What Happened at Midnight(2)

He wrenched her elbow. “You really don’t understand. Why, as your father’s closest associate, I’m practically your guardian. And do you know what I do with wayward girls who won’t speak to me?”

There was nothing he could do to her anymore. She’d been the one to discover her father’s note. She’d found his body. The physical pain was nothing to that. But every second she remained here being manhandled by them was another moment where someone might find the trunk she’d lowered out her window.

Her father was an embezzler and a suicide. Nobody would help her—nobody except herself. She shut her mouth and tried once again to free her arm.

Lawson pulled his arm back, made a fist—

“Lawson,” a new voice said, “what do you think you’re doing?”

Lawson straightened, moving away from Mary so quickly that she gasped in relief.

“Aw,” Lawson said, “I didn’t mean any harm. I was just going to—”

“I have a good idea what you were going to do.” With those words, John Mason stepped into her father’s office. Mary shut her eyes. She hadn’t cried, not even when she’d realized that her father had left her alone with nothing. Not when she’d realized that the future she’d dreamed of was gone forever. It had been easy to bury her fear, her despair, her mourning. Those emotions were too big to believe, her loss too large to comprehend.

Why, then, did the sight of John Mason make her want to weep?

She opened her eyes wide, willing that stupid moisture to evaporate into nothingness.

Across the room, John met her gaze briefly and then looked away.

He didn’t belong with these men; he never had. The other men were both grandfathers; John was scarcely twenty-five. They were dressed in sober, respectable browns and grays, every white starched to points; John’s cravat was a bare pretense of a neckcloth, well-laundered but soft. Most of all, the other men were thin and pale from hunching over desks, while John’s hours out of doors had left him golden skinned and broad shouldered.

He hadn’t been part of their initial investment scheme. His father and his brother-in-law had been involved. But he’d taken over when his relatives had passed away.

That was how she had met him.

She had always believed his eyes were sweet—large and liquid brown. There had been nothing sweet about them last night when he’d confronted her father, proof in hand, finger pointing directly at his chest. There was nothing sweet about them now, either. Mary’s stomach churned, and she looked away.

“Don’t be difficult, boy,” Lawson said. “It’s your money at stake, too. She knows something. I swear it’s so.”

“I don’t truck with hitting ladies,” John responded.

“She’s no lady.”

John’s eyes flicked to Mary, touching her without really seeing her. But he didn’t contradict the older man. He simply shrugged. “I don’t truck with hitting women, either,” he said in a low growl, then spat on the ground.

Don’t spit on Papa’s carpet, some stupid part of her wanted to say. As if the Turkey carpet mattered. Just one more possession to be sold to make up for his wrongdoings. One more thing for her to leave behind. Still, that disrespect hurt more than John’s casual acceptance of her new status.

“Come now,” Lawson said. “Given what her father owes us, she’s practically a servant. It’s not wrong to slap—”

John shoved the other man into the wall of the office. “I mean it, Lawson. That’s enough.”

She forced herself to concentrate on the hard lines of John’s face, so different from the confident smile that he usually gave her when their paths crossed. He made her think of a rocky cliff: impossibly hard, with an unforgiving drop to the crags below.

“Very well,” Lawson finally muttered with a sullen sneer. “But one day, you’ll regret letting her go. Useless bitch.” That last was directed at her.

Mary wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her affected by that epithet. She simply nodded to the two men, as if this were the last round of an exchange of pleasantries, and turned to go.

John set his hand in the curve of her spine and guided her away, down the dark hallway, to the back of the house. He wrenched the servants’ door open and then glanced outside, verifying that nobody was about. Then, and only then, did he turn to her.

“Mary…” He ran one hand through the dark brown of his hair. She’d never heard his voice like this—dark and rumbling like thunder on the horizon. She’d never seen his eyes like this, either. There was a tension in them, worry lines gathering at the corners. He wasn’t quiet because he intended to be gentle with her. It was the quiet of a pot on the verge of boiling over.

“John.” She shut her eyes.

“Swear to me that you don’t know where he is.”

Like everyone else, he was thinking only of her father. But unlike the others, at least he believed her. For now. Mary’s thoughts went to her trunk, to the ache in her arms.

“If I had to guess,” she told him gravely, “I would say that he went straight to hell. He left me—” All that angry fury raged within her for a moment, startling in its heat. No place to put it now; she had too much to do.

“Did he tell you where the money was?”