A Study In Seduction(95)

“Lydia!” Jane straightened, her eyes wide and frantic.

Lydia yanked her arm from Cole’s grip and ran toward her daughter. She wrapped her arms around Jane and pulled her from the chair. Hugging the girl close, Lydia twisted to pin Joseph Cole with a glare.

“What do you want?”

His gaze on Jane, he replied, “How much is it worth to you, Lydia? How much will it be worth to keep the information from him?”

“Northwood already knows the truth. I told him.”

Cole’s smile appeared, as cold and sharp as a crescent moon. “You expect me to believe you would ruin your life like that?”

“Believe what you will. He knows Jane is my daughter.”

“Our daughter. Perhaps you can convince her to tell me where the document is.”

“What document?”

“The acte de naissance she hid,” Cole said. “If she tells me where it is, this can all be ended very quickly.”

No. It would never end. Lydia knew that to the core of her being. Never.

She felt the press of Jane’s body against her side, the girl’s hand clenching her arm. She met Jane’s eyes. An odd understanding passed between them, something that spoke of regrets and sorrows that perhaps had some justification, some well-intended motive.

Lydia forced her gaze back to Cole. “Dr. Cole, why are you doing this?”

He looked at her with that clear, owl-like gaze that seemed capable of penetrating the deepest recesses of her mind.

“I lost everything, Lydia. First my position at the university. Couldn’t find another job to save my life. Then Greta… you know how weak she was, how frail. She couldn’t withstand the strain. Crumbled underneath it, really. What savings I had went to medical expenses, then, of course, to the burial.”

Lydia wanted to clamp her hands over her ears to avoid hearing about Greta’s death. “Why did you lose your professorship?”

A vague smile wreathed his mouth. “Ethics violations, of a sort. Can you imagine?”

“Ethics—”

“She was dead when I arrived. Shame they never believed me.”

Lydia’s breathing grew shallow, bile burning in her throat. “Who… who was—”

“The daughter of one of the history professors. Pity too. Lovely girl. I’ve no idea how many men she’d entertained in her rooms.”

“And you… you—”

“They said she’d been strangled. They claimed I was a suspect, but they never proved I did the deed. Still, talk of the whole thing was enough for the education minister to see fit to dismiss me.”

A door banged open somewhere. Voices rose from the lower floor like a flock of birds. Something crashed.

Lydia pushed Jane behind her, trying to make the movement inconspicuous. She wanted to shove the girl toward the stairs and the safety of the lower floor, but she had no idea if Cole was armed.

“It has been a year,” Cole continued. “Then I read of Sir Henry’s death and thought of you, so I returned to London. I wanted to know if you’d had the child. And when I found out about Jane, I wondered if she had your intelligence, your prodigious mathematical abilities. I thought that with you as her mother and me as her father, her genius might already be legendary. So I wrote to her.”

A sick feeling swirled in Lydia’s stomach at the idea that he had lured Jane into a correspondence. “What did you want from her?”

“At first, I thought she might have some novel ideas, different approaches to mathematics,” Cole said.

“You wanted to mine her talents for your own purposes, didn’t you?” Lydia snapped. “You thought she might provide you with some brilliant new theorems or identities. And you would have stolen them, published them as your own in a desperate attempt to regain your lost prominence.”

He frowned. “That’s not quite accurate. She is my daughter, after all, so by rights her theories would have been mine to begin with. Imagine my disappointment when I realized she possesses a rather ordinary mind. Comparatively speaking, of course.”

Lydia clenched her teeth to prevent herself from contradicting his erroneous observation. “So what led to your current plan?”

“The news of your father’s death,” Cole replied. “I knew it would be a good time to contact Jane, and then I learned of your… relationship with a wealthy peer. If I can’t have my reputation back, then a sizable amount of money might well assuage my disappointment. Enough so that I can live somewhere else, perhaps France or Italy, in comfort for the remainder of my days.”