Jilting the Duke (29 page)

“I know nothing of those.” Sophia looked bewildered. “I pay my staff and make my smaller expenditures in coin. Any larger bills I forward to Aldine to draw against my accounts.”

Aidan exchanged a glance with Walgrave. “Are you aware that simply having forged notes in your possession is as much a crime as making or using them? The officers, finding these, would have taken you directly to the Tower.”

Aidan folded the bills and handed them to Walgrave. “You know what to do with those?”

Walgrave nodded.

Aidan turned his attention back to Sophia. “Think carefully. Are there any papers here that you would not wish to be discovered?”

She looked to the desk and put her hand to her breast. Aidan could see the faintest hint of a ribbon. Aidan glanced at Walgrave to see he had also noticed. Walgrave nodded in acknowledgment.

“Show us what you have and where they are hidden. We can't risk that something else has been hidden there as well.” Aidan felt the same anxiety he'd felt when they'd entered. What if they failed? What would happen to Sophia if they didn't find all the evidence planted against her? Would he lose her just as he'd found her again?

“There are some papers. But I . . .” She turned slightly away from him and instead looked imploringly at Walgrave. Aidan felt his blood rise as anxiety turned to anger. She should have looked to him. What was she hiding?

“Damn it, woman. We have little time.” Aidan stalked to the desk, barely containing his growing fury. Ignoring Sophia's side of the partner desk, he sat on Tom's side. His eyes followed each curve of the carved design, examined each panel until he saw a slight bump near the corner. He felt the molding, exerting pressure with his fingers as he moved his hand along the frame. He felt a click, and a panel opened. Behind it was a keyhole.

He turned to Sophia. “The key.” He held out his hand.

She didn't move.

“Sophia, any agent of the Home Office will find this compartment in no more time than it took me. Give me the key. I can pick the lock, but I might damage it.”

She still didn't move. He remembered again the press of her lips against his, the crush of her body moving in passion against him, his own passion sated in her sighs. A week in his bed and his company, and she still didn't trust him. He'd been betrayed again, by her and by his own desires. To think he had changed his mind about her and her motives—to think he had almost confessed he loved her.

“Fine.” He pulled a penknife from his boot and reached toward the lock.

“No. Don't destroy it; it would be obvious.” She lifted the ribbon from her neck and handed him the key. “Would you trust me if I told you the papers are only of the most personal nature?”

“What, Sophia? Letters from a lover?” Aidan growled.

“In a sense.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

That was the wrong answer. He resisted jamming the key in the lock. He had to get himself under control. He had been searching the library, frightened they wouldn't find whatever had been hidden there in time. And she had been hiding papers all along, even through the night they had searched together. Papers of a “most personal nature.”

He heard the lock click open and pulled gently on the key as if it were a handle. The door swung free.

“Is the hair still there?”

“Hair?”

“I placed a hair over the stack, so that I would know if the letters had been disturbed.”

“Look for yourself.”

He pulled away from the space so that she could lean in to see. The plait of her hair in a loose braid down her back brushed his shoulder. Without wanting to, he desired her. She began to reach in, but he stopped her. “That's enough. Step away.”

Her hand hesitated, then withdrew. She obeyed with reticence. “I would prefer for Walgrave to examine the papers.”

He ignored her and took the papers out. There were several documents. Two were folded in half then in an accordion, the outside of the document labeled. His Italian was sufficient to see they were both certifications of birth. The third was a letter, seal intact, addressed in Tom's hand . . . to him.

He began to break open the seal.

“Aidan, wait. Let me explain.”

“This letter is addressed to me. You have had weeks to explain whatever it reveals.”

She looked crushed, and Walgrave went to stand by her, placing his arm around her shoulders in comfort. She looked up at him pleadingly. “It's not the time. Please, stop him. I promise I'll explain later.”

Aidan glared at Walgrave, who shrugged. He placed the letter addressed to him to the side and focused on the birth papers.

The first birth certificate was six years old, and recorded the birth of a Liliana Gardiner; mother, Francesca Bruni, father, Thomas Gardiner, Lord Wilmot. Tom had fathered and acknowledged a child, while married to Sophia. So she did know of the mistress.

The second was a birth certificate for Ian, mother Sophia, father Tom, but the date of birth was wrong, making Ian older, almost ten. If that were the case, then Sophia had been pregnant when she married Tom. That didn't fit with her story of a marriage forged by her aunt's machinations, but her aunt had offered the story herself, and Sophia's dislike of her aunt had been palpable. Something didn't fit, but he would think on it later; he was still too angry to think clearly. He reached for the letter.

“Aidan, Tom left that letter in my care; I was to choose the best time for you to read it. Trust me: this is not it.” She was pleading. And through his anger, he saw the moment of his revenge come into focus, if he still wished for it. She was in his power. The passion of the past week had given him the hold he wanted, but the softness of her body had stripped him of his resolve. There was only one truth he knew: whatever was in the letter, she wished for him not to know. And he had thought she had trusted him with all her secrets. Had he been less angry, he might have admitted that he still had secrets of his own. But he felt frustrated, hurt, and betrayed. Again.

He pushed the letter into his boot. “Then I will read it later. But this one tells me a great deal.” He held out Liliana's birth certificate. “Tom fathered a bastard.”

“No. Tom acknowledged Liliana as his child; I agreed. In part, the letter to you asks for you to serve as Liliana's guardian. Tom knew Lily would need a powerful ally to ensure she is never deprived of her settlement as his daughter.”

“Francesca . . .” He looked back at the name of Tom's mistress, then remembered the woven blanket in Tom's case in the attic, the perfume of bergamot. “The Francesca who lived at your villa?”

Walgrave interjected. “Aidan, there is no time for this. We still haven't found Tom's code key. And we have to repair the room before the magistrates arrive.” He turned to Sophia, apology on his face and in his voice. “Forster has to read his letter now. It might offer something of value to us in understanding Tom's code.”

She watched with dread as Aidan pulled the letter out and turned it over. “Stop! If you must read it, we should be alone. Walgrave, could you remain here and repair this mess? I'll call Dodsley. We'll be . . . only a little while.” Once more in control, she motioned toward the door. “Please.”

Aidan leaned forward, shutting the door on the now-empty compartment, relocking the door, and resetting the panel that hid it all from view. He placed the key with the ribbon in the top desk drawer for the officials to find and use. Then, standing, he picked up the birth certificates and his letter. He offered with false gallantry, “After you, my lady.”

She led him, not to the study, but up the stairs to her dressing room, which was brightly lit.

“Are you thinking to seduce me, madam, to regain those papers? Because I'm sure we have time for such entertainment.” He pulled her to him, kissed her deeply, pressing his firmness into her belly. She pushed him away.

“I need to change into more suitable clothes if I'm going to be surprised by the police. I assumed you would want to search my private rooms.”

“No, I've already done that. Weeks ago.”

She looked startled, confused. This was his opportunity. To watch her face change from trust to realization.

“You've been spying on me?” Her tone held startled disbelief. “Why?”

“It was a request of the Home Office, nothing more.”

“If it were nothing more, then you wouldn't have agreed. What was it that made you agree? It couldn't have been something I'd done.... We hadn't seen each other in years. All this time, I thought you were being kind to me. To Ian.”

Tears filled her eyes, and the pain in them clutched at his heart, but only for a moment. She turned away from him, and he watched her back as she stood quietly. She took a linen handkerchief from a pocket in her dress and wiped her eyes. He watched her back stiffen before she turned back to him. When she did face him once more, his Sophia of the past week was fully gone. “But you weren't, were you?”

The flat emotionless tone was back in her voice, and like Shakespeare's Hermione, Sophia had turned back into a statue.

He began to speak, but she held up her hand, pressed it lightly to his lips, a motion that had she done it only an hour ago would have been the touch of a lover. But now she was cold. “No, don't speak, at least not of this.”

“Why didn't you tell me you were increasing before you married?” He sat on the stool in front of her toilette. The scent of lavender water almost made him relent.

She stiffened. “You didn't ask. But Tom's letter will explain.”

“I'm not interested in Tom's letter at this moment.” To emphasize his words, he placed the letter on her dressing table. He watched her look at the letter. “I'm interested in how quickly my fiancée threw me over to marry my best friend. I was gone less than two weeks before my father wrote with the news that you and Tom were engaged.” This was his moment to turn the knife. He stretched as if completely at ease. “Given Ian's birthday, you must have fallen into Tom's bed almost as soon as I left.”

He watched her eyes widen, and her face turn pale. The knuckles in her hand whitened as she grasped the back of a chair.

“You got the letters in time, before the wedding.” She spoke slowly, parsing out the words. “You knew we sent for you, but you hid from us. From me.”

He nodded, offering his most charming smile, and shrugged. “I was ready to go abroad, to make my fortune, and you had chosen a more lucrative arrangement.” He had it: his revenge, there in the way her shoulders collapsed just slightly, the downward turn of her head, the tightening of her hand into a fist that she pressed to her mouth to catch the sob.

“So, let's read this letter. Perhaps I can ignore it as well,” he quipped. She said nothing, staring at him inscrutably.

He began to read. Tom began with the same narrative of how they had been forced into an engagement by the machinations of her aunt. Aidan could hear his old friend's voice, and he pitied Tom for falling for the siren he now knew too clearly Sophia had been . . . and remained.

“By now Sophia has confided in you the reasons for our marriage. The night of the ball I had been coming to find you, so that you and she could elope. But her aunt's scheme complicated everything; the man was cruel and a rogue, and I feared what he would have done to her—or your child—if she had been forced to marry him.”

The words “your child” struck home. Aidan's head reeled. Suddenly, he saw all the details he'd ignored come together in a clear picture: Tom's insistence that Aidan be Ian's guardian; Sophia's face when she'd told him Ian's age; Ian's ability to strategize; and Malcolm's persistent intuition that there was something to the story they didn't know. Aidan's stomach turned at the realization that Barlow had been right: Aidan had let his irrational pursuit of Sophia's guilt cloud his judgment, and now, he had destroyed his own happiness as much as he had destroyed hers. He needed time to take it all in, to see the true shape of the story. But this much was clear: whatever Sophia had believed before, she knew now that he had chosen to abandon her.

The sound of Sophia talking brought him back to the present.

“All these years I thought you hadn't gotten my letter, that if you had, you would have returned, that it was my fault, all of it, for loving you too much, for putting Tom in the position to save my reputation, for making it so that Tom couldn't marry the woman he loved when he found her. All those years I wondered how my life, Tom's life, all of our lives, would have been different if you had received just one of those letters, if you had come back. All these years I felt that we cheated you somehow of your child, of your right to see him grow up. But you
chose
not to come back. I never considered that: that you would choose to stay away.”

“Sophia . . . I believed you had chosen Tom.”

She shook her head, refusing him the explanation, and her belief. “You told me to send for you if I needed you, and I did. I trusted you. Trusted that you loved me. But you didn't trust me. Or Tom. And you never wondered, not for one instant, what might have happened for us to call you back.”

She turned toward the fireplace, speaking to herself, not to him. “I never let myself believe that Tom was the better man. I always loved him for the man he was, and for all he did for me and Ian. But I never let him replace you in my heart. Yet he was faithful to you all along, giving up his own freedom because you and I were reckless. Because he loved you . . . and me.”

Aidan watched her in the mirror beside the fireplace, and he waited for her anger. There should have been anger; he had been the faithless one, not her. He had chosen to believe her a flirt and a jilt, less interested in his love than in Tom's money. Without realizing how much he had imbibed his father's and Aaron's values, Aidan had believed himself to have so little value that he had been unable to believe that Sophia loved him. The words had come so easily to her; they couldn't be true. Though all his work for the Home Office during the wars had relied on his ability to see past appearances to the truth of things, in his own affairs, he had failed to exercise even the most basic curiosity. He had failed to ask
why
, because doing so would have revealed his own failings and his own culpability. He turned his attention back to Sophia—the woman he now realized he had wronged deeply and repeatedly.