Leslie Lafoy (2 page)

Seraphina paused, wondering how much longer Marta would be with her other patron. Should she patiently wait or make her presence known by knocking on the pie tin nailed to the tent’s center post? Good manners weren’t generally expected or practiced in Belize. She glanced toward the shore and noted the dinghies being dragged up out of the tide line. Time was growing short. Twin beads of perspiration rolled down her back and into the already drenched layers of fabric encircling her waist.

Sera listened again to the conversation inside the tent, noting that it now contained the certain ring of business being concluded. Deciding that she could afford to be polite and wait her turn, she resisted the urge to use her sleeve to wipe her brow and instead considered the letter crumpled in her hand. It took a moment and a bit of shifting, but she managed to tuck her portfolio under her arm and free her hands for use.

She smoothed the wrinkles from the letter as best she could and then reexamined the boldly written address.
Arthur William Albert Reeves. Belize.
Clearly, the sender had no inkling that Arthur had disappeared. Which left her in a quandary as to what to do. Seraphina sighed, wishing this sort of decision hadn’t been thrust upon her and yet knowing that she didn’t have any choice but to make it. One shouldered all manner of burdens for friends.

The simplest solution would be to file the letter in the box of receipts she was amassing in Arthur’s absence, but if she did, there was a possibility that she would be ignoring important business that needed to be addressed. What that business might be, she hadn’t the foggiest notion.

But she did know that in the three years the Reeveses had been in Belize, Arthur had never received correspondence of any sort. Mail came so seldom that everyone knew when it did and who had received what. The very fact that a letter had come at all implied that it was of great importance and therefore she was duty-bound to ascertain its contents. And considering that Arthur and Mary had left her in charge of their home, their children, and their money … Surely that delegation of authority extended to dealing responsibly with their correspondence.

Of course, there was nothing on the face of the letter itself to suggest that it was of a business nature. It was just as likely to be a personal communication. If it was, to open and read it would be a grave violation of Arthur’s privacy.

“You’re dithering, Sera,” she muttered, frustrated with herself. “Just open the thing and be done with it.”

Her teeth clenched, she quickly broke the seal on the letter and opened the folds. Two slightly wrinkled one-hundred-pound banknotes fell out and fluttered down toward the mud at her feet. Her heart racing and lodged high in her throat, Seraphina dropped her portfolio to save them—and the girls—from ruin.

C
HAPTER
1

London

1860

It had been damn inconsiderate of Percival to drown in his bowl of porridge. And Arthur was certainly taking his sweet time about assuming the mantle of responsibility. As brothers went, the two of them were pathetic at best. The fact that they were—or in the case of Percival,
were
—half-brothers didn’t matter. Between them, they’d managed to top off his well of resentment. Yet again.

“Wallowing in dark thoughts, Carden?”

He continued to stare into the depths of his morning teacup as he honestly answered, “No more so than usual, Aiden. No more so than usual.”

Across the table, Barrett Stanbridge reached for a third slice of toast and asked, “And would this be the usual thoughts over the state of the empire? Or perhaps the fact that no one’s building railroads in England these days?” Slathering a generous portion of butter on the lightly browned bread, he added, “Or maybe you’re dwelling on the rather nasty comments Lady Caruthers offered on your plans for her new conservatory?”

“I was going to get to those items in good time,” Carden admitted, wondering if noon was too early in the day to begin drinking. “And I wouldn’t be using my talents to design conservatories for silly old ladies if Parliament would get on with the standardization of gauges for the existing rail systems.”

“Ah. Very true,” Aiden Terrell replied, setting his empty teacup aside and reaching for a cherry pastry.

Barrett nodded in agreement and spooned up a heap of strawberry jam. “Then the black thoughts have to be about his having to endure the privileges of being a peer until his brother returns from God knows where.”

“Arthur’s in Belize. And there’s precious little privilege to offset the tedium of being a peer,” Carden snapped, polishing off his tea and setting the cup back into its saucer with a loud clink.

“We’ll have to take your word on the matter,” Barrett countered, grinning. “Neither of us is ever going to know for ourselves. Which, of course, begs the question of why you continue to associate with us.”

“Because you’re happy drunks and miserable card players.”

Aiden laughed and refilled his cup from the silver teapot. “That and we’re most kind about taking the unwanted women off your hands.”

Carden momentarily winced. Damn if he hadn’t forgotten about dealing with that bit of business. Out of sight, out of mind.

“Speaking of women,” Barrett said predictably, momentarily forgetting his toast and making a production of looking around the breakfast room, “where’s the lovely thing with whom you left Covent Garden last night? Have you got her under the table?”

The suggestion triggered a mental image. Carden mentally filed it away and shifted in his chair to casually arrange the silk dressing gown so that it concealed his physical response to it. “As far as I know,” he answered his friends, “she’s still upstairs, still abed. I haven’t checked recently.”

“It’s rather late in the morning,” Barrett observed before taking a wolfish bite of his toast.

“We were up rather late into the night,” Carden replied with a smile, knowing he was expected to say something of the sort. One accommodated friends in such things. And, being friends and gentlemen, he knew they wouldn’t press for details on precisely how he’d passed the hours spent in the woman’s company.

“Might we take this as a sign,” Aiden asked, adding cream to his second cup of tea, “that this one will be around a bit longer than the others before her?”

Carden laughed at the less than subtle—and so very expected—inquiry. “No. And no, I don’t care which of you takes her off my hands. Draw straws if you’d like.”

“Aiden got the last one,” Barrett declared. “It’s my turn. What’s her name?”

“Jenine. Or Joan,” Carden supplied. He shrugged and added, “Or something like that. We didn’t engage in any prolonged conversations.”

Barrett nodded, his eyes narrowed as he looked out the open breakfast room doors and toward the stairwell at the front of the house. “Have you hired a new housekeeper yet?”

Puzzled by the abrupt change of subject, Carden glanced toward Aiden, seeking an explanation. The other shook his head and shrugged his shoulders in silent reply. “All right, Barrett,” Carden said on a sigh. “What does my hiring a housekeeper have to do with the woman presumably still in my bed?”

Laying aside his unfinished toast, Barrett brushed crumbs from his fingertips while explaining, “I was thinking that perhaps she might be waiting for breakfast to be brought up. She’d likely be quite grateful should someone think of obliging her expectations. And if there’s no housekeeper to see to the task…” He met Carden’s gaze, grinned and winked.

He saw the direction of his friend’s thoughts and settled back into his chair and the usual game. “There’s no housekeeper. The advertisement runs in the
Times
today. I imagine that they’ll begin queuing up within the next hour.”

“Then hadn’t you best be getting dressed for the interviews?” Aiden asked. He looked him up and down, cocked a brow, and then added, “Or do you intend to select the candidate least affected by your lack of inhibition?”

“Now there’s an idea,” Barrett contributed, rising from his seat and beginning to gather items for a breakfast tray.

“Capital one, if I may so myself,” Aiden remarked, handing over the teapot. “If he were to hire the right kind of woman, he’d save himself the necessity of finding a new romantic interest every other day or so. There’s a great deal to be said for convenience.”

Carden snorted and passed Barrett the jam. “There’s even more to be said for novelty and the thrill of seduction.”

“Boredom is such a bore, isn’t it?” Barrett observed, lifting the hastily assembled but well-laden tray. He chuckled and then said, “Give me fifteen minutes to charm your latest before you come up to make yourself presentable.”

“Fifteen?” Carden asked. “That’s all?”

“Actually, I think ten will be quite sufficient,” his friend replied while moving toward the door, “but I’d rather err on the side of certainty. The young lady might be a bit uncomfortable if you walked in just as she’s agreeing to slip down the back stairs with me.”

Aiden pulled a gold watch from his pocket and flipped open the ornate cover. “How long are you going to give him?”

“At least thirty.”

“It won’t take him that long,” the other replied, placing the open timepiece on the table so they both could see it. “He can be quite the charmer when he wants something.”

Carden smiled broadly. “He’s almost as good as I am. And given the proclivities of the woman upstairs, I doubt that it’ll take him much more than five minutes to convince her to shift romantic allegiance. I’m allowing another ten for her to ably demonstrate her new loyalty and then another fifteen for them to get dressed and gone. You know how it goes.”

Aiden’s smile said he did. “Be honest, Carden. Won’t you miss her charms just the tiniest little bit?”

Carden considered the center of the now almost empty breakfast table. Aiden was young—just twenty-three—and while able to hold his own when it came to drawing women into his arms, still maintained some of youth’s romantic notions about doing so. He’d had them at that age, too. But somewhere in the intervening seven years, they’d been discarded along the roadside of experience. Aiden would let go of them soon enough; Carden could see no reason for him to teach the hard lessons that life and women inevitably would.

“I very deliberately choose women who are…” He paused, not quite certain of the best word to use. There were so many qualities that he deemed necessary in his lovers.

“Forgettable?” Aiden supplied.

Carden shook his head. “Utterly disposable.”

Aiden pursed his lips and stared at the linen tablecloth. After several long moments, he brought his gaze back to Carden’s and asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that you might choose the wrong one at some point and find yourself trapped into marrying her?”

Of course he had. That’s why he’d made all but a science of selecting the women for his liaisons. Perhaps, on second thought, he did owe it to the younger man to provide some words of fundamental wisdom. “Only the daughters of peers come with that kind of power, Aiden. I take great pains to avoid them. Pains, I might add, that are every bit the equal of those they take to avoid so much as conversing with a third son like myself.”

“So, in short, the answer is no.”

“I have no intention of being married. By either choice or force.”

Aiden smiled, his earlier tension obviously ebbing away. “Marriage would put something of a crimp in your social life.”

“Not in the least,” Carden countered as the front bell chimed. “Which means, of course, that making any vows of fidelity would be extremely hypocritical of me. And I firmly believe that there’s a sufficient number of hypocrites in the world already. I refuse to add to the problem.”

“Very decent of you.”

“Thank you. I think so.”

The bell chimed again and they both looked out of the breakfast room doors.

Aiden leaned forward for a better look down the hallway and wondered aloud, “Isn’t Sawyer going to answer the door?”

“He went to run errands for me,” Carden explained, pushing himself up from his chair. “Obviously he hasn’t yet returned.”

“You’re not going to answer it yourself, are you? Dressed like that?”

He looked down at his silk dressing gown, realizing that he was barely covered and a far cry from decent. The bell sounded yet again. He considered the expanse of hallway and the door at the other end. “Would you prefer to listen to the bell ring incessantly?”

“Not really.”

“Neither would I,” he admitted, drawing the sides of the gown closer and giving the waist sash a quick yank. “And, the matter of preserving our sanity aside, the advertisement was clear that interviews are to begin at two. It’s just now noon. If the woman’s brassy enough to repeatedly ring the bell two hours early, then she fully deserves to have her sensibilities shocked to the core.”

He was moving to the door when Aiden said, “I’m dressed. I could get it for you.”

“It’s not your house,” Carden declared and then left his friend at the table. The bell sounded again as he reached for the knob. His teeth clenched, he wrenched open the thick mahogany panel and immediately stepped into the opening, prepared to serve up a scathing lecture on good manners.

He stopped breathing instead. She was without doubt the most exotic, lusciously curved beauty he’d ever seen. The fact that her clothes were hopelessly unfashionable, faded, and wholly insufficient for the spring weather did nothing to detract from the essential elements of her. Tall, blue-eyed, and—judging by the curls peeking out from under a battered bonnet—brunette, she was an almost perfect picture of genteelly impoverished English womanhood. But where most Englishwomen of some quality had skin the color of fine porcelain, this creature decidedly departed from the norm. She was finely featured and delicately boned—which only served to make the softly burnished hue of her skin all that much more intriguing. Her hands were the same delectable color, her fingers long and graceful and without the slightest evidence of a wedding ring.

And her demeanor … It was a curious mixture, as well. She’d flinched as he’d flung open the door, but then stood her ground and looked him up and down without the slightest squeal of surprise at his state of virtual undress. At present her gaze was fastened on his shoulders and she seemed to be searching for a beginning, an explanation of her presence. He didn’t really need one, he decided. She was standing on his doorstep and that was enough. He was sufficiently resourceful; if she gave him just half a chance, he could take their relationship from here.