Stephanie Laurens - Beyond Seduction

Madeline smiled, openly approving; reaching out, she grasped his hand and lightly squeezed. “Indeed. We’ll be only too happy to have you along.”

Gervase nodded his own, rather more masculine approval. “As your sister suggests, we should catch him before he has a chance to ride out for the day. If it is him, we don’t want him luring more unsuspecting leaseholders into his net, so we’ll need to make an early start.” He glanced at Madeline. “Best if I meet you two at the junction at Tregoose-let’s say at nine. We can ride on together from there.”

Madeline and Harry agreed. Then Harry was imperiously summoned to the card table. He quickly went to take his place.

Madeline turned to Gervase. She searched his eyes, then arched a brow. “Was that your doing, or truly his own initiative?”

“Mostly his own initiative-I just nudged him into acting on it.”

She tilted her head. “How?”

He smiled and sat back, his gaze going to the game; their conversation was drowned out by the already eager exclamations of their siblings. “By explaining how the smugglers’ days are, if not quite over, then numbered, and that for adventures they-their generation-will need to look elsewhere.”

Madeline studied him; his more relaxed demeanor in this company made him easier to read. Then she laid a hand on his sleeve, lightly gripped. “Thank you.” She, too, turned to watch the game. “They’ll accept that from you.”

He didn’t say anything for some minutes, then murmured, “I checked again to make sure the wreckers hadn’t taken advantage of that bad blow a week ago. Apparently the wind was in the wrong quarter, and so regardless of your brothers’ devotion to searching, they’re not going to find anything that will bring them into contact with the wreckers.”

“Thank you again.” She touched his hand lightly.

They both grew absorbed with the card game, although not for the same reasons that held their siblings engrossed. Again and again they shared a look, a private laugh at the interaction, the antics, and all they revealed. Belinda might be sixteen, and Harry fifteen, but under the influence of excitement both shed their superiority and became the children they’d only recently left behind, happily and noisily engaging with the others in what degenerated into an uproarious engagement.

Madeline watched, and appreciated the moment, appreciated that Gervase saw it, understood it, too. Earlier in the evening, she and Sybil had drawn him into a discussion of various aspects of the festival; she had to admit she could now see Sybil and his sisters’ point. He was so accustomed to command that he tended to ride over any but the most trenchant opposition-or, in her case, an opposing view put by someone of equally strong character unwilling to simply get out of his way.

She was also someone he had reason to wish to please, but, when she’d noted the way his sisters had been avidly watching them and had arched a brow at him, he’d reassured her with a murmur that neither the girls nor Sybil had any inkling whatever of their affair.

Which was a relief in one sense, yet it left open the question of why his sisters, and Sybil, too, were viewing her in quite such a way. Viewing her success in influencing him with something akin to smugness.

More, of approval.

She couldn’t put her finger on what it was she sensed from them. In the end, she inwardly shook her head and told herself they were simply the four people most likely to applaud any lady who could deal with Gervase.

Late that night, with the rising wind howling about the eaves of the manor, Malcolm Sinclair was quickly and efficiently packing the last of his belongings when a tap at the library French doors had him glancing sharply that way.

Recognizing the shadowy figure beyond the doors, he strode over and unlocked them, leaving Jennings to enter and follow him back to the desk.

The implication of the box into which Malcolm was loading papers was transparent.

“You’re leaving?” In the light of the lamp, Jennings’s eyes grew round.

“Yes. And so are you.” Grim-faced, Malcolm dropped in the last file, then reached for a piece of string. “Here-help me secure this.”

Jennings obediently held the box closed; while he wrapped the string around and tied it tight, Malcolm explained, briefly and succinctly, whom he had seen in Helston that afternoon, where they’d been going, and what that meant. “While everything we’ve been doing here is perfectly legal, I have absolutely no wish to meet Tregarth and be asked to explain.”

More specifically he didn’t want to explain why everyone locally knew him as Thomas Glendower, rather than Malcolm Sinclair. He definitely didn’t need Tregarth thinking back, and deciding to check for a connection between Thomas Glendower and Malcolm’s late guardian’s nefarious scheme. The connection couldn’t easily be proved, but to a man with the resources Malcolm feared Tregarth might possess, his secret might yield.

The authorities had been lenient over Malcolm’s role in his guardian’s illegal and immoral scheme, but if they knew of Thomas Glendower and his investment accounts, they might not be inclined to be quite so forgiving.

That was a chance Malcolm wasn’t prepared to take. Aside from all else, he’d come to enjoy being Thomas, being the owner of this place. He resented having to leave so abruptly, to decamp and flee, but he was barely twenty-one; there would be time, eventually, for him to return to Cornwall, the manor and Thomas Glendower.

But he shared none of that with Jennings, who had no idea his alter ego existed. He cared not a whit if Jennings thought he was running like a scared rabbit; ego, he’d learned, was a weakness, a failing.

“We’re going tonight.” He met Jennings’s gaze. “I’m leaving most of my things here. I’ll be packed, saddled and ready to ride in an hour. How long will it take you to get ready?”

Jennings was staying at a tiny cottage in the hamlet of Carleen, a mile or so north. He narrowed his eyes in thought. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour to get back to the cottage, pack and clear up, then get back here.”

Curtly, Malcolm nodded. “Good. I’ll meet you on the London road.”

Midnight arrived; Madeline stood at her open bedroom window and listened as clocks throughout the house whirred, chimed and bonged. Everyone else was sound asleep; they’d got back from the castle more than an hour ago. Happy and tired, her brothers had trailed up to their rooms without her even having to hint; she and Muriel had exchanged fond glances and followed.

The household had settled. Unfortunately, she couldn’t.

Restless, as unsettled as the weather, she’d drifted to the window to stare out at the clouds scudding over the sky, concealing, then revealing the waning moon as they streamed past, driven by a strong offshore wind.

Her room faced inland, overlooking the gardens at the front of the house. From their earliest years, her brothers had claimed the rooms facing the sea; as when younger they’d been noisy and clamoring, she’d moved to this room at the far end of the opposite wing.

When Muriel had joined them, she’d reclaimed her childhood room in the central block of the house; Madeline had grown used to her isolation, to her privacy.

She leaned against the window frame; warm air wafted in, lifting her hair, setting it floating about her face and shoulders. She was smiling to herself, imaging how she must look, when a shifting shadow in the gardens caught her eye.

A deliberately moving shadow. She’d already doused her candle; her eyes had adjusted to the night. She watched long enough to be certain that a man was approaching the house, but he was walking surely and purposefully, albeit carefully, rather than skulking.

Once she was sure he was making for the morning room French doors-a route she knew her brothers occasionally used on nocturnal forays-she left the window, paused, considering, by her dressing table, then hefted the heavy silver candlestick she’d left there, and on silent feet went to the door.

Her slippers made no sound on the corridor runner. She knew the house literally better than the back of her hand; hugging the shadows, she made her way to the head of the stairs.

She knew the male she’d glimpsed hadn’t been Edmond or Ben, but in the poor light she hadn’t been able to tell whether he was Harry or not.

The thought of Harry, of the evidence of his evolving maturity she’d witnessed that evening-and Gervase’s earlier allusion to what might constitute the emerging Harry’s idea of adventure-made her wonder just how much he’d truly grown.

Was the man she’d glimpsed Harry returning from some tryst?

Given the time since they’d returned, it was possible.

If it was he, he’d never forgive her if she roused the household; he’d be embarrassed beyond measure.

But if it wasn’t Harry…they had an intruder in the house.

Straining her ears, she could just detect not footsteps but the faint creak of boards. From the familiar sounds, she tracked the man as he crossed the morning room; standing at the gallery rail, she looked down into the shadowy pit of the front hall, and saw the morning room door open.

Just in time she remembered her nightgown was white; she jerked back into the shadows, then inwardly swore. She didn’t want the intruder, if he wasn’t Harry, to glance up and see her at the top of the stairs. The candlestick was all very well, but surprise-as in her surprising him-would greatly help. But if she’d hesitated for just a second she might have been able to see if the man was Harry or not, but she hadn’t, so she didn’t know, and so now she had to retreat into the gloom behind the old suit of armor facing the stairhead.