A Daring Liaison(88)

Charles remembered that incident. He’d been impatient to have the nuptials said. He’d thought she was having doubts and was going to beg off and hadn’t wanted to give her the chance. “You should have insisted,” he said, knowing that was unfair.

“I wish I had. Oh, if only I had.”

Tears brimmed in her eyes again and he was afraid she’d begin crying at any moment. He took a tight rein on his rising anger. “That is your only excuse? That people were waiting and I shook my head?”

She looked up at him again and he was surprised at the depth of despair in her eyes. “And...and that I thought I’d be safe with you. You made me feel...less alone.”

He’d hoped to hear those words again—that she loved him and always had. He could forgive her anything for the sake of that. “But if you knew then, Georgiana, why are you crying only now?”

“Shame, Charles, for what I’ve brought to your door. I am suspected of murder and will be arrested soon. Hathaway went to the Home Office and accused me. And, somehow, I’ve... I am connected to the man who is trying to kill you. Oh!” Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, ravaging her face with grief or guilt, he couldn’t tell which.

A cold feeling settled in his heart. He had been shunning the thought from the moment it had entered his mind this morning. Between Gibbons’s mysterious accusations and Clark’s revelations, he’d been fighting the suspicion. He’d denied it in his mind, refused to believe it, sought for other answers.

And still, he had to ask. “Connected how, Georgiana?”

“No, Charles. No...”

“Tell me.”

“I cannot say the words.”

Then he would say them for her. “He is your father.”

She gagged and he feared for a moment that she would vomit.

And still he could not relent. He stood, needing to put distance between them. Needing to harden himself against her pain. “Admit it.”

She gasped for air, clearly fighting her hysteria. “Charles...”

“Damn it, Georgiana!”

“Yes,” she moaned. “Yes, he says he is my father.”

He took two more steps away from her. “When did you know?”

“I wonder if I always knew. When I think back, I remember his face in my village, or on the street when I came to London. There was always a shadow behind me. A feeling I could not dispel.”

Charles could scarcely comprehend her admission. Had she married him knowing who she was? Had she deceived him deliberately? “When did you know?” he asked again.

“He told me yesterday.”

After the wedding. Thank God for that much. “You met with him?”

“He waited in the garden.”

He recalled Finn’s remark that he’d found her crying in the garden. And then he’d gone upstairs and made love to her. He’d lain with her, touching her, knowing her, loving her in ways too intimate to speak of. And all the while, she’d known she was Gibbons’s daughter.

“He means to kill you, Charles. ‘Put you out of the way,’ he said.”

Nothing new there, at least. There was only one last question he had to ask.

“Were you his accomplice, Georgiana? Were you helping him?”

She looked up from her knees, her eyes wide with horror, and then reached for the whiskey without saying a word. The crystal stopper shattered on the stone hearth as she knocked it off and lifted the decanter to her lips without bothering to fill a glass.

God, how he wished he could join her. Sit with her before the fire, drinking until the memories fell away, until it no longer mattered that she was a Gibbons by birth, but he doubted there was enough liquor in the world to accomplish that. All he knew for certain was that he’d go mad if he stayed in this room a moment more. That he’d surely say or do something he would regret tomorrow.

He turned and walked away, closing the door softly behind him.

* * *

It was late afternoon before Charles nodded at Wycliffe’s man loitering across the street and looked at the folded paper again, confirming the address Wycliffe had given him. The tenement looked respectable enough for all that it was in a declining neighborhood. He opened the door and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The unwholesome stench of cabbage and spoiled meat followed him. Halfway down the passageway he found the number he was looking for. He knocked and waited a moment.

A door opened across the way and a man peeked out. “Real popular man, that Hathaway. Keep tellin’ folks he ain’t in.”