Harlequin Historical July 2020 - Box Set 1 of 2

by Virginia Heath

  ‘He owns the damn mortgage, Lydia. And whenever he wants something he waves the damn deeds in our faces!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Slugger said you were back.’ Owen came quickly into his office, ridiculously pleased to see her, then stopped dead.

  Lydia was sat at his desk, papers strewn everywhere and glaring at him as if he disgusted her.

  ‘You are investigating my family!’ A statement, not a question, because she was holding the file the Runner had delivered yesterday. A very damning file. One he should have locked away rather than tossed carelessly in the drawer. ‘How could you?’

  ‘I am investigating the thefts…it is impossible to do that without looking into your family history, too.’ He raked an agitated hand though his hair, cursing himself for his stupidity. ‘To be fair to me, I merely engaged the Runner. I didn’t tell him to dig up all that.’

  While the contents of the thorough dossier did not lead him in the direction of the real thief, they were still damning. Beyond damning, in fact. Documenting a sordid tale of Barton hedonism and debauchery which he had intended to spare her from.

  ‘I have sisters, I see. Two of them I never knew about. By two different women to boot. And apparently a nephew, too.’

  Both her father and her weak-willed brother had a habit of paying off mistresses instead of debts. And the list of hidden debts the dogged Runners had uncovered was frankly staggering. Mind-boggling, in fact. Justin Barton had racked up gaming debts at every unsavoury and undesirable gaming hell in the capital and, as he had initially suspected, gone to some very dubious money lenders to help pay for them. He sincerely hoped she hadn’t reached the page which listed his penchant for brothels who catered in quite particular perversions. No sister should know their brother enjoyed such depravities in the bedchamber.

  And then… Oh, God! There was all the Kelvedon stuff. Owen winced. ‘I knew nothing of it all myself until yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday? Before we left for Aveley Castle?’ After they had made love for the first time and before they had done it again for the second. That made him wince again. He should have said something. ‘What do you intend to do with it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Her bitter laugh was without humour. ‘More blackmail, I presume, seeing as that has proved so fruitful.’

  ‘Blackmail? Of course not.’ He touched her shoulder, only to have her pull away as if he had slapped her. ‘Lydia… I’m sorry you saw all this. Genuinely I am. I am just trying to get to the truth.’

  ‘No, Owen. You are trying to control everything and everyone. Using whatever makes the best leverage—exactly as you did before.’

  ‘Where has this all come from?’ Because this wasn’t the woman he had made love to this morning, nor the one he had bared his soul to in the carriage. But in the hours since he had last seen her, she had been with her brother. ‘Has Justin put all this nonsense into your head?’

  ‘We both know it isn’t nonsense.’ She stood, took herself to stand on the opposite side of the room and then hugged her arms tight around her body in defence. ‘You have been blackmailing my family.’

  ‘I really haven’t…’

  ‘Do you deny you used the mortgage deed to force my father into giving you my hand in marriage?’

  He should have told her about that at least. He’d had ample opportunity these last few weeks. ‘Only because I couldn’t bear the thought of you marrying Kelvedon! You know how I feel about you, Lydia.’

  ‘Do I? Only you’ve never actually said it out loud.’

  Only because it frankly scared the hell out of him. For a man who feared being controlled, it was the ultimate weapon. Or rather she was.

  ‘Then I’ll say it now… I love you, Lydia. I’ve always loved you. Right from the first moment I saw you and that blasted thunderbolt knocked me sideways. I never stopped loving you. It’s why I came back. Why I was desperate to come back.’ He had seven damning swallows tattooed into his skin to prove it. Each marked a year and renewed his desire for a safe return home—to her. He now knew it had all been for her. ‘It is why I immediately sought you out as soon as the ship hit the shore and why I couldn’t leave you alone afterwards.

  ‘You must have realised. Must have wondered why I just happened to be in the park when you rode there? Why I always sought you out at balls and parties?’ He edged towards her and, when he was close enough, reached out his hand and gently caressed her cheek. She didn’t pull away this time. ‘Why I married you… All those damn thunderbolts! They keep striking me out of nowhere. Knocking me sideways. It was never business… I love you, Lydia. So much it terrifies me…and I think you love me, too.’ If she didn’t, he was well and truly doomed. ‘I hope you love me, too.’

  There were tears in her eyes. He was baring his soul, but she still looked down her nose at him. ‘Did you use the mortgage deed as leverage to get back my clothes?’

  ‘I did… I had to. Your father wouldn’t budge otherwise.’ Owen should have come clean then. ‘I tried to tell you…’ He couldn’t lie. ‘That’s not strictly true. I wanted to tell you, but… I knew it would look bad.’

  ‘It does look bad.’ Yet she still didn’t pull away. ‘And all of that…’ he gestured to the desk ‘…also looks bad. So much so, I really don’t know what to think or who to believe any longer.’

  ‘What does your heart say?’

  She stared deep into his eyes, then took a step back. ‘I don’t think my heart has the best judgement. Not when my head knows categorically you possess all that damning knowledge.’ Her gaze flicked to the file on the desk. ‘And you still own the deed to the Berkeley Square house.’

  ‘Then allow me to simplify things.’

  He unlocked the safe and pulled out the deed, then handed it to her.

  ‘It’s yours now. To do with as you please.’

  ‘Even if that means gifting it to my brother.’

  ‘So he can mortgage it all over again and likely lose the house within the year?’ Owen shrugged. It wasn’t as if he was ever going to see his three thousand pounds again anyway. Justin Barton owed twice that and most probably more. ‘Yes. I’ll even summon a messenger so you can send it express or we can deliver the damn thing together right now. And as to all that…’ They both glanced to the messy pile of damning papers. ‘Let’s throw it all on the fire.’

  ‘No…it might turn out to be important…for your investigation.’

  ‘I’ll call off the investigation. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It absolutely matters. You have a right to know the truth. After all you have been through, I wouldn’t deny you that. Any more than I can deny the truth of what you’ve discovered. It’s right there in black-and-white, after all. Your Runner has been very…thorough.’ That she didn’t condemn it all as lies was testament to her great strength of character. Unless she already had some doubts about her brother.

  ‘Then you keep it. Put it somewhere safe until you decide what you want me to do with it.’

  She stared at it, obviously shocked at the gesture, but still not completely convinced of his sincerity. ‘I need to think about things.’ She clutched the beribboned deed to her chest like a shield. ‘There seems suddenly so much to think about… So much that I do not understand…when last night I thought I knew absolutely everything I needed to know.’

  Last night they had made love for hours. Randolph’s words of caution had been ringing in his ears and he had blithely ignored them and built his house of cards anyway, selfishly avoiding the past for just a little bit longer so he could enjoy the present. Deluding himself it didn’t truly matter when it did.

  Idiot.

  Even today, when they had talked in the carriage, he had held back. Censoring the past to suit his own purpose and forgetting he hadn’t been the only one to live it. In his determination to uncover the truth he was hurting the thi
ng he loved the most. Looking at the enormous weight of the world suddenly on her shoulders, he wasn’t quite so sure any more it was worth it.

  Ignoring the pile of papers, she walked to the door, their whole future in the balance.

  ‘Just remember…above all else, Lydia…please remember that I love you.’

  ‘Enough to pay my brother’s debts if I ask it?’

  If he sold his half of Libertas to Randolph he could just about cover them all. ‘Yes.’ If that is what it took to keep her affection.

  Her fingers grasped the handle, slowly pulled the door open, then she hesitated and turned around, the oddest expression on her face. ‘For me there was no thunderbolt…’ Of course there wasn’t. ‘For me…time stood still.’ She offered him the ghost of a smile. ‘It has an annoying habit of doing that around you.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Yes.

  No pause. No hesitation. She had asked him if he would pay her brother’s debts as a test of his sincerity and he had agreed in a heartbeat, even though she knew from Gertie he had spent almost all his savings paying her father. Owen was prepared to bankrupt himself for her.

  Purely because he loved her.

  Through all the chaos this dire day had thrown at her, only that seemed to matter.

  As pivotal moments went, it was probably the most significant moment in her life. She had been lost in the fog, ambushed by secrets and rattling skeletons from the past, feeling betrayed and bereft and so crushingly alone, expecting him to disappoint her, too, and he hadn’t. He had held his hands up, admitted he had been wrong, spoken directly from the heart and handed it all to her without a second thought.

  Why on earth would he do that unless she was his entire world?

  Then he had given her space to digest it all—not that it had helped—and she had sat for hours next to her fireplace, staring at the flames and wondering what on earth she was supposed to do next. Then another two had passed as she stared at the ceiling.

  When she had flung open his bedchamber door in the small hours and fallen on his mouth hungrily, he had sensed she wasn’t ready to talk and simply needed passion. Being Owen, he had given it unreservedly, just as he always gave her everything she wanted. Taking her lead, there had been no preamble, no lazy journey of discovery, no need for explanations. It had been hot and fast and completely uninhibited.

  When he repeated his assertion that he loved her, she could see the truth of it in the stormy blue depths of his beautiful eyes, so she told him she loved him, too. And he had thanked her.

  Thanked her!

  As if she had just given him the most precious gift in the world when she had only been admitting to a truth which had been self-evident for ten long years. She loved him. Needed him. And believed him completely.

  Not that that had helped her to sleep either. While Owen slept the blissful sleep of a man who genuinely hadn’t done anything wrong, Lydia’s mind was racing. The past, so long buried, was suddenly coming back in a flood. Events which had seemed insignificant. Details she had forgotten. All of them needed to be examined and dissected and put into their correct order.

  All through that summer, and largely ignored by Lydia because she was too busy being head over heels in love, items had been going missing from the house. She remembered that now. Alongside her mother’s treasured pearls had been three jewelled stick pins belonging to her father, a valuable antique ormolu clock which had lived in the morning room and several small pieces of silver—snuff boxes, pill boxes, hip flasks and the like.

  At the time, she had thought nothing of it. Servants had a sporadic habit of stealing things in the Barton household for the exact same reasons as they hastily left its employ—because their wages were so bad and they had such little regard for her father. But as she reluctantly recalled it all now, those thefts that fateful summer were different because they weren’t sporadic. In fact, they had become so frequent, her father had decided to get to the root of things himself and unmask the culprit. And like most things he did in self-righteous ill temper, he became obsessed.

  They all knew he wouldn’t rest until he caught the perpetrator. The entire household was in uproar because of it. Therefore, it stood to reason, it was entirely plausible the real guilty party might have panicked and implicated Owen to save himself from imminent discovery and her father’s revenge. Her husband wanted to know who might have been capable of such a heartless fraud, yet she was struggling to remember all the servants’ names at that time. There had been so many over the years, she would probably have to resort to the household account books to list them all. Or talk to Maybury, the only retainer who had lasted the course.

  One of those many long-forgotten servants had to be the culprit. But who?

  Who?

  Then, as she dug deep to try to force it all out, her fevered mind suddenly wandered further back still, to the weeks before she had met Owen, and all at once everything slotted into place.

  * * *

  Her racing heart threatened to beat out of her ribs as she stared at her father’s house.

  ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’

  ‘No.’ As dawn was yet to break, and because he knew the still-sleeping Owen would be furious, she had walked through the dark streets all alone except for Slugger, who had accompanied her. ‘But I would be grateful if you waited here for me, Cyril…in case things turn nasty.’

  A laughable statement when things were guaranteed to turn nasty.

  She took one last calming breath to steel herself, then knocked on the door.

  ‘My lady?’ Poor Maybury was flustered, not all the buttons on his waistcoat yet done up in his haste to get dressed. ‘What brings you here at this hour?’

  ‘Urgent business. Inform my brother I am here and tell him I need to speak to him immediately.’ There was no point skirting around the issue. Things needed to be said and the truth needed to be uncovered.

  ‘He didn’t retire till very late, my lady…’

  ‘It cannot be helped. Kindly inform him that if he is not downstairs in five minutes, then I shall be coming up.’

  The butler must have seen the slightly manic and determined expression on her face because he nodded and practically ran up the stairs. Left alone, she decided to take the opportunity to search her father’s study herself, just in case she might find something which might prove her unthinkable new theory incorrect.

  Less than five minutes later, that was where Justin found her. He was wrapped in a robe, his hair on end and his eyes dull and bleary. Probably, she realised dispassionately, from drink. Justin liked to drink. It was one of his many vices, apparently. Looking at him now, she realised she had given him too much leeway in recent years and made too many excuses for the way he behaved. He was a weak-willed, pathetic specimen of manhood. Spoiled, arrogant, self-absorbed and ultimately spineless.

  ‘What the blazes is going on, Lydia?’

  She had trusted him. Thought him on her side. Yet all along he had been in cahoots with their sire. He had never been a decent brother at all—merely a liar. A cowardly wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  ‘Where to start? That is the more pertinent question.’ From her reticule, she pulled out the folded letter she had hidden when she had first found it in Owen’s office and handed it to her brother, then watched him warily scan it.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘The smelly Marquess of Kelvedon gave it to a Bow Street Runner.’ She wanted to slap him for his deceit and his greed and his treacherous duplicity.

  ‘What are Bow Street doing talking to Kelvedon? Did you put them up to it?’

  How dared he be outraged! ‘Surely your first response should have been to drop to your knees and beg my forgiveness for your treachery, Brother! All the while I believed you were trying to save me from marrying that lecher, but I now realise it was you who brokered the deal in
the first place. You suggested Kelvedon to Father, didn’t you? That is your handwriting, isn’t it, Justin? Your seal on the front?’

  ‘Father needed a certain amount of money and the field of potential candidates was slim.’

  How typical of him to pass the blame elsewhere rather than apologise.

  ‘And why did he need that money, Justin?’

  ‘You know full well why! Papa put us up to our eyeballs in debt!’

  ‘Which brings me neatly on to your debts.’ She retrieved the second pilfered sheet from her bag and watched his face pale as he read the damning list.

  ‘It’s funny what you remember sometimes.’ And since she had been dredging up and trawling through her memories, things she had once believed almost without question no longer held up to scrutiny. ‘But I now see how a passing comment, something I had no reason to think was significant, suddenly becomes incredibly significant. Like Papa’s comment on the night he informed me I was to marry Owen when you argued against it. He said, “You’ve done quite enough already, boy…” He was referring to this, wasn’t he? Your gambling debts. Your loans. Harlots. Hedonism. Avarice. The money you paid your mistress to leave the country with your illegitimate son. Your mess, Justin. On top of his. And you both sold me down the river to pay for it all.’

  She had rendered him speechless clearly, because he gaped like a fish. Although what she expected him to say, when there really was nothing he could say which would justify his actions, she had no clue. ‘We’ve had three poor harvests in a row, Lydia! I was desperate!’

  Lord, he was pathetic. A lily-livered, selfish liar to the end.

  ‘Those debts go back to Cambridge, Justin.’ And the root cause of some of them disgusted her. Her beloved brother really was just the mirror image of their horrible father. She’d had her suspicions over the years, but quashed them. Felt guilty for her disloyalty for even thinking them, but had refused to believe what was right in front to her eyes.

  Not believing what she was seeing—but seeing what she wanted to believe. Exactly as Owen had cautioned.