Leslie Lafoy (24 page)

“No he’s not, Sera,” Carden quietly assured her. “And twenty thousand is no doubt a conservative estimate.” He gave her a moment to catch her breath, to digest in small part the staggering reality of it all, and then added, “I think that whatever plans you may have for tomorrow should be set aside. You need to pay a call on your father’s publisher.”

Yes. Yes, she did. There were several questions she wanted to ask, several answers she desperately needed. And beyond those more personal ones, there were undoubtedly others that she should ask. What precisely they were, she didn’t know offhand. The publishing business was a world she had never so much as glimpsed before. “Would you be willing to accompany me, Carden?”

“If you’d like.”

“I would very much,” she admitted, relieved. “Thank you.”

“While you’re there,” Barrett said, “you might ask them why it is that they never communicated their decision to publish and why there have been no royalties paid to date.”

“Perhaps,” his mother suggested, “they couldn’t find Seraphina.”

Across from her, Carden shook his head. “She was precisely where she was when her father’s work was submitted. They could have found her had they tried to do so.”

“My late husband was my father’s agent. Perhaps…” Her voice faded into the frantic pounding of her heart as possibilities tumbled one over the other in her mind, all of them dark and mean and frighteningly twisted by the memory of the man hurrying away in the park.

“Surely your husband—God rest his soul—would have mentioned such an extraordinary coup had he known of it,” Melanie offered.

The old icy shadow of dread wrapped around her heart. Sera swallowed hard and forced herself to smile. “Yes, surely he would have.”

I want to go home, Carden.

Don’t be afraid, angel.

*   *   *

They’d done no more than was required by civility, stayed no longer than to be perfectly polite. With the copy of her father’s book in the crook of his arm, he handed her into the carriage, stepped in behind her and closed the door, asking simply, “Are you still cold?”

“To the center of my bones,” she confessed, wondering how he knew. She thought she’d done so well at pretending to be normal.

He took off his coat, draped it over her shoulders, then sat next to her and drew her into the circle of his arms. Sera snuggled closer, burying her cheek against his shoulder and finding comfort in the solid warmth of his presence and in his willingness to offer it. The tiny voice of good judgment suggested that she was courting an advance, but she ignored it. She needed his strength tonight and if a kiss or a caress were the price she had to pay for it … Price? Integrity demanded that she be honest. She enjoyed Carden’s physical attentions. To a dangerously tempting degree.

“Seraphina Baines-Miller Treadwell,” he said as the carriage began to roll down the Stanbridges’ drive. “That’s one long name.”

“Seraphina Maria Louisa Baines Miller Treadwell. And that’s just the English version. The ride home isn’t long enough to do the Spanish one.”

He laughed and hugged her tight. “It’s nice to hear the sparkle back in your voice. Are you feeling better?”

“A little,” she admitted, bracing herself for what she knew was coming. Carden had seen the darker implications of her fame long before she had. “At least I’m warmer.”

“Do you feel up to answering some questions for me?”

“I thought you would have some,” she said with a sigh, easing away from him. She was instantly chilled, but not as deeply as before. And, somehow, she felt stronger for being able to see the chiseled planes of his face and the hard line of his jaw. “Go ahead, Carden. Ask me whatever you want.”

“All right. To begin, tell me about your husband. Where did he come from? How did you meet him?”

It was precisely where she’d thought he would start. “Gerald was a financial agent for William Walker,” she began. “Are you familiar with the name?”

“I can’t say that I am.”

“Walker is an American. Twice in the last four years, he’s attempted to invade and overthrow the rightful government of Nicaragua. His vision is to create American slave states along the Mosquito Coast.”

“And the American government doesn’t approve,” he guessed.

Sera nodded. “And because of that, Walker’s forced to acquire private financing. Gerald’s responsibility was to seek out individuals who had money to invest in the enterprise. It was after Walker’s first failure to conquer Nicaragua that Gerald arrived in Belize and eventually approached my father about managing his publishing affairs.”

“And your father thought this was a good idea?”

“Oh, Carden,” she said, deeply regretting that he would never get to meet her father, would never know him for the interesting, loving person he had been. “My father was a good man. But all he wanted to do was his research. The writing and the organization of his notes were the interesting parts of it to him, but none of the rest of it appealed. And what didn’t appeal to my father, he delegated to someone else. Since he felt that conducting business with London publishing houses was inappropriate for a female mind, he rejected my offer to attend to it and happily turned over all responsibility to Gerald.”

“Your father didn’t know about his connection to this Walker fellow, did he?”

“No,” Sera assured him, pleased that he’d assumed her father to be the honorable man that he had been. “No one knew until after my father died and one of Gerald’s former compatriots came to Belize hoping to enlist his assistance in planning yet another invasion of Nicaragua. Gerald was out when the man arrived and, not knowing that Gerald had kept his past a secret, he told me everything over tea and biscuits while we waited.”

“Assuming that since you were married to the man, you approved of Walker’s goals.”

Sera nodded again. “But I’d been with Gerald long enough by then to realize not only the wisdom of keeping my opinions to myself, but also in pretending they were in sympathy with his own. He had accepted the Walker offer when Arthur and Mary heard the rumor about the ancient ruins and asked him to guide them into the interior.”

“Did—”

“Yes,” she hastened to assure him. “I had no secrets from Arthur and Mary. They were my friends. I told them everything.”

“And yet Arthur asked him to be their guide?” he asked. “Had he taken complete leave of his senses?”

“Arthur wanted to find his ruins and Gerald represented his best chances for doing so. It was a purely pragmatic decision on your brother’s part. I desperately tried to talk him out of it, but Arthur was just as single-mindedly blind about his work as my father was.”

He muttered under his breath, but Sera couldn’t tell whether it was over Arthur’s priorities or the fact that the carriage had drawn to a halt in front of his house. She watched in silence as he opened the door, vaulted out, and turned back to assist her. Though moonlight softly gilded his face and shoulders, it did nothing to soften the hard light in his eyes. Scooping the precious book from the seat beside her, she took his hand and joined him on the walkway. He gave her a smile and, still holding her hand, led her to the front door and inside.

In the silence of the sleeping house, Carden gazed down at her, wanting to gather her into his arms, kiss her slowly, thoroughly, and tell her that they were done with thinking and talking, that they were going to pretend that the world beyond the walls of Haven House didn’t exist and that they were safe.

But he couldn’t. Only a fool closed his eyes when he sensed danger prowling in the shadows. “We’re not done talking, Sera,” he said quietly as he closed the door behind them.

“I know,” she whispered, giving him one of her bravest, steadiest smiles of the evening. “We’ve yet to come to the heart of the matter.”

“Would you care to sip on a brandy while we do?”

“I don’t recall ever having had a brandy. Will I like it?”

Oh, if he were a truly predatory man … “It’s quite a bit headier than sherry,” he explained, leading her toward his study. “I’ll pour you a small glass.” And do battle with his conscience if she smiled at him and asked for more.

He was pouring and congratulating himself for self-restraint when she slipped his coat from her shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair. He paused, remembering the day she’d arrived here and how he’d vowed to put her in gowns befitting her beauty. Having so spectacularly achieved that goal, he couldn’t help but recall the others he’d made regarding her. Having her willingly in his bed. And inside a week. The latter possibility was gone; life had swept away the days without his being consciously aware of their passage. But taking her to his bed … God, he wanted her more now than he had that first day, more than he’d ever imagined he could want any woman.

She looked over at him, smiled, and glided toward him, the lamplight soft on her burnished skin, lost in the lusciously sweet valley between her breasts. His loins tightened and he heeded the warning, marshaling enough of his wits to hand her a glass and admonish, “Slow, small sips or it will go straight to your head and make you regret it.”

Following his instruction, she sampled. And then, as though testing his control, she languidly touched the tip of her tongue to her lower lip. “I like it better than sherry,” she said, softly interrupting his fantasy. “It feels like liquid velvet.”

Carden dragged air into his lungs and forced himself to think past the shimmering heat of desire. Sera wasn’t willing to brave scandal for him. He’d given her a choice in the kitchen and she’d made it. She didn’t want him with the same kind of hunger and desperation that he wanted her. He couldn’t force her. Not and live with himself.

He expelled a long, hard breath and deliberately focused his thoughts on the complexity of the world that had sprung up around her in the last hour. After several long moments he said, “Sera, I don’t how to say this gently.”

“Bluntly will do,” she replied, taking another sip of brandy.

He was going to hate himself in a few minutes. “I believe there’s a distinct possibility that Gerald either abandoned or murdered my brother and his wife in the jungle and made his way to Walker’s camp to rejoin the cause. I think he’s probably still alive, Sera.”

“And as ugly as those possibilities are, I think there’s even more,” she added evenly, stunning him with her calm. “If, as my father’s agent, Gerald knew of the acceptance and publication of his work … and if it’s indeed the financial success that everyone says that it is … the royalties would make for a very handsome contribution to Walker’s cause, wouldn’t they?”

“Or to Gerald Treadwell’s own pockets,” he suggested, beginning to pace. “You’re supposed to be in Belize, awaiting his emergence from the jungle. As he left you, he was reasonably certain you’d never discover that you’d been cheated of your inheritance. He couldn’t have anticipated that a man named Percival Reeves falling face first into his porridge would bring you to England less than a year later or that you’d attend a dinner party a fortnight after your arrival and learn of the duplicity.”

Sera took another sip of the brandy and waited, not wanting to tell him what she had to.

“I know it all sounds terribly far-fetched, Seraphina, but…”

“No, it doesn’t, actually,” she countered. “I think I’ve seen Gerald.”

He whirled on her so fast the brandy sloshed over the rim of his glass. “What?”

“In the park, the morning we rescued the puppies,” she supplied, her heart thundering and her chest aching. “I saw him walking away at the back of the crowd that had gathered about us.”

“Why, for the love of God, didn’t you mention this then?”

He
was upset by the news? He didn’t even know Gerald! “What was I supposed to say, Carden?” she demanded. “‘Oh, by the by, there goes my dead husband’?”

His shoulders slumped. “Damnation, Sera,” he said, rubbing his forehead and somehow looking both furious and dejected.

“I thought I was merely imagining things at the time,” she offered in her defense. “But, now, given what I’ve learned this evening…”

“Do you think he saw you?”

He was grasping at straws and as much as she wished she could let him hold the hope, she couldn’t. “How could he have
not
seen me, Carden? Seen all of us? We provided everyone in the park with a grand performance.”

“I’m going to hire Barrett to find the bastard,” he announced just before tossing the remaining contents of his glass down his throat.

Her heart tripped and her blood raced cold through her veins. She drank all of her brandy in the same fashion as he had and then went to refill her glass. “I would much prefer to leave Gerald Treadwell forever in the past,” she said, pleased with the calm she heard in her voice as she turned back to face him. “Please, Carden, if you care anything at all for me, don’t prod the snake.”

He crossed to place his empty glass on the desk beside her. And stayed. Leaning his hip against the corner and crossing his arms as he always did, he said quietly, gently, “I don’t have any right to ask and you certainly don’t have to answer. But … why did you marry him, Sera?”

She knew the course their exchange would follow and resolved to be honest with him no matter how poor the light of truth made her look. There was nothing to be done but face the past squarely and hope he understood she’d done the best she could in the circumstances in which she’d found herself at the time. And perhaps, when she was done, he’d understand why she needed the past left in the past.

“My parents were dying and they knew it. Both were worried about what would happen to me after they passed away. Gerald was fairly well educated and charming and they saw in him a deliverance for me.”

“You married him to please your parents?” he asked incredulously.

“To give them peace in their passing, yes.” She sipped the brandy, fortifying her determination. “But I’d be lying to you, Carden, if I were to claim that I didn’t have concerns of my own. I knew that when my parents died, I’d be stranded in Belize without a shilling to my name. Being the wife of Gerald Treadwell, while less than an ideal situation … It was never a romantic relationship, but, when sober, he was at least well-spoken and reasonably attractive. You have no idea what a rarity that is on the Mosquito Coast.”