war. Everyone knew someone who’d died. We’d listen to the news every night, pray quietly for the men who died in battle, prayed that London would survive another night. Prayed we weren’t next. Everyone knew they’d bombed London, but that wasn’t the only place. Portsmouth, Southampton, Bath, Coventry…they were all hit. This place, our home, didn’t feel safe anymore. When women started packing up their children and heading north and inland, to the country, no one said anything. To say anything would be admitting we were afraid, and admitting we were probably going to die.
