A Daring Liaison(74)

Harry nodded, all trace of his usual mockery gone.

“Blast it all! None of this helps us at all,” Wycliffe concluded. “Georgiana’s past, while tragic, cannot have a bearing on what has happened to her husbands. Considering her circumstances, her marriages were...quite good.”

Above her? And her marriage to him would be considered the same. “I’ve learned that Lady Caroline arranged those marriages. I have been trying to think what her criteria were. What did Arthur Allenby and Gower Huffington have in common?”

Richardson scratched his head. “Allenby was young, and Huffington was mature. Both had quite comfortable fortunes. Both had little family. Neither were titled. But there is nothing so remarkable in those things.”

“Both had country estates and neither was often in town,” Wycliffe added.

“Seems as if Lady Caroline wanted Georgiana settled comfortably in the countryside.”

“And she achieved that. Twice. But why should that matter to her? She’d done all she could to hide Georgiana’s past. We’ve only discovered it because we were looking for something else and found this instead.” Charles thought of Georgiana waiting for him upstairs and wondered how much of the truth she knew.

He swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and poured more. A change of subject was in order.

“About Gibbons?” he asked.

Richardson turned from his position near the window. “Wycliffe filled me in while we were waiting for you. I am asleep on my feet, gentlemen. I’m going home. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

Charles opened the library door for him and nodded to a discreetly waiting Crosley to see him out. Turning back to Wycliffe, he said, “Hope it’s better news than Richardson’s.”

“Gibbons has been seen loitering around the Crown and Bear. I find that odd considering he knows you frequent the place and your brother-in-law owns it.”

“Odd? Not if he’s looking to kill me. Good Lord. I’ve searched seven months with nary a glimpse of him, and now that my attention is elsewhere, he’s everywhere I turn.”

“Gibbons must be desperate,” Wycliffe said.

Charles stopped his pacing to look down into the fire. “No more so than I.”

“What would you say if Gibbons offered a truce, Hunter? Would you agree?”

He shook his head. “He killed Adam Booth and shot me. Those are hard things to ignore. Aside from that, I have no faith he’d keep a truce. Gibbons never honored an agreement in his life.”

“And if he asked for a meeting? Would you want to know what he had to say?”

What could Gibbons possibly have to say to him? Now, that was tempting. “Perhaps. Let’s go. We can fetch Devlin along the way.”

Wycliffe stood and clapped Charles on the back. “Not tonight, Hunter. It’s your wedding night. Go upstairs. Make love to your wife. Forget your pride. It will not keep you warm.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” he admitted.

“Then you are a bigger fool than I’d ever thought possible.”

* * *

Georgiana’s hair spread across her pillow and her lashes lay in dark spikes against her pale cheeks, almost as if they’d been formed by tears. Regrets, sweet Georgiana? Her lips—those soft petals that beckoned him—were slightly parted. He longed to kiss her awake but he merely stood there, studying the woman he had married. In the flicker of dim candlelight she looked almost ethereal.

In the face of better judgment, of past rejections, of vague suspicions, he’d married her. Knowing she was keeping secrets from him, he’d married her. He could not distinguish what he was feeling—the odd misgivings. Was it anger? Or something darker?

She’d fallen asleep waiting for him, and he could not regret it. He’d have welcomed any delay in talking to her because he did not know what to say. Would she be shocked to learn that her ‘aunt’ Caroline had been her mother? Or had she known and kept it from him?

Tomorrow. They’d sort it out tomorrow.

A black leather-bound journal lay facedown against her chest, her hand curled over it. She must have fallen asleep reading. Carefully, he slipped the slender volume from under her hand and smiled at her soft sigh.

He glanced at the writing, wondering if it were hers, and wondering if he would learn more about her from these pages than he had in the past week of conversations and confessions. But the date of the entry was from years before, and the handwriting was not Georgiana’s.