Impetuous
Candace Camp
Loving the enemy is one thing.Trusting the enemy is quite another. In the late 1600s Black Maggie Verrere was engaged to marry Sir Edric Neville in an effort to unite their two families. Instead she eloped to America with another man, and the famed Spanish dowry vanished along with her.The two families—the Verreres and the Nevilles—have hated one another ever since. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, another Verrere woman seeks the dowry. Cassandra Verrere has no hope of providing a future for her younger siblings, or for herself, unless she recovers the treasure.Unfortunately her path to its attainment requires the help of a Neville—the disarming Sir Philip. With an ancient feud marking their lineage, Cassandra cannot imagine trusting him. But the true challenge may be in trusting her heart not to fall for him." is renowned as a storyteller who touches the hearts of her readers time and time again." –RT Book Reviews
Loving the enemy is one thing.
Trusting the enemy is quite another.
In the late 1600s Black Maggie Verrere was engaged to marry Sir Edric Neville in an effort to unite their two families. Instead she eloped to America with another man, and the famed Spanish dowry vanished along with her. The two families—the Verreres and the Nevilles—have hated one another ever since.
Now, 150 years later, another Verrere woman seeks the dowry. Cassandra Verrere has no hope of providing a future for her younger siblings, or for herself, unless she recovers the treasure. Unfortunately her path to its attainment requires the help of a Neville—the disarming Sir Philip. With an ancient feud marking their lineage, Cassandra cannot imagine trusting him. But the true challenge may be in trusting her heart not to fall for him.
Praise for the novels of
New York Times bestselling author
“A smart, fun-filled romp.”
—Publishers Weekly on Impetuous
“Camp’s newest Matchmaker novel features her usual vivid characterization, touches of subtle humor and plenty of misunderstandings, guilt and passion. You won’t want to miss this poignant and charming tale.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Courtship Dance
“Delightful…Camp is firmly at home here, enlivening the romantic quest between her engaging lovers with a set of believable and colorful secondaries.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Wedding Challenge
“A beautifully crafted, poignant love story.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Wedding Challenge
“Lively and energetic secondaries round out the formidable leads…assuring readers a surprise ending well worth waiting for.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Bridal Quest
“A clever mystery adds intrigue to this lively and gently humorous tale, which simmers with well-handled sexual tension.”
—Library Journal on A Dangerous Man
“The talented Camp has deftly mixed romance and intrigue to create another highly enjoyable Regency romance.”
—Booklist on An Independent Woman
Impetuous
Candace Camp
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Prologue (#u99df90f0-c0f5-5ae3-893e-8ddf306bdb94)
Chapter One (#u5e4a9529-70c0-5059-b748-1a7d464f3443)
Chapter Two (#u22ba8a0e-b66a-582e-8e61-5625ab287493)
Chapter Three (#u02ab5cd9-b59e-5b9c-9e93-e0d2d7f68932)
Chapter Four (#ub0e93226-0264-59de-9edb-339dcb814e09)
Chapter Five (#uc80eb408-27ab-50de-98e0-227bad8f5994)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
THE DOOR TO her room opened softly, and a man slipped in. The candle in his hand barely penetrated the darkness, but he could make out the bed, and he glided toward it.
The woman in the bed lay turned away from him, her feminine curves concealed by the covers. He stopped, a little uncertain. He had expected her to be awake, to turn toward him with the eager welcome that she had displayed earlier this evening in the conservatory. He held the candle closer to the bed. Its light glinted off the pale fall of her hair as it tumbled across the covers and pillow. It was that light gold hair which had caught his interest this afternoon, more than the perfect features.
He set down the candle and blew it out, slipped out of his shoes, and crawled across the bed to the woman. She said nothing, and he wondered whether she had actually fallen asleep or was merely feigning it. It seemed peculiar that she would simply have gone to sleep when she had made this assignation with him for midnight. It occurred to him that she was pretending to sleep in order to somehow retain an illusion of her innocence in the whole matter—or perhaps she thought that he would find it arousing. He had to admit that there was something rather intriguing about lying beside her warm body, pliant and all defenses down, even that of consciousness.
He nuzzled into the mass of sweet-scented hair, gently looping his arm across her. Desire flickered through him, immediate and piercing. The faint aroma of roses teased at his senses. He found it more arousing than the heavier scent she had worn this afternoon. He lifted her hair and placed his lips tenderly against the nape of her neck.
She let out a little shuddery sigh, and he smiled against her skin. He trailed soft, warm kisses across her neck and up onto her jaw, finding her ear and nibbling at it, tracing the gentle whorls with the tip of his tongue, rubbing the lobe between his lips. His hand slid beneath the covers, shoving them down, revealing her clad in a plain white cotton nightgown. The demure gown surprised him, but he found it intensely, immediately arousing in a way that a more suggestive gown would not have been. He almost chuckled. He would not have thought the chit had such understanding or expertise. Perhaps this would be much better than he had thought. He was glad that he had changed his mind and decided to accept Joanna’s invitation after all.
His hands roamed her body as his mouth continued to play with her ear. He caressed her breasts and the feminine swell of her hips through the cloth of her nightgown. His fingers played over her thighs, her stomach. His blood thrummed as he kissed his way down from her ear, across the soft skin of her neck, until he was stopped by the cloth of her gown. Impatiently he unbuttoned the first few buttons until it fell open enough that he could pull the gown down onto her arm, exposing a tantalizing expanse of skin down to her shoulder. He gazed at the creamy skin for a moment, feeling himself harden and throb. He trailed a finger, shaking slightly, across the smooth flesh. It was like touching rose petals, and it sent a spear of desire straight down into his loins. He bent his head and kissed the point of her shoulder.
His breath came faster in his throat as he kissed his way back across her collarbone and up her neck. He snuggled up closely behind her, pressing his body against hers all the way up and down, letting his desire pulse against her rounded derriere. His hand slid down her abdomen, pushing her tightly against him, and delved between her legs. She let out a soft moan and moved her legs, opening for him. He caught his breath, stirred by the sound of her passion. He was certain now that she must be awake, though her only acknowledgment had been that sound. There was something infinitely arousing in her silent acquiescence, in the way her breath grew faster and louder, as though her most basic needs were betraying her, breaking through her self-imposed quiet. His fingers moved rhythmically, pressing and releasing, sliding across her nether lips through the cloth, and he was rewarded with another low groan that seemed to rise from deep within her.
Eyes closed, luxuriating in the petal softness of her skin, he kissed his way across her cheek. Letting out a murmur of pleasure, she turned instinctively toward him, and their lips met. Her mouth was soft and warm, yielding to the pressure of his, and her lips opened to his questing tongue. Her arms came up and curled around his neck as he kissed her deeply. Desire shuddered through him.
He pulled and tugged at her nightgown, rucking the skirt of it up until finally his fingers were on the soft flesh of her thighs. He caressed the delicate skin, his fingers creeping upward until they encountered the moisture of her desire, which only fed his own. He slipped across the slick, satiny flesh, her pearly dew wetting his fingers. She jerked a little, startled, as he touched that most intimate part of her, but then she moved, inviting his touch, and his fingers began to stroke her.
Need was pounding in him. He wanted to taste her, touch her, everywhere. He would have liked to part her legs and slide between them, plunge deep within her and carry them both to satisfaction. But even more, he wanted to prolong this moment, to explore and taste and suck every ounce of pleasure from this coupling. He had not expected anything like this when he had responded to the Moulton girl’s invitation. She had seemed a blatant hussy, and he had not planned at first to even come to her bedchamber. Only restlessness had finally sent him from his room and down the hall to Joanna’s. But now...
Now, touching her, breathing in her scent, taking her mouth with his—there was none of the casual, premeditated passion he had expected. Her body was like fire beneath him. Her kisses and the way she responded to his touch, the unstudied moans and sighs, all spoke of a blend of passion and inexperience that was more enticing than any practiced touch. He could not remember the last time he had felt so quickly aroused, so intensely alive, in a woman’s arms.
She writhed beneath him, moaning as his fingers worked their magic. He felt as if he might explode. His mouth left hers and trailed down her neck onto the white expanse of her chest. His lips touched the quivering softness of her breast. Gently he kissed her flesh, and her body arched up a little, as though seeking his kiss. Obligingly, he took her nipple into the hot, wet cave of his mouth and began to suckle.
She let out a moan, and her hips moved fiercely beneath his hand. Suddenly she jerked and cried out, her eyes flying open, and he realized with intense satisfaction that he had brought her to release. He raised his head and smiled down into her face. He saw the blank confusion in her eyes, wide-open and staring at him. He saw the horror dawning in them. He also saw, with the feeling of stepping off a cliff into nothing but air, that the girl who lay beneath him was not Joanna Moulton.
Chapter One
CASSANDRA WAS AWASH in pleasure. She had never experienced anything like it, dreaming or awake. She had been dreaming lush, colorful dreams from the moment she fell asleep. Somehow she knew they were dreams, and yet she was unable to awaken from them. She had been walking through her house—the old mansion of Chesilworth, not her aunt’s more habitable, yet far less pleasant, home—and she had been warm and happy. Her father was still alive and puttering downstairs in his library. The walls were a warm, buttery tint, touched by the rays of the sun, and she passed a bedroom, where a jewel-toned red velvet spread covered the bed. Candles burned inside, beckoning her. She started into the room, but then somehow she was outside in a cool, vibrantly green bower. The leaves of the hedges were dark and waxy, smooth to the touch. A breeze swept over her, lifting her hair and tickling the back of her neck. She shivered a little in delight. The sun was warm upon her shoulders, the breeze caressed her. She closed her eyes, luxuriating in the feeling.
Pleasure welled up inside her as the wind played over her cheek and neck. She was aware that now she had on no clothes, but strangely this fact did not seem to bother her. She loved the way the sun felt on her naked skin, the way the air drifted over her. Now there was a man with her. But that did not bother her, either. She knew him, though she could not see his face or say his name. He put his hands on her, and her loins turned to warm wax. She felt weak and shaky as he kissed her over and over again. His lips pressed against her mouth, opening it to his questing tongue, and she jerked with the violent, unexpected pleasure of it. Warm moisture pooled between her legs, and she squeezed them together, trying to satisfy the ache that had arisen there.
His kisses filled her even as they consumed her. She clung to him in a maelstrom of pleasure. His hand traveled down over her body and delved between her legs, sending waves of pleasure through her. She moaned and moved her hips against his hand, instinctively seeking something, though she wasn’t sure what. Then, suddenly, a pleasure more intense than anything she had ever felt seemed to burst within her.
Cassandra jerked, and her eyes flew open. She was awake. And a man she had never met was leaning over her, staring down into her face.
For an instant, she simply stared at him in stupefaction that matched the stunned expression on his face. Then horror rushed through her as her befogged mind began to function. She drew breath to scream. He saw her intent and quickly covered her mouth with his hand, which frightened her even more. She grabbed his arm, trying to pull his hand away, and at the same time, she struggled to sit up. He pushed her back down firmly, and she swung her hand up, hitting him sharply on the ear. He winced and grabbed for her wrist with his free hand, but she swung the other at him, too, and kicked, trying to wriggle off the bed. He threw his weight upon her to pin her down, and she was aware of every hard line of muscle and bone.
He was stronger than she, but Cassandra was not one to give up, and she had an advantage in that he had to keep one hand pressed across her mouth to keep her from screaming. She rained blows on his head and shoulders and back, and thrashed her legs, trying to land a kick that would do some harm. It took him a good while to finally get his legs wrapped tightly around hers and his hand clenched around both her wrists, pinning them to the bed above her. He was lying completely atop her, bearing her down into the mattress. Cassandra could not help but be aware of the intruder’s power, of his very maleness. The position frightened her, yet at the same time she was confusedly aware of the heat that sizzled through her veins and lay pooled and heavy in her abdomen.
She wished that she could think better. Why was her head so heavy and groggy? And what was a man of the wealth and position of Sir Philip Neville doing assaulting a woman in her bedroom at a house party in the country?
He was breathing heavily, and Cassandra saw that sweat glistened in the hollow of his throat, just above the undone button of his shirt. Cassandra pulled both her eyes and her mind away from that tanned hollow of flesh that was visibly pulsing with each beat of his heart.
“Don’t scream!” he whispered, leaning down close to her face. “I promise you I mean you no harm. I will let you go, if you will promise not to scream.”
She gazed at him, wide-eyed, and nodded her head. He looked at her for a long, doubtful moment, then eased his hand from her mouth, moving in tiny increments, always ready to clamp it back down if she showed signs of screaming. Cassandra said nothing, merely watched him steadily.
He relaxed a little. “I swear to you that I mean you no harm. I will leave this room. I won’t harm you. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand!” Cassandra hissed back in the same undertone. “I’m not an idiot.”
He moved off her with a groan. “Bloody hell! What a tangle.” He looked at her, frowning. “You’re the wrong one.”
“I should certainly hope so,” Cassandra retorted acidly, sitting up. “Oh, my head! I feel as if a thousand hammers were banging away inside it.” Why was she so groggy? And why did she feel strangely hot and tingly inside?
She looked at the man sitting cross-legged on the bed beside her. She supposed she ought to be frightened, but, once that initial spurt of terror was past, once she recognized the stranger for Sir Philip Neville, she had not been scared, only stunned and confused.
The lingering emotions from her dream unsettled her, and she took refuge in sarcasm. “What young lady’s room were you trying to break into, may I ask?”
“I wasn’t breaking in,” he responded, stung. “I was accepting an invitation.”
“Of course. I should have known.” Cassandra’s voice was dry, and she arched an eyebrow. “I am sure that Sir Philip Neville has ample invitations to enter women’s bedrooms.”
Neville gazed at her for a long moment. “You are a most unusual female.”
“So I’ve been told.” Cassandra did not deceive herself that his words were a compliment.
“I would think a young lady would be...rather more distraught in this situation than you are.”
“Would you rather that I were?” Cassandra retorted. “I fail to see how it would help matters any if I were to fall into hysterics.”
“I didn’t say it would help. It just seems more...natural.”
“I must be an unnatural female, then. It is what my aunt and cousin tell me. They say it is why I never caught a husband. But I think that had more to do with the sad state of our finances than with my attitude, for I have seen odder women than myself marry well, as long as they had a wealthy father. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I daresay you are correct.” Sir Philip gazed at her in a sort of dazed fascination. He had never before met a woman who spoke in the candid, no-nonsense way this woman did. Indeed, it was something of an oddity to speak to a woman who did not immediately set to flirting with him. He had found that an income of one hundred thousand pounds a year acted as a powerful aphrodisiac.
“To return to the subject at hand,” Cassandra continued crisply, “exactly why are you in my room rather than that of the female who issued the invitation?”
Neville grimaced. “I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.” He turned to light the candle he had set down on the bedside table earlier. Taking out a note from his pocket, he unfolded it and reread it. “Though I don’t see how. It’s quite clear—the fifth door on the right from the stairs. Isn’t this the fifth door?”
Cassandra thought for a moment. “Yes.” Curious, she rose onto her knees and looked over his shoulder at the note. She gasped as she recognized the blotted, sloppy handwriting and the distinctive looping initials at the bottom of the paper. “My God, that’s Joanna’s script!”
Neville turned to glare at her, crumpling the note in his fist. “I beg your pardon, madam. This is a private correspondence.”
“Mmm. I think it’s hardly a private matter, considering that you are sitting in my bed reading it.”
“It would be the death of her reputation if this were known,” he countered grimly.
“I think that my reputation is of more concern at the moment, since you are in my bedroom.”
“I would trust, madam, that you would have enough sense not to bandy it about that you were entertaining a man in your room, and since I have no intention of revealing it, I think it is clear that your reputation is safe.”
“Of course I have enough sense to keep quiet,” Cassandra retorted, nettled by what she considered a rather excessive concern on his part over Joanna’s reputation. “The one you ought to be concerned with is Joanna, since she is obviously so hare-witted that she directed you to the wrong room.”
She reached over and plucked the ball of paper from his hand and smoothed it out, bending close to read it in the dim light of the candle. “Ah, yes, I see. She didn’t say fifth door, she wrote fourth. You see? It’s just her abominable handwriting, and she left out the u. She never was much good at spelling, I’m afraid. I can see how you made the mistake—especially with, ah, your undoubted eagerness clouding your thinking. I have had a bit more experience with reading her notes.”
“Then it is too bad that I did not consult with you first,” Neville snarled, “but, you see, I was not aware that I needed an interpreter.”
“There is no need to be testy,” Cassandra stated. “And you needn’t worry for your, uh, for the lady’s reputation. I’m not likely to besmirch my family by telling anyone that Joanna makes assignations with men in her bedchamber. She is my cousin, you see.”
“Your cousin?” Neville studied her face in the candlelight. “That’s odd. I don’t recall seeing you with her.”
“That is often the case.” Cassandra kept her voice light. She was used, after all, to being overshadowed by her beautiful, flirtatious cousin. Joanna’s guinea-gold hair and large blue eyes generally captured all male attention when she was around.
Cassandra, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, knew that she was on the shelf and, indeed, had never been popular with men. She had not “taken” one during her season, and her father had not been able to afford more than one. Cassandra knew, anyway, that any number of social seasons would not have seen her married. For one thing, she had no knack for flirtation and even less interest in it. For another, while she was not precisely plain, her features lacked the even perfection of a true beauty. Her cheekbones were too high, her jaw too firm, and her mouth was much too wide for the popular rosebud look. Even her eyes, which she felt to be her best feature, were a quiet gray rather than a soulful brown or a sparkling blue, and she did not use them to her advantage, instead gazing at the world in a straightforward, clear way that did not lure men.
So she had retired from the social world after one year, not really displeased that she had not made a successful marriage. She had done the season as a duty for her family. They were, as always, in desperate need of money, and she would have gritted her teeth and said yes if an eligible man had asked for her hand. But she had found no man during the year of her debut whom she had accounted as anything but boring, and she was, frankly, quite glad to return to the bosom of her family at Chesilworth unengaged and unlikely ever to be so. With relief, she had donned her old clothes, wound her hair up into the familiar bun and jumped back into the management of her father’s household, which had fallen into a woeful state in her absence. She found contentment in raising her younger brothers and sister, and intellectual companionship with her father, and if there was anything missing in her life—other than a chronic lack of money—she had not felt it, or at least had not allowed the feeling to dwell long. At social functions, she sat with the matrons overseeing the antics of the youngsters, rather than with the giggling, hopeful maidens, whose conversations she found stultifying, and in the last couple of years, she had even taken to wearing a small cap over her hair in acknowledgment of her spinster status. It was just as well, she thought, that men’s eyes slid past her indifferently. It was much less trying not to have to make conversation about nothing.
Still...she could not help but feel a twinge of hurt at the thought that Sir Philip had not even noticed her when he was standing not three feet away from her, chatting with Aunt Ardis and her cousin Joanna.
“You were otherwise occupied,” she continued, not without a sting.
“I see.” He turned and looked at her. It puzzled him that he could have missed noticing this creature with the wide eyes and tumbling mass of bright hair and...other, entrancing features. His gaze dropped down to her torso, where her nightgown, still unbuttoned, had once again slipped off her shoulder and down her arm, revealing a high, firm white breast with its enticing pinkish brown nipple. Even fully clothed and with her hair done up in proper midday form, how could he not have noticed her?
Cassandra, following the direction of his gaze, glanced down and saw with horror that her breast was exposed. Blushing furiously, she jerked up the neck of her nightgown and began buttoning it up, keeping her eyes turned down. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to her! How could she face him again? No man had ever seen more of her than what was bared by the neckline of an evening gown. Now this man, this stranger to her, had seen her with the intimacy of a husband. Worse—what was she doing with half the buttons of her gown undone? She thought of the wild, swirling emotions of her dream, the startling sensations and the heat in her abdomen. What had happened? Had it been not a dream lover but a real man touching her in those intimate ways? Had this man caused that fierce, primeval jolt of pleasure that had finally dragged her from her slumber?
She looked up at him, color still staining her cheeks. She was embarrassed, but Cassandra Verrere was not one to flinch from the truth. “What happened? Here, tonight, I mean. I—I feel so strange. I dreamed, well, bizarre things, things that I— Were they real? What did you—what did I do?”
Sir Philip hesitated, then he leaned over and took her hand gently. “You did nothing. I assure you. I entered your room, thinking you were another. You were in the midst of a fevered dream. I—you were tossing and turning. Thinking you were Joanna, I came over and, ah, took your arms. I tried to wake you, but you were very heavily asleep. I...kissed you. And you woke up. That is when I realized that you were not Miss Moulton.”
“And that is all?”
His eyebrows rose lazily. “Yes. Of course. What else could there be?”
Cassandra let out a sigh of relief. “Nothing. It was just peculiar. I felt as if I were not quite asleep, yet I could not seem to pull myself out of my slumber.”
“No doubt you had a tiring day.”
“Mmm.” Cassandra knew it had not been at all tiring physically. But the social interaction that a large house party involved was rather wearying. Still... “I think you had better leave now.”
“Yes. You’re right.” He slid off the bed and walked toward the door. Cassandra followed him. He paused and turned toward her. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she responded automatically, then added, “What are you thanking me for?”
“For being a most calm and reasonable young woman. There are not many who would have reacted as you did.”
“Oh.” Cassandra nodded matter-of-factly. “I am afraid I haven’t much sensibility.”
He reached for the doorknob, but Cassandra laid a restraining hand on his arm. “No. You had better let me see if anyone happens to be out in the hall first.”
“Of course.” He nodded and stepped back.
Cassandra eased the door open a crack and put her eye to it. She gasped and jerked back, closing the door hastily. She turned to Sir Philip, her eyes huge.
“What is it?” He made a move toward the door, but she raised her hand.
“Don’t!” she cautioned. “Shh. It’s my aunt!”
Almost without thinking, she reached down and turned the key in the lock. The last thing she wanted was for Aunt Ardis to barge into her room.
“What is she doing here?” he whispered.
“I have no idea. Could she have seen you enter my room? If she knocks on the door, you will have to hide.” She looked speculatively toward the window. “I wonder if you could escape out the window.”
“We are on the second floor,” he reminded her.
“There might be a trellis or a tree.”
He raised one brow sardonically. “You seem awfully familiar with this sort of predicament.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Their discussion was interrupted at that moment by heavy pounding on a door, not Cassandra’s, but the one next door. Cassandra jumped at the sound, then relaxed with a heartfelt sigh. “Thank God. She’s at Joanna’s room.”
“Joanna!” Aunt Ardis bellowed, her voice carrying clearly through the walls. “Open this door. This is your mother! Open this door at once, I say!”
“Is your aunt in the habit of waking everyone up in the middle of the night this way?”
Cassandra shook her head, puzzled. “No. I cannot imagine what has possessed her. She is always in bed by ten.”
“Joanna!”
Cassandra stealthily unlocked her door and opened it a fraction, peering out at the spectacle of her aunt. Aunt Ardis was a sizable woman, with a large bosom that thrust out like the prow of a ship when she was corseted. It did so now, despite the fact that Aunt Ardis wore a red velvet dressing gown and bedroom slippers. Cassandra noticed, too, that her hair was still coiled up into its usual flat braided bun, not hanging loose down her back. Cassandra frowned, wondering what could have happened to put her aunt into such a state.
“Joanna! Open up I say. Who’s in there with you? I heard voices.”
“Voices!” Cassandra exclaimed softly and looked back at Sir Philip. “Oh, dear, do you think she could have heard us?”
Neville shook his head, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. Cassandra had to admit that it seemed unlikely, given the fact that her aunt’s room was on the other side of Joanna’s.
At that moment Joanna’s door was wrenched open, and Joanna cried out in a carrying whisper, “Hush! It’s too early! He’s not here yet!”
Aunt Ardis’s jaw dropped, and she stared at her daughter in horror. All up and down the hall, doors were opening and heads were popping out, their expressions variously sleepy, irritated or avid, and some all three.
“I say, what’s going on?” Colonel Rivington, across the hall from Joanna’s room, called out. “What is all this commotion?”
“Uh.” Aunt Ardis’s mouth opened and closed like that of a landed fish.
“I’m so sorry.” Joanna smiled sweetly at the man. “Please forgive my mother. She was, uh, she was just...”
“Worried!” Aunt Ardis found her voice. “That’s it. I was worried. I heard Joanna crying out in her sleep. She must have been having a bad dream.”
“Yes,” Joanna agreed quickly. “A nightmare. I was having a nightmare.”
Cassandra eased the door shut and turned toward Sir Philip, frowning in puzzlement. “How odd. Why are they—” She stopped short at the forbidding expression on his face. “What is it?”
“I understand now.” His words were short and clipped, his mouth thinned with distaste. “I was surprised when Miss Moulton threw herself at me this afternoon. Before that she had been acting like the usual coy, flirtatious maiden. Then suddenly she turned into a brazen woman of the world.” He remembered his faint surprise as she had “accidentally” brushed against him three times this afternoon in the conservatory and the seductive looks she had sent him, the long, promising kiss behind a palm tree as she slipped the note into his hand.
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“Your cousin’s scheme. Your aunt’s. She wrote me that note asking me to come to her room tonight at midnight. She gave every indication of welcoming quite dishonorable attentions. And her mother was primed to come barging in after I was in the room, rousing everyone on the floor with her loud comments.”
Cassandra stared. “You mean, she lured you up to her room so that her mother could catch you in a compromising position with her? But why? Why would she want to destroy her reputation like that?”
A faint smile flickered across Neville’s face. Her lack of comprehension of her relatives’ scheme spoke volumes about her own honest character. “My dear girl, I doubt very much that she cared about her reputation being shredded, as long as it brought her wealth and an old name. Her reputation would not have been ruined, in any case, since she and I would immediately have become engaged.”
Cassandra gasped. “You mean—they wanted to force you into marrying Joanna? I can’t believe it!” But she could; it took only a moment’s reflection to bring her around. Why else would her aunt have been pounding on Joanna’s door so loudly and virtually shouting, except to bring out several interested observers? Why else would her aunt, usually early to bed, still have been up at midnight—and still wearing her corset, her hair done up? She was expecting everyone to look at her, and she had been unable to bring herself to be in true deshabille.
“That’s why I was so groggy...” Cassandra murmured. “Aunt Ardis must have put some of her laudanum in my drink tonight. I should have known she was up to something when she came in here with that warm milk to help me sleep. She knows how lightly I sleep and the difficulty I often have going to bed. She wanted me deep in slumber so I wouldn’t investigate any noise I heard—like you slipping into Joanna’s room.”
“No doubt you’re right. It is merely my good luck that Miss Moulton’s handwriting is so illegible, or you would have found yourself forced into cousinship with me.”
“Oh.” Cassandra raised her hands to her burning cheeks. She wasn’t sure whether she was more humiliated or furious. How could her aunt and cousin have acted in such a despicable way? Somehow the thought of Joanna trying to tie this man to her for life made Cassandra long to slap her cousin. “I am so ashamed. Sir Philip, I apologize for my family. I cannot imagine what made them do such a thing.”
“I have found that the lure of money often causes people to act in a bizarre fashion.”
“That is no excuse for—for such a lack of principles. I am sorry, so dreadfully sorry.” Her eyes shone with angry, embarrassed tears. “You must think we are awful.”
He smiled and took her hand, gallantly bowing over it and brushing the back of her hand with his lips. “My dear lady, I do not think you are awful at all. Indeed, you almost restore my faith in humanity.”
The touch of his lips on her skin sent an unaccustomed thrill through Cassandra, reminding her of the fevered, pulse-racing condition in which she had awakened. That odd melting-wax sensation deep in her abdomen had still not completely gone away. Cassandra swallowed and turned away.
“I, ah, I shall see if everyone has gone back inside.” She opened the door a crack and looked out. When she saw no one, she stuck her head out the door and peered up and down the hall.
She turned back to Sir Philip. “There is no one out there now.”
He nodded. “Then I shall take my leave of you.” He smiled, sketching her another elegant bow. “Thank you for a most interesting evening, Miss Moulton.”
“Oh, I’m—” Cassandra stopped. Now was not the time to go into an explanation that her name was not Moulton. “I’m just sorry for what my cousin and aunt did.”
“And I apologize for...my most ungentlemanly behavior.”
Cassandra felt another blush beginning to rise in her cheeks. She turned away and made another check out the door, then stepped aside for Sir Philip to pass. She closed the door behind him and waited a few tense moments for the sounds of voices that would indicate that he had been caught. There was nothing. Again she ventured a peek out and saw that the hall was empty. Sir Philip had gone.
She closed the door and leaned against it, letting out a sigh. Oh, God! Why had this had to happen? Tonight, of all nights, and with Sir Philip Neville, of all people?
Cassandra made her way over to her bed and sat down heavily. She had schemed so hard to get her aunt to take her along on this visit when she had heard that Sir Philip was going to be here. It had taken numerous careful, subtle hints about the difficulty of chaperoning an active young girl like Joanna on the sort of outdoors amusements that one tended to go on at large house parties, painting a picture of liveliness that was guaranteed not to appeal to Aunt Ardis’s sluggish nature. Concealing any desire on her own part to attend such a function, she had worked her aunt around to realizing that the ideal solution would be to take Cassandra along to chaperon Joanna on the activities Aunt Ardis found too taxing. Reluctantly, Cassandra had let herself be persuaded.
It had been, she thought, a superb performance on her part, especially given the fact that her decisive, straightforward nature did not run naturally toward subterfuge. And now her effort was in all likelihood wasted. How could she even face Sir Philip again, knowing what Joanna had tried to do to him? And knowing, too, in what an intimate situation he had met Cassandra herself?
Heat flooded her just at the memory of the things she had dreamed—the deep, passionate kisses, the sensual caresses. Had those things really happened? Had her drugged mind just turned them into a dream? She groaned in despair, covering her face with her hands. She could never live it down if she had moaned and writhed in Sir Philip’s arms the way she had in her dream. He had told her that nothing had happened, but perhaps he was merely being gentlemanly.
She flopped back on her bed, unconsciously running her hand down her front as she remembered the hot, pulsing sensations that had assaulted her in her dreams...the intense explosion of pleasure that had propelled her out of her sleep finally. What had that been? That deep, hard jolt of pure sensation that had left her feeling weak and quietly throbbing? Nothing in her experience had ever even come close to that feeling.
Was she a wanton woman? The idea seemed absurd. She had had very few dealings with men, really. She did not seem to know how to talk to them. The straightforward way she had talked to her father had seemed to make young men quickly leave her side. Aunt Ardis had told her that young girls did not make conversation about such boring topics as history or politics, much less offer their strong—and often quite radical—opinions. Young ladies, Aunt Ardis had pointed out, were supposed to giggle and flirt, to flutter a fan coyly in front of their faces and let their eyes speak volumes above it. Cassandra had found the whole notion absurd, and she could scarcely believe that a gentleman could decide whether he loved a woman or could even stand to be married to her on the basis of giggles and inane conversation.
Of course, she had had no beaux, whereas the flirtatious Joanna, who had never uttered a sensible word to a man in her life, was flooded with them at every party. It proved, she supposed, the truth of Aunt Ardis’s advice. Cassandra had realized that she was not romantic enough or not interested enough in men to act the part of a ninny in order to snare one. If her aunt was correct, Cassandra thought, then most men were too foolish for her to want to spend the rest of her life with one. It was far better to remain a spinster and her own woman. With such an unromantic, practical nature, she found it difficult to believe that there was a streak of wantonness running through her. If there was, then her earlier dream had been the only manifestation of it she had ever noticed.
This was nonsense, she told herself, sitting up straight. Sir Philip had not been trying to protect her when he said nothing had happened. He had merely been telling the truth. It was absurd to think anything else. Of course he had done nothing except climb into her bed, thinking that she was Joanna. Then he had seen her face and realized that she was not. He would not have been kissing and caressing her for several minutes before he realized that he did not know her.
Cassandra let out a sigh of relief. She had been letting her imagination run away with her. The peculiar sensations she had experienced were doubtless part of the peculiarity of her dreams. She was sure that Aunt Ardis or Joanna must have dosed her with some of her aunt’s laudanum. The sleeping potion had obviously affected her dreams as well as made her sleep, and no doubt it was responsible for the odd sensations she had dreamed—things that had been entirely in her head, not really physical.
Sir Philip would not assume she was wanton. Indeed, he had told her that he appreciated her integrity. She told herself that she need not be embarrassed to face him. And the fact was, she had to talk to him. Her family’s whole future rested on getting him to agree to her plan. Her cousin’s behavior was irksome and embarrassing, of course, but Cassandra told herself that she would have to rise above it. She had to think of her brothers and their future. It was imperative to get their family inheritance, and only Sir Philip could help her do that. She could not let a few well-bred qualms deter her from her course. She had to talk to Sir Philip tomorrow.
Cassandra gave a short, decisive nod, as if she had been arguing with another person. Then she slid beneath her covers, reaching over to blow out the candle. She felt much more like herself now. And tomorrow she would proceed with her plan.
Chapter Two
SIR PHILIP NEVILLE strolled through the rose garden, scarcely noticing the sweet aroma or the heavy, colorful heads of flowers nodding in the morning sun. His mind was on the young woman he had met in such bizarre fashion the night before. He had been thinking of her for much of the morning—indeed, for much of the night before, too, after he had made his secretive way back to his bedroom. To think that she was related to the scheming Moultons!
He had trouble seeing any resemblance to Joanna in her open face. He supposed that others would say Joanna was lovelier; indeed, before last night, he might have said the same thing himself. Joanna’s sparkling blue eyes and pouting, rosebud lips were far more what was acknowledged as beauty than her cousin’s luminous, intelligent gray eyes or generous mouth. But as he thought of the woman’s creamy complexion and the firm lines of her cheek and jaw, the softer outlines of Joanna’s face blurred in his mind. And that glorious light gold curtain of hair—how could he possibly have failed to notice her yesterday?
That question had been plaguing him for hours. He could not believe that he had been so dazzled by Joanna’s beauty that he had noticed nothing else. Joanna was a pretty little minx, all right, and her bold looks and smiles had aroused his sexual interest, but he had not been rendered thoughtless by her. Even given her obvious invitation to share her favors, he had originally intended not to go to her room. He found her prattle boring, as he did most women’s, particularly the young ladies of quality who pursued him, hoping for marriage, and he had not been sure that the momentary pleasure of her body would be worth the effort of making the sort of sweet assurances she would expect, much less having to listen to her prate on about her hair or clothes or whatever inane thought entered her head.
Thank God he had gone, though, or he would not have met the other Miss Moulton. He found Joanna’s cousin a much more interesting prospect than the nubile Joanna. He thought back to the day before, when Lady Arrabeck had introduced him to Mrs. Moulton and her daughter. He vaguely remembered that there had been another woman in the room, standing at some distance from Joanna and her mother. He had received the hazy impression of an older woman, turned slightly away from him, looking out the window. Surely that had not been Joanna’s cousin.
He tried to remember why he had assumed she was not a young woman. Her clothes had been dark and plain, and he thought he recalled that a matronly sort of cap had sat on her head. Yes, that was it. Her tall, slender figure had been encased in dark clothes, unremarkable except for their lack of fashion or appeal, and that glorious fall of bright hair must have been caught up under a spinster’s cap. He wondered why she had hidden her best feature that way. His sister, he knew, would give anything to have that thick fall of light gold hair.
Sir Philip could almost feel the satin smoothness of her hair as it had trickled through his fingers, and his abdomen contracted with a swift stab of hunger. He remembered the way her mouth had tasted beneath his, the smooth glide of his fingers over her skin, the unconcealed pleasure she had experienced from his lovemaking. Philip smiled. This was one woman whose pleasure at his hands had not, he was sure, been artifice.
True, other women had smiled and moaned and writhed beneath his kisses and caresses, apparently in the throes of passion. But with his mistresses, he had never been sure whether their desire and delight were real or merely a show they put on to please him so that he would continue to keep them in high style.
Sir Philip had come into a great deal of money at an early age, inheriting from his mother’s father a sizable fortune. His father’s death some years later had only increased his wealth, adding the substantial Neville properties. While his title was only that of a baronet, the Neville family boasted one of the oldest and most blue-blooded lineages, with countless connections to dukes, earls and viscounts throughout its history. The combination of both great wealth and good name had made him from an early age a prize for predatory females—from aristocratic mamas searching for a husband for their daughters to common ladies of the night to elegant actresses or ballet dancers prepared to accept a carte blanche. He had learned to be cynical about their attraction to him before he reached his twenties.
On the whole, Sir Philip preferred the more straightforward business arrangements of a kept mistress to the coy flirtations of society maidens, all of whom, he was sure, would have smiled at him and fluttered their eyelashes and hung on his every word even if he had been a cross-eyed stuttering fool, as long as they might acquire the Neville name and fortune by doing so.
But even with the elegant, attractive women whom he had kept as his mistresses, he had always known that they earned their living by pleasing him, and he had never been able to trust their protestations of love or even the elementary sounds of their passions.
But last night, there had been no artifice, no deception. The young lady had responded unconsciously, instinctively, and her arousal at his touch had been immediate and unmistakable. Such honest desire intrigued him. Indeed, just thinking about it now, he could feel himself hardening once again.
He stopped and turned to look back toward the house, searching, he had to admit, for the sight of Miss Moulton. He had been doing so most of the morning. He wanted to talk to her again, to hear her warm, pleasant voice, free of the soft, babyish affectations toward which young women of his acquaintance were so often prone. He wanted to see her in the daylight, to assure himself that her creamy skin and luminous eyes were as he remembered them from last night. So far, however, the young lady had been disappointingly absent, though he had met several other young women who had been more than happy to stroll with him in the fragrant garden, annoying him with their chatter.
He wondered if she was simply a late riser or if he should perhaps seek her inside. It was possible, he supposed, that she was one of those delicate creatures who never ventured out into the sun.
As he stood searching the garden and the distant terrace, there was the crunch of a footstep behind him on the gravel, and a woman’s voice said, “Ah! Sir Philip. We meet again.”
It was her voice. He whirled to face her. She was tall and carried herself with pride, seemingly unaware or uncaring that she loomed over many men. She was slender, with high, enticing breasts, though her figure was concealed in a brown bombazine gown that Sir Philip would have expected to see on a governess rather than on Ardis Moulton’s niece. Her hair was hidden beneath a straw hat, and its wide brim shadowed her face, as well.
He stepped forward, unaware of the smile that touched his usually impassive face. He looked down into her face, seeing once again the firm, generous mouth, smiling unaffectedly at him, and the wide, intelligent gray eyes under curving dark brows. He knew that her facial bones were too strong for her to be considered a proper beauty, but their lines appealed to him. Hers was the sort of face one did not easily forget, and he knew that he had been guilty of not really looking at her the day before, for he would not have forgotten that face. He wished she was not wearing the bonnet, so that he could see her hair in the sunlight. His fingers itched to take it off her head.
“Miss Moulton, what a pleasant surprise. I fear my walk in the morning is usually a dull affair, but you, I am sure, will enliven it. If you will walk with me...?” His voice trailed off questioningly, and he offered his arm.
Cassandra took it, smiling. She hoped that the heightened color in her face would not betray her. She had spotted Sir Philip in the garden some minutes earlier, and she had been walking around, working up her courage to speak to him, ever since. When she had finally approached him, and he had turned to her and smiled, her heart had done the most unusual flip-flop in her chest, and her lungs seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. She had never before felt this way when she talked to a man, nor had she ever had the silly desire to grin at a man for no reason, as she feared she was doing now. It was, she told herself, some odd reaction caused by her trepidation at speaking to him.
She tried to ignore the way her heart pounded in her chest as they strolled through a vine arbor and out into the less formally restrained yard at the rear of the gardens. “My name is not Moulton,” she began.
“I beg your pardon. I had thought, since your aunt’s name was Moulton—”
“Of course. But she is the wife of my mother’s brother.”
“I see. Then I am afraid you have the advantage of me. What is your name?”
Her courage failed her at the last minute, and she said only, “Cassandra.”
“Cassandra!” Amusement lit his eyes, and Cassandra noticed that in the sunlight they looked more gold than brown. “A rather gloomy name to put on a child, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps Papa and Mama thought it would give me prophetic powers. Papa was in his Greek period then, so I suppose that I am lucky that they didn’t decide to name me Persephone or Electra.”
“Mmm. Quite true.” He looked much struck by the thought.
“Of course, my brothers and sister call me Cassie. That’s not so bad.”
“Neither is bad. I assure you, I didn’t mean that. Cassandra is a lovely name. It is just not—”
“I know. The sort of name most people would inflict on a baby.”
He smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t have put it quite that way.”
“Only because you are too polite.”
“And was your father in his ‘Greek period’ when your brothers and sister were born?” he asked delicately.
Laughter bubbled up out of Cassandra’s throat, a delicious sound that Sir Philip found sizzled along his nerves. “You mean, are they named Ajax, Agamemnon and Demeter?”
“Precisely.” His eyes twinkled down at her.
“My sister’s name is Olivia. That is close, I suppose. It comes from Latin, does it not? But I think he had left that phase by the time the twins were born. Their names are Crispin and Hart. Not exactly Ned or Tom, but at least they are not classical.”
“No. Proper British names, both of them.”
They were nearing the maze, and Cassandra nodded toward it. “Would you like to go in the maze? I explored it yesterday and worked it out. There is a lovely fountain in the center.”
Philip thought of wandering through the high green walls of the maze with Cassandra, alone in its quiet seclusion, and his loins tightened. “Yes,” he replied a little huskily. He cleared his throat. “It sounds delightful.”
“It is nice—though it’s not terribly difficult. The one we had at home was dreadfully complicated. It was easy to get lost in it, even for us. Once, when Hart and Crispin were little, they went in, and it took us hours to realize where they were. Papa threatened to close it off, but I persuaded him merely to block the entrance until they were older.”
She did not add that in the past few years the maze had been let go; the once-trimmed shrubs had in many places grown together, with grass and even weeds cropping up everywhere. They had not had the money to continue to pay a gardener to keep it in proper form.
“Where is your home?”
“In the Cotswolds, near Fairbourne. Actually, we live with Aunt Ardis now, since Papa died. It’s not far away from our home, but we do miss it.” She smiled, her jaw setting in a determined way. “But our circumstances are about to change, and then we will be able to go home again.”
They turned into the maze and began to follow its twistings and turnings. The air was still within its corridors, and hushed, with only the occasional twittering of a bird. Enclosed by the high, waxy green walls, it seemed almost as if they were in a different world from the rest of the estate. They walked silently for a time, both of them loath to disturb the hush.
But when they were deep within the maze, Cassandra drew a deep breath and looked up at Sir Philip earnestly. “I did not tell you my last name.”
“No, so you didn’t.” He had noticed the omission and wondered at it. Now his curiosity grew even stronger.
“Well, as I said, I am not a Moulton. That was my mother’s name. My name is Verrere.”
He stopped abruptly, startled, and looked at her. His eyes grew a little wary, and he said in a soft voice, “Ah...a faithless Verrere.”
Cassandra planted her hands on her hips and glared at him. “A ruthless Neville,” she responded.
For a long moment they simply stood, looking at one another. Finally Sir Philip started forward again, saying only, “And what does a Verrere want with a Neville?”
Cassandra cast about in her mind for exactly the right words to say. She had been waiting for this moment for months now. It was the only opportunity she was likely to have, and she had to get it right.
“I know that our families have for some years now been, well...”
“Enemies?” he suggested.
“I would say that enemies is rather a strong word to use,” Cassandra demurred. “It has been over a hundred years since a Verrere or Neville tried to kill each other.”
“Mmm. A remarkable achievement.”
At one time the two families had, indeed, been constantly at the point of drawing swords. Any comment by a Neville about a Verrere was immediately interpreted to be a deadly slur and vice versa. Over the years the hard enmity between them had declined to a social one-upsmanship, with each striving to outdo the other in terms of parties, carriages and racehorses. During this century, even that degree of rancor had died down, so that hostesses became able to invite a Neville and a Verrere to the same function without fearing that neither would ever speak to her again.
Cassandra suspected that the intense rivalry had diminished largely because the Verreres’ fortunes had declined, while the Nevilles’ had kept on growing, as always. The Verreres had simply been unable to compete any longer in any comparison of possessions or parties, leaving them with little to lord over the Nevilles except the Verrere title, Chesilworth. Indeed, during Cassandra’s father’s lifetime, the Verreres had retired from the lists, socially speaking. Cassandra’s grandfather had long ago had to sell the London house to pay debts, and the expense of clothes and rent for a London season was beyond them. Her father, Rupert, had been a bookish man, anyway, and he had been more pleased than not to give up the season in London each year. He had preferred to spend what money he had on his books and art.
“I trust that you are not so narrow-minded as to hold my name against me,” Cassandra continued, looking up at Philip challengingly.
His mouth quirked sardonically. “I was taught as a child that if I was bad, the Verreres would get me. However, I do trust that I will be able to hold my own against this particular Verrere.”
“I have come for your help, not to fight.”
His brows soared. “My help? A Verrere asking a Neville for help?”
Cassandra frowned. “Do you plan to continue playing the fool in this fashion? I came to this house party specifically to talk to you, but I can see that I have wasted my time if you are unable to drop your petty prejudices long enough to listen.”
He could not help but grin at her tart words and tone. “I beg your pardon, Miss Verrere.” He pulled his face back into somber lines. “I will endeavor to be serious, since my levity displeases you. However, I have to tell you I find it bizarre that a Verrere would even think of asking me for help, let alone believe that I would be willing to extend that help.”
“Well, as for your helpfulness, I have no way of knowing that, of course. But I would hope that you are a reasonable enough man to see that it would be profitable for both of us.”
“I am afraid you have lost me before we have even started. What would be profitable?”
“That is what I am about to tell you. Ah, here is the center of the maze. Isn’t it a tranquil spot? Why don’t we sit down on the bench, and I will explain myself?”
“By all means.”
Neville politely dusted off the bench with his handkerchief, and they sat down. They looked at each other assessingly. Finally Cassandra began. “I am searching for the Spanish dowry.”
Neville gazed back at her blankly. “The what?”
Cassandra frowned. “Surely you have heard of it. It was what started the whole bitterness between our families.”
Late in the seventeenth century, the Nevilles and Verreres had decided to ally their families by marriage. Sir Edric Neville was contracted to marry the daughter of Richard Verrere, Lord Chesilworth. The girl’s name was Margaret, and she, rather than marrying Sir Edric, had stolen out of the Neville estate on the eve of her wedding and run off with the man she truly loved. It had been a scandal of immense proportions, heightened by the fact that the substantial dowry which she had brought to the Nevilles was missing, as well. The incident had set the two families at odds for the next two hundred years.
“You mean Black Maggie’s dowry?” Philip exclaimed.
She gave him a disapproving look. “If you mean Margaret Verrere, then, yes, it is her dowry I am speaking of. A collection of Spanish treasure seized by Colin Verrere in the late sixteenth century.”
Philip snorted. “Stolen, you mean. Colin Verrere was an out-and-out pirate.”
“He sailed with letters of marque from Queen Elizabeth herself,” Cassandra retorted hotly. “He was a patriot, as well as an excellent sailor and fighter.”
“Legalized piracy. I suspect that the Spanish sailors he killed had some difficulty telling the difference.”
“It was a war,” Cassandra reminded him coldly. “Spain was our enemy, and any damage done to her economy was a blow for England and the queen.”
“Yes, and was it not convenient that Lord Chesilworth’s own pockets were so well-lined by his ‘patriotism’?”
Cassandra regarded him with irritation. “I fail to understand why an Englishman should have so much sympathy for a country that tried to invade his own.”
Neville shrugged. “I have no particular love for Spain, Miss Verrere. However, I do believe in telling the truth, rather than masking ordinary, everyday greed with a patina of ‘God, queen, and country.’”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Frankly, Sir Philip, I think it is more that you simply enjoy being difficult.”
Her words startled a chuckle from him. “Perhaps you are right.” He paused, then added, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. There is no dowry. It is only a legend.”
“A legend! Of course it’s not a legend. The Spanish dowry was real. Why else would your Neville ancestor have pursued the matter so assiduously in and out of court? Why did he keep insisting that the dowry by rights belonged to him, if there was not really a dowry?”
“Oh, I grant you that Chesilworth had some jewels and things that his grandfather took from Spanish ships, but the size and value of it has been greatly increased by the years and distance from the actual thing. Who is to say that the dowry was that valuable, and who is to say that Chesilworth even really sent the dowry with his daughter? It could have been an elaborate ruse to defraud Sir Edric.”
“Oh, poppycock!” Cassandra said bluntly, color flaring in her cheeks. “I have read the list recorded in the Verrere estate books when they loaded the trunk into Margaret’s baggage train. Unset emeralds and rubies from South America, gold coins, gold jewelry, emerald earrings—and, the pièce de résistance, the most beautiful and precious piece of treasure—a ‘solid gold leopard of cunning workmanship with eyes of emeralds and a collar of rubies.’”
Cassandra’s eyes glistened as she thought of the stunning beauty of the statue. “It was a work of art, as well as being of great monetary value. It was the crown jewel of Colin Verrere’s Spanish collection.”
“If the treasure was actually loaded into the baggage train and sent to Haverly House with Margaret Verrere,” Sir Philip said firmly, “then Black Maggie took the dowry with her when she ran away. Sir Edric obviously did not have it, or he would not have pursued Chesilworth so about it, and Chesilworth claimed that he did not have it. So either Chesilworth was lying, and she left it with him all along, or Black Maggie took it with her to help set up herself and her lover in the colonies.”
“Would you stop calling her that? Margaret Verrere was not a thief, and she did not take the Spanish treasure with her. She left it behind at the Neville estate when she eloped.”
Sir Philip gave her an odd look. “You speak as if you knew the woman. She has been dead for at least a hundred and fifty years.”
“One hundred and fifty-five, to be exact,” Cassandra corrected him. “But I do feel as if I know her. You see, I have been reading her diaries.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. Sir Philip stared at her.
“This tale grows more fantastic by the moment,” he said at last. “Miss Verrere, if that really is your name, I am beginning to get the feeling that someone has set me up for an elaborate jest.”
“Really, Sir Philip.” Cassandra looked at him with aggravation, the same look she bent on her brothers when they had been misbehaving and which generally had the effect of making them suddenly stand straighter. Unfortunately, it seemed to have little effect on Philip Neville. “You are the most suspicious human being I have ever had the misfortune to meet. First you don’t believe that a dowry, which is recorded in ledgers and which one of your own ancestors pursued with great diligence all his life, ever really existed. Then you don’t believe that it was actually delivered to the Neville estate. Now you are saying that you do not believe that I am who I say I am. I don’t understand. Are you this suspicious by nature, or have you met so many liars and cheats that you are a sadly disillusioned man?”
Neville grimaced. “I am suspicious of your story, my dear lady, because it is a highly unbelievable tale. As for the so-called Spanish dowry, I am simply saying that it happened so long ago, and so many stories have been spread about it, that we really have no way of telling what is the truth.”
“But we do. That is what I am trying to tell you, if you would only pay attention. I am in possession of Margaret Verrere’s diaries.”
“How did you come to acquire these diaries?” Neville settled his hands, crossed in his lap, the expression on his face that of one who is preparing to hear a long and entertaining story.
“From Mr. Simons. Perryman Simons—he is a book dealer in London. He sold the diaries to my father. Probably you were not aware of it, but my father, the late Lord Chesilworth, was intensely interested in the stories of the Spanish dowry all his life.”
“I had heard it was a...a continuing passion with him.”
“From the studiously impassive expression on your face, I assume that you heard he was obsessed on the subject. Cracked, I believe is the common vernacular.” She shrugged. “Pray do not bother to spare my feelings. I am not a woman of high sensibility. Besides, I have heard it all before, and probably worse. But whatever people might have said about my father, he was an intelligent man, a scholar. He based his reasonings on sound facts, not wishful thinking. Of course, he also had access to the family records and the stories that had been handed down from generation to generation. He knew that Margaret Verrere was not the sort of woman to take the dowry with her. The Verreres have always prided themselves on their honor, you see.”
“A thing that Margaret seems to have forgotten when she broke her marriage contract and left Sir Edric standing at the altar.”
“She was in love with another!” Cassandra flared. “She had every right to marry the man she loved instead of being forced into a loveless marriage simply for the sake of family alliances. Sir Edric may have been wealthy and powerful, but everyone knows how the Nevilles acquired their money and influence—they have a history of ruthless, insensitive, predatory behavior, and doubtless Sir Edric was like all the rest of them.”
“Yes, a far cry from looting Spanish shipping, as the first Lord Chesilworth did,” Neville countered sardonically.
“Colin Verrere was a man of action, true.” Cassandra drew herself up as straight and tall as she could, glaring at the man sitting on the opposite end of the bench. “But he was also the Queen’s man, fighting the Queen’s enemy. It was a code of loyalty and honor he followed. The Verreres, at least, have never been powermongers, doing whatever it took to acquire land and money, with no regard for anyone else. They did not amass a fortune in land during the Middle Ages by waging war on everyone whose land they coveted. They did not dwell at court, currying every favor they could from the king.”
“You are implying that the Nevilles did?” Sir Philip sprang to his feet, his eyes suddenly flaming with a hot, gold light. “That they made their money off the sorrows of others, from dishonorable conflicts? From gifts from kings? The Nevilles have always been shrewd. But they did not act without honor, and it was more often they whom the king asked for money than the other way around. They were good warriors, that is true, and I am proud of that fact. But they did not fight without just cause. They invested their money where it would bring them more and did not fritter it away on dubious works of art or fantastic parties or architectural conceits.” He looked pointedly at Cassandra. “The Verreres are dreamers—feckless and generally incapable of making an intelligent business decision.”
“As if that were all that was important in life!” Cassandra retorted, her eyes flashing. “Yes, the Verreres were dreamers. Still are dreamers. There is nothing wrong with dreaming. It is dreamers who build empires and create masterpieces. Verreres are scholars, and they are interested in things of beauty more than in the price of tea or tobacco.”
“Ah, but the prices of tea and tobacco are useful things to know if one wants to continue to be able to spend one’s money on beautiful things.”
Cassandra’s cheeks colored. Obviously he knew about her family’s straitened financial circumstances. No doubt her father’s poor investments in various marvelous inventions and enterprises had been the gossip of the town. “No doubt you are right,” she said in a tight voice. “But scholarly enthusiasm and business acumen do not seem to run together.”
Neville sighed, his anger slipping away. His irritation with Cassandra had led him to say something far blunter than was polite. Of course he knew about poor old Chesilworth’s idiotic business schemes and their failures, but he would not normally have been so boorish as to shove that knowledge in the man’s daughter’s face.
“Forgive me,” he said quickly. “I did not mean—”
Cassandra sighed. “Of course you did.” She looked Philip in the eye. “I know my father was not good with money. Neither was my grandfather. It is obvious, after what has happened to the Verreres over the years. You are right. A love of beauty and scholarship do not bring in money. But still...” she squared her shoulders proudly “...I would never have wished for my father to be any other way. He was a fine man, and I loved him very much.”
“He was a fortunate man to have a daughter such as yourself.”
Cassandra smiled faintly. “I hope he thought so.”
“I am sure he did. Everyone knows that Chesilworth was a family man.”
“Yes. He did love us.” Cassandra swallowed, blinking away the sudden tears that threatened at the thought of her father. “I’m sorry. I am afraid that I still miss him very much.”
Sir Philip moved uncomfortably. “Forgive me. I—”
Cassandra shook her head, smiling. “No. It is I who must apologize, for straying from the subject. We were discussing the journals.”
“Ah, yes, the journals.” The faintly sardonic look returned to Sir Philip’s face, but he took his seat beside her on the bench again. “Of course.”
“They are the journals which Margaret Verrere kept all her life after she ran away to America. There were seven of them in all, and Mr. Simons sold them to my father not long before...before his death.” Cassandra did not see fit to add that her father had spent more money than they could afford in order to acquire the journals, leaving them in even worse financial shape when he died. Cassandra had perfectly understood his reasons for doing so. “Unfortunately, Papa did not get to read a great deal of the journals before he was taken ill. His lungs were always weak, I’m afraid. After—well, afterward, I read the journals.” She squared her shoulders, seeming to thrust sorrow behind her, and leaned forward eagerly. “In them, Margaret said that she left the dowry at the Neville estate. Not only that, she left instructions on how to get it. If we work together, you and I can find the Spanish dowry.”
Chapter Three
CASSANDRA GAVE A triumphant smile and leaned back, waiting expectantly.
Sir Philip gazed back at her shining eyes, and after a long moment, he said carefully, “Miss Verrere, don’t you find it a trifle...convenient, shall we say, that these lifelong journals of a woman who lived in the colonies should now turn up here in England?”
Cassandra sighed. “I was afraid that working with a Neville would be like this. Have you no adventurous spirit? No interest in a treasure hidden for generations?”
“I have no interest in fairy tales,” he retorted flatly. “Really, Miss Verrere...surely you can see that this is a hoax. The journals—after all these years—happen to turn up in England, even though they’ve been in the United States all this time. And they happen to fall into the hands of Mr. Simons, who happens to be your father’s favorite book dealer. I am sorry, but you are asking me to suspend disbelief a trifle too much.”
Cassandra took a firm grip on her temper, reminding herself that she had known what it would be like to try to convince a Neville of her plan. She had hoped that Sir Philip would be less stodgy than his father, Sir Thomas, had been reputed to be. Cassandra’s father had, by turn, characterized that man as a “dull dog” and a “cold fish.” Certainly Sir Philip’s entrance into her room last night had been anything but dull, and she had hoped that it had indicated a more adventurous character, but it was clear to her now that his was a typical Neville mind.
Pleasantly, she explained, “I don’t find it at all odd. Mr. Simons said that an American, a descendant of Margaret Verrere’s, had brought the journals to him. The man is a merchant who sometimes sails to England on business, and when he decided to sell the journals, which had been kept in his family all this time, he thought that since Margaret was from England, the books would fetch a better price here than in America. Americans, I believe, haven’t as much respect for old things.”
“Mmm. No doubt they haven’t the imagination or the adventurous spirit for treasure hunting, either.”
Cassandra frowned repressively and went on. “Mr. Simons was not the only book dealer this man went to. He tried several. But Simons, you see, was more interested than the others simply because he was Papa’s book dealer. He knew that Papa would want to buy the journals, given his interest in Margaret and the dowry. So Mr. Simons was willing to buy the journals when other dealers were not.”
“Miss Verrere, I think it is much more likely that this Simons fellow or some crony of his made the journals himself, knowing that he would be able to sell them to your father.”
“Sir Philip!” Cassandra looked shocked. “Perryman Simons is a reputable London book dealer. My father traded with him many times in the past. Mr. Simons would not have tried to sell him a forgery! And even if he had, why would he put in all those things about the dowry? That makes him no money.”
“No? Tales of a hidden treasure doubtless made the journals easier to sell. I’ll warrant that he charged your father a hefty sum.”
“It was rather large,” Cassandra admitted reluctantly. “But these are historical documents of great significance to my family. Papa would have bought the journals even if there had been no reference to the dowry.”
“The dealer could not be sure of that. Miss Verrere, I am afraid that your father and you were the victims of an unscrupulous hoax.”
Cassandra’s mouth twisted in exasperation. “I hate to think what must have happened in your life for you to have become such a cynic.”
“Think back to last night, and you will know one of those things.”
Cassandra thought about her aunt’s and cousin’s trick to force Neville into marrying Joanna. “Oh.”
“I have simply seen more of the world than you, Miss Verrere. I fear you are too trusting, and probably your father was, as well. Scholars often are, especially where their special fields of interest are concerned.”
“My father did not have such a highly developed mistrust of people as you,” Cassandra admitted. “But he knew Mr. Simons. He had dealt with him for years.”
“I am not wedded to the theory that Simons forged the journals. He could have been an unwitting victim, also. Perhaps the man who sold them to him was the real culprit.”
“That would mean that this forger was so good at his work that he was able to deceive both my father, a lover of antique books and Mr. Simons, one of the country’s best dealers. Neither of them voiced any suspicion that the journals were anything but genuinely old—the paper, the ink, the bindings. Unless, of course, you are suggesting that the journals were forged a hundred and fifty years ago or more, so that someday one of their descendants could palm off this forgery on my father?”
“No. Of course not.”
“My father knew a great deal about books. Perhaps he was naive, but he was not stupid. He would have known if the journals had been written in the last few months. He would have noticed if the paper was not old or the ink not faded. Whoever forged the diaries would have had to work very hard to make the books look authentically old enough to fool Papa. I cannot imagine that it would have been worthwhile to do all that for the price Papa paid—let alone all the hours it would have taken making up and writing all the things that were in the journals. It would have been a mammoth task and would have taken a great deal of time. It is much more likely that these really are Margaret Verrere’s diaries.”
“I find it hard to believe that a woman writing in her journals would have laid out instructions on how to find a treasure. A journal is something one writes to oneself, and she knew were the treasure was.”
“She did not write out instructions, as you say. Her remarks about the dowry were spread throughout the book, and they were small, often indirect, things. You see, in the first journal, which she started soon after they arrived in America, she now and again would mention how worried she was because she had heard nothing from her father. She had mailed him a letter, and she had not heard anything back from him to indicate that he had received it. At one point she says something about the letter having the secret to the dowry. That was why she had sent it to him.”
“Then I would think it obvious that Chesilworth got the letter, followed her instructions and found the dowry. He just never bothered to write and let her know he had it. Probably still miffed over the fact that she had made his name synonymous with treachery.”
“Sir Philip, I am afraid that we are going to find it very difficult to work together if you continue to refer to what happened in that way. I should think that a modern man would be able to admit that a woman has the right to marry whom she pleases.”
“I have no quarrel with that, only the manner in which it was handled. Becoming betrothed, then scampering off the night before the wedding, is not what I would consider correct behavior.”
“Yes,” Cassandra agreed drily, “’tis far worse than breaking into young ladies’ bedrooms at night and mauling them.”
“I did not maul you!” Neville looked aggrieved. “And you know that was a mistake.”
“Then give poor Margaret Verrere allowance for making a mistake, too. You don’t know what was involved or how afraid she was of her father and Sir Edric. I do. I read the remnants of that fear in her journal entries months later. She still was concerned that her father might track her down to the colonies and try to force her to go back. Perhaps it was not all neat and tidy and polite enough for you, but Margaret Verrere was only a seventeen-year-old girl at the time, desperate and alone. She did the only thing she could think of to do.”
Neville looked into Cassandra’s face, animated with emotion for the long-dead girl, and he had to smile. Argumentative and stubborn she might be, but when her face was alight with enthusiasm, her gray eyes luminous, she was almost beautiful. No, something more than beautiful, he thought; she was intriguing...quite out of the ordinary. He thought about the taste of her mouth last night, and a shaft of pure desire speared through him. He wanted to taste her again, he realized—and this time alone in some quiet spot, where he could kiss her at his leisure. It occurred to him that they were in that perfect place, that perfect moment—except that the lady in question was obsessed with discussing lost treasure.
“All right,” he agreed, tamping down his burgeoning desire. “I will grant you that Bla—Margaret Verrere was not an evil person, merely a confused and frightened young girl. And I will even, for the moment, accept her journals as genuine. How are we to find this dowry?”
“Well, from what I pieced together, apparently she hid the dowry somewhere on the Neville estate. Then she hid instructions on how to find it in the Neville house and also sent instructions to her father in a letter. Since she never heard from him, she sent him another letter with the same information, and finally, much later in her life, a third. She didn’t receive a reply from him, but she was sure that one, at least, of the letters was bound to have reached him. She feared that he had not opened the letters because he was such a stubborn man and that, therefore, he would not have found the treasure.”
“Perhaps my Neville ancestor found it,” Sir Philip suggested. “Sir Edric or one of his descendants. You said she left instructions at Haverly House, as well.”
“Wouldn’t you know about it, then?” Cassandra argued. “I would think it would be part of your family lore.”
“Probably.” He shrugged. “But I have no idea what the man was like. He could have been a sneaky chap who never wanted to admit that he had discovered the treasure—afraid he might have to give it back to the Verreres, you know. He might have quietly sold the gems and so forth and pocketed the money.”
“No doubt you know your relatives better than I,” Cassandra responded dryly. “However, I doubt that he would have been able to. Whatever Margaret left at Haverly House was apparently not enough to lead one to the treasure.”
“But I thought you said—”
“Yes, I know. She did leave instructions, and she did send them to her father, but she indicated quite clearly in her journals that neither of the men would be able to find the dowry alone. That was part of her purpose, you see, in hiding the treasure. She wanted the two families to have to work together to retrieve it. She felt very bad about the rift that she knew her departure would create between the Nevilles and the Verreres. She wanted to make it up to them, to force them to cooperate. That was the other thing that worried her, that even if her father opened her letter, he might not be willing to work with Sir Edric and so would never find the fortune.”
“So you need both what she left at Haverly House and what she sent to her father in order to find the dowry?” Neville couldn’t keep from feeling a prickle of interest at the mystery, even though he knew that the whole story was in all likelihood made up.
“Yes. I think perhaps they are two halves of a map or something. I’m not sure what. But she seemed certain that one could not find the dowry box without both.”
“Intriguing.” Neville rubbed his forefinger thoughtfully against his lip. Cassandra watched, hiding the little smile of triumph that threatened to break out. He turned to Cassandra. “Where in Haverly House is it located?”
“I’m not sure.”
His eyebrows soared. “I thought you said the journals told you.”
“Only in a vague way. Apparently the instructions are hidden in a book.”
“A book!” he groaned. “Isn’t that a trifle vague? There must be thousands of books in the library. What if it’s been thrown away over the years?”
Cassandra frowned. The thought had occurred to her, also. “I think she would have tried to put it in a valuable book, one that would not be thrown away.”
“During the course of two hundred years?” he asked skeptically.
“Well, of course, she would not have expected it to take that long for someone to try to find it.”
“And that’s all you know? That it is hidden in some book?”
“She did not give a title,” Cassandra answered carefully. Her ancestor had been more specific about the book, but she was not sure that she was ready to tell Sir Philip exactly what Margaret had written. He was, after all, a Neville, and she was not entirely sure that she could trust him not to go off hunting on his own.
“Aha.” Neville apparently saw the flicker of distrust in her eyes, for he gave her a sardonic look as he crossed his arms. “So you know more than you are telling.”
“You can hardly expect me to tell you everything when you have not agreed to help me yet,” Cassandra said reasonably. “You haven’t even admitted that the journals are real. I can assure you that I will be entirely open and forthright with you once we have started our project. I have no taste for sly dealings.”
Sir Philip did not add unlike your aunt and cousin, but both of them were thinking it. He got up and began to pace, considering Cassandra’s madcap scheme. “So you are suggesting that if I agree, we will go to Haverly House, and there we will search the house for this book that you’re not exactly sure of in a location that you don’t know. And if by some miracle we should find it, then I am to help you find the treasure on my land and give it to you?”
“Half,” Cassandra corrected. “I thought it would be fair to split it.”
“My dear Miss Verrere, it would seem to me that the entire dowry should be mine,” he said, his golden eyes alight with amusement. “It is my land, after all, my house where you hope to find both the instructions and the treasure—which, I might point out, belonged to the Nevilles anyway.”
“Nonsense.” Cassandra bounced to her feet, hands clenched at her sides and color flying high in her cheeks. “Sir Edric never won the rights to the dowry, and you know it. There was no marriage. The treasure belonged to Chesilworth by rights.” She noticed then the laughter in his eyes and realized that Sir Philip was teasing her. She went on with an air of unconcern, “Besides, as I said, the instructions or map or whatever it is at your home is not enough. And I am the one who possesses the other half.”
He stiffened and stared at her in amazement. “Are you serious? You found one of these letters your ancestor wrote?”
“Well...not yet.”
The surprise dropped from his face and he grimaced. “I see.”
“But I will get it,” Cassandra insisted. “I would have waited to tell you until I had found the letter, but this opportunity to meet you dropped into my lap, and I had to take advantage of it. I didn’t know if I would ever have such a chance to talk to you again. I hardly move in Society, you see. But I am already working on the problem. I have been searching the Chesilworth attics for some weeks now. They are chock-full of old trunks with clothes and papers and, oh, all sorts of things. We are back to the time of the Prince Regent now, and there is plenty of attic left. I am sure we will be able to find it.”
“Indeed? And who are ‘we’? Is there some third party involved in this harebrained scheme?”
“My brothers and sister and I. They are helping me look. It is for them that I really want to find the dowry. Even half of the fortune would be worth a great deal today—imagine those large, uncut gems and the old coins, the golden leopard! I am sure it would be enough money to put Chesilworth back into shape, and then we would be able to stop living on the charity of my aunt. Crispin would inherit a house that is at least worth something. Maybe there would even be enough to help Hart start some sort of career when he is grown, and to give Olivia a proper season.”
“You have great plans, I see, for this fortune you have not found yet.”
Cassandra looked at him a little defiantly. “You, no doubt disapprove. Verrere dreams again.”
“You have an odd picture of me, Miss Verrere, one that I think I have done little to deserve. I have nothing against dreams. I am simply afraid that you will be sadly disappointed when yours do not come true.”
“Should that happen, I will have to deal with my disappointment. But, you see, I don’t believe that I am going to be disappointed. I am sure I will find the letters.”
Neville sighed, looking down at her. He found himself, quite badly, wanting to help her—but the whole idea was too absurd. “Miss Verrere, doesn’t this whole thing seem a trifle melodramatic? I mean, star-crossed lovers, feuding families, buried treasure, long-hidden maps...”
“Yes, it does.” Cassandra did not seem disturbed by the fact. Her eyes shone as she talked. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
He paused, nonplussed. “What I mean is, it seems too dramatic to be real, too much like a story. It sounds as if someone made it up.”
“But we know that most of it is true,” Cassandra protested. “Margaret did elope with another man on the eve of her wedding. She did have a fabulous dowry, which disappeared at that time and which no one has ever found. The two families have disliked each other ever since. The only things that have been added are the journals and the possibility of finding the treasure.”
“It is precisely that which strains credulity. Miss Verrere, I know you think I am a frightfully dull sort, but I have found that the simplest answers are usually the correct ones. Margaret Verrere did not hide the dowry and leave clues lying about for others to find it. She didn’t write journals that coincidentally wound up in Verrere hands two hundred years later. The answer is that she took the dowry and used it to start a new life in the colonies. All these recent developments are merely a scheme to sell a few books at a greatly inflated price to a man who was well-known to be obsessed on the subject.” He stopped, realizing that once again he had let his tongue run away with him and had stated the facts too baldly.
“Then you refuse to help me.” Cassandra’s face fell, and she stepped back. She had pinned all her hopes on this man, and he had turned her down. She was flooded with disappointment. “I am sorry that I wasted your time,” she said stiffly and started to turn away from him.
Sir Philip reached out and grasped her arm, holding her back. “No, wait. Don’t go yet.”
Cassandra turned, fighting back the tears that threatened. She refused to let Sir Philip see how his refusal had hurt her. She lifted her eyebrows in silent inquiry, striving to look cool and disinterested.
“Miss Verrere, ’tis only the authenticity of these journals that I question. The coincidence of them falling into your hands after all these years is simply too much for me to accept.”
“I explained that to you. It isn’t coincidence—it is a logical progression.” She felt a tiny spurt of hope rise up in her again at his attempt to explain. “Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t,” he said softly. “I see a very lovely young woman whom a scoundrel has probably taken advantage of. A woman still sorrowing over her father’s death, hopeful that his dream might become a reality.”
“Oh!” Cassandra’s gray eyes flashed. “I am not some silly little girl who can’t spot a deception that’s right in front of her. My father was not a fool, and neither am I! Those journals are real, but you are simply too prosaic to see it.” She tried in vain to jerk her arm away. “I should have known that a Neville would find the whole thing too quixotic. Too romantic.”
“Miss Verrere, I assure you that I do not think you are a silly little girl. Indeed, I think you are a very intelligent, as well as beautiful, woman. I admire you greatly.” He paused, smiling faintly. “Nor am I unromantic.” He leaned closer, looking down intently into her eyes. “Indeed, I am having thoughts of quite a romantic nature at this very moment.”
Cassandra swallowed, unable to look away from his piercing golden-brown gaze. Her throat was dry, and it seemed suddenly difficult to breathe. She tried to speak, but found she could not.
Philip slid his hand up her arm and around her back, pulling her gently and completely against him. “Your story is the only thing I do not find appealing about you.”
“S-sir Philip...” Cassandra managed to stammer, washed with a weakness and confusion that were foreign to her.
He bent and brushed his lips against hers lightly, then more forcefully. Cassandra could feel the pulse suddenly pounding in her head, and her breath caught in her throat. The memories of her lascivious dream of the night before came flooding back, turning her knees weak and melting her loins. She sagged against him. His arms went more tightly around her, pressing her up into his hard body, and his lips sank into hers.
For one long moment she gave herself up to the pleasure, not thinking of her disappointment, her plans or anything, just feeling the liquid fire that sizzled through her veins.
“Cassandra...” he murmured, releasing her mouth long enough to trace her jawline with kisses.
Somehow the sound of his voice saying her name brought Cassandra back to reality. Through the haze of delightful physical sensation, she recalled where they were and how improper their conduct was—not to mention the fact that he had just dismissed her search for the Spanish dowry as a fraud and characterized her as a naive woman grasping for straws to relieve her sorrow over her father’s death.
Cassandra jerked back and slapped his face. Neville’s jaw tightened, and for a moment anger flared in his eyes, but then the usual cool, polite mask descended, hiding both the anger and the passion.
“I beg your pardon,” he began stiffly.
But Cassandra cut in on him, in no mood for polite apologies. “I should have known! It is so typical that it is almost laughable. You have no interest in anything I said. All you care about is trying to steal a kiss while we are secluded in the maze. No wonder you were so willing to listen to what I had to say. You knew that it would give you an excuse to get me alone and try to seduce me. I should have known that any man who spends his nights sneaking into young women’s bedchambers would only be interested in taking advantage of a woman. I suppose I am naive, as you said—not because I believe Margaret Verrere’s journals are genuine, but because I did not realize that the only thing you were interested in is lust! Oh, I knew that a Neville would be difficult to persuade, but I did not realize that an even worse problem would be having to deal with a libertine!”
“I did not try to lure you out here,” Neville protested, his own brows drawing together furiously. It occurred to him that Cassandra Verrere could be quite as annoying as she was attractive. “It was you who asked to speak to me, if you will remember, and it was also you who suggested that we talk privately in the maze.”
“Oh! So you are going to use that against me! I merely wanted to be able to speak in private. I did not mean it as an invitation to kiss me!”
“No,” he responded bitingly, “’twas your lips that provided that.”
Cassandra gasped. “You are insulting.”
“Only truthful. If you will think back on it, you returned my kiss quite willingly, at least until you remembered that you were supposed to react with maidenly outrage.” Neville found it supremely annoying that even while he was irritated with Cassandra, his wayward body was still thrumming with desire for her. Damn it! She had a most peculiar effect on him.
Cassandra ground her teeth, letting out a low and most unlady-like growl of frustration. “Blast you!” she snapped, her mild father’s favorite oath, and wished she knew something worse to say. “I was a fool to think that a Neville would help me. I wish I had never talked to you. I wish I had never even seen you!”
With those bitter words, she whirled and ran away from him.
“Wait! No, Miss Verrere...”
Neville started after her, but Cassandra had a good head start, and she knew the map of the maze, so she quite easily made her way out ahead of him. Once or twice she heard him calling her name behind her, but she paid no attention. She burst out onto the smooth expanse of the lawn and stopped. Her aunt and cousin were walking along the path leading from the garden to the wide lawn. They looked at her in surprise, her aunt’s eyebrows rising in disdain. Cassandra smoothed down her skirts and walked toward them at her usual brisk pace, hoping that her face would not give away her inner turmoil.
“Really, Cassandra, must you hurry about so?” Aunt Ardis complained as she drew near them. “You always are in such a rush. It is most ungenteel.”
“I am sorry, Aunt,” Cassandra responded automatically. “Good morning to you both.”
She started to pass them, heading back toward the house, but at that moment, Sir Philip burst from the maze entrance, saying, “Damn it, Miss Verrere!”
Both Joanna and Aunt Ardis turned toward him, promptly forgetting all about their inelegant relative. Aunt Ardis’s face underwent a miraculous change, becoming suddenly gracious and welcoming. Beside her, Joanna dimpled and smiled and began to fan herself coyly.
“Why, Sir Philip!” Aunt Ardis exclaimed warmly. “What a pleasant surprise to come upon you.”
“Hardly an unlikely event,” Sir Philip replied drily, “since we are both staying here.”
Joanna tittered as if he had said something unbearably amusing. Sir Philip turned toward her. “Miss Moulton.” He gave her a sardonic look and continued, “I trust that you are feeling better this morning after your nightmare last night.”
Joanna’s mouth dropped open, and she glanced from him to her mother and back. Aunt Ardis was of no help, appearing equally astounded. Sir Philip looked toward Cassandra. She met his eyes with a stony gaze, folding her arms across her chest. Sir Philip started to speak, then stopped. He nodded toward them in a general way.
“Good day, ladies.” He turned and walked briskly away from them.
For a long moment Joanna and Aunt Ardis stared at his retreating form in stupefaction. Finally Joanna exclaimed, “He knew! Mama, he knew!”
“Nonsense. Just hush.” Her mother frowned at Joanna and cast a significant glance toward Cassandra.
“Oh.”
“Please, don’t bother trying to hide anything on my account,” Cassandra told them. “I am quite aware of your scheme to entrap Sir Philip.” She paused and added pointedly, “Obviously he is, too.”
“You told him!” Joanna cried indignantly.
“Joanna!” Aunt Ardis interrupted sharply.
“Well, she knows anyway.” Joanna pouted. “She’s probably been sneaking about listening at keyholes.”
“It is hardly necessary,” Cassandra replied coolly. “Anyone who heard your mother banging on your door and shrieking last night would have had a fair idea what you two were up to. And given the way you were throwing yourself at Sir Philip yesterday afternoon, it was not hard to guess who you were trying to entrap.”
Mrs. Moulton let out a moan of mortification, but Joanna started toward her cousin furiously, shrieking, “Why, you jealous cat!”
Aunt Ardis had the sense to grab Joanna’s wrist and hold her back. “Joanna! Stop it! Right now. I will not have you creating a scene at Lady Arrabeck’s house party. Things are bad enough already.” She glanced around the lawn anxiously, as if she expected the other houseguests to be gathering around and whispering about her. “Do you really think they all believe that we—that Joanna—”
Seeing her aunt’s look of humiliation, Cassandra almost took pity on her. However, she was in no mood to linger here, and she knew that if Aunt Ardis didn’t fear the scorn of the other guests, she would remain at the country estate as long as she could, searching for another prey for her daughter or perhaps even convincing herself that Sir Philip was still interested in Joanna himself. Joanna was, as even Cassandra was forced to admit, an exceptionally handsome woman, and Aunt Ardis was of the opinion that every man swooned before Joanna’s beauty. She never considered that anyone might be repelled by Joanna’s shallow, selfish nature or her silly conversation. It would not take Aunt Ardis long before she began to tell herself that if only Sir Philip continued to see Joanna, he would fall in love with her despite the trick Joanna had tried to play on him.
So Cassandra said flatly, “I am sure that they found it quite as peculiar as I that you were shouting outside Joanna’s room last night. It didn’t help that Joanna opened the door and told you that ‘he’ was not there.”
“You see?” Aunt Ardis exclaimed, rounding on her daughter. “I told you that you should not have said that. Anyone could have heard you. Why didn’t you think?”
“I suspect that Sir Philip must have heard her, too,” Cassandra added, hardening her heart to her aunt’s piteous look. “He was probably coming down the hall when you enacted your tragedy in Joanna’s doorway. No doubt he heard it all, and since he alone would have known for certain that it was he whom Joanna had invited to her room, he would have realized instantly what was going on.”
“I didn’t invite him,” Joanna protested, not very convincingly.
Cassandra did not reply. She merely cast her a look of patent disbelief that made Joanna screw up her face unattractively.
“Well, you needn’t think he is interested in you,” she huffed at Cassandra, “just because you managed to get him to walk with you in the maze. He would never have any interest in such a bookworm.”
“No doubt you are right,” Cassandra replied calmly. “As it happens, we met by accident in the maze. He seemed unable to find his way out, and I had to tell him.”
Joanna sent her a smug gaze. “You know nothing about men, Cassandra. No man likes to be told what to do.”
“How unfortunate, since so many of them seem in dire need of it.”
“Girls, please!” Aunt Ardis snapped, drawing attention back to the truly important issue—her own discomfiture. “This is not helping at all. We need to think what to do. I cannot bear to remain here with everyone staring at us and thinking that we—that you—”
“Engineered an incriminating rendezvous with Sir Philip Neville?” Cassandra suggested crisply.
“Really, Cassandra, you have a most unlady-like bluntness. It is very unappealing.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Ardis,” Cassandra said with a noticeable lack of regret. “I am sure it must be a very trying situation for you. Perhaps we should leave.”
Aunt Ardis looked a little surprised, but a moment’s consideration had her nodding. “Yes, that’s the thing. We shall go back to Dunsleigh, and soon everyone will have forgotten this.” She frowned. “But what shall I say to Lady Arrabeck? I must not offend her.”
“Blame it on me,” Cassandra said cheerfully, knowing that was the plan most likely to please her aunt. “Say that I have been taken ill. I will go straight back to my room now, saying I feel poorly. This afternoon you can tell Lady Arrabeck how wretched I am and that I insist on returning home. Tell her you worry about me. Tell her I’m frail or something.”
“You are as healthy as a horse,” Joanna objected contemptuously.
“Lady Arrabeck doesn’t know that.”
“You don’t look sick. You look positively robust.”
“I shall do my best to look wan. Unless, of course, you would rather act the invalid.”
Joanna considered the matter, thinking of the appealing picture she would make, pale and fragile, leaning on her cousin for support as she made her weak way out to the carriage. Or she might even have to be carried out by one of the footmen—that handsome one she had seen in the hall yesterday, perhaps. Her lips curved up in a smile. “Yes, I think that would be best. It would be much more natural for Mama to be concerned about her daughter, anyway. Here, Cassandra, give me your arm.”
She put her hand through Cassandra’s arm and drooped against her. Cassandra stifled a sigh of irritation at her cousin’s dramatics, reminding herself that she would do almost anything to get out of this place and away from the odious Neville. She started slowly back toward the house with Joanna. She refused to think about the way that Sir Philip had ruined all her plans. All was not lost. She would go home and continue her search for those letters, and then...and then somehow she would figure out a way to find the Spanish dowry on her own.
Chapter Four
JOANNA ENTERED INTO her deception with such enthusiasm, applying white powder to her face for an interesting wanness and lying in her darkened room emitting effective groans and sighs, that it was all Cassandra could do not to slap her. Naturally, with Joanna “weak” in her bed, it fell to Cassandra to pack for both of them. She wondered darkly if her lazy cousin had taken that fact into consideration before she offered to play sick. It was the middle of the afternoon before Cassandra managed to get everything together and stowed away in their carriage, interrupted as she was by her aunt’s often contradictory orders.
However, finally Joanna, wrapped in a blanket, was carried down the stairs and out to the carriage by a burly, graying footman and carefully bestowed within, and Cassandra and her aunt climbed in after her. Lady Arrabeck’s daughter came out to graciously bid them farewell, and a few moments later they were wheeling at a smart pace down the drive and through the open iron gates of the estate.
“Whew!” Joanna pushed the carriage rug from her lap. “Get this thing off me. I’m sweating like a pig.”
Cassandra noted that perspiration was, indeed, making little rivulets through her cousin’s white powder. However, she said pacifically, “You put on a wonderful performance, Cousin.”
Joanna scowled. “Why did that awful old footman have to carry me down?” She was thoroughly disenchanted with the whole charade. “And no one was there to see us leave.”
“Lady Patricia,” her mother reminded her. “It was a very nice gesture, I thought.”
Joanna snorted. “She’s only the spinster daughter.”
“And so will you turn out to be, if you make many more mistakes like yesterday’s!” Aunt Ardis snapped.
“I! I made the mistake?” Joanna turned on her mother wrathfully. “It was you who came pounding on my door too early! You couldn’t wait, and it chased him away!”
“I came when we had agreed I would! He didn’t arrive on time, that’s what happened.”
“And that is my fault?”
“Yes. He wasn’t eager. You didn’t enchant him. He should have hurried to your room, and instead he dawdled.”
“I did everything I could think of! I smiled and flirted and pretended I was interested in those silly old writers he kept talking about, when I had never heard of them. I even left the lace fichu out of my afternoon dress.”
“Yes, and leaned over to pick up your fan several times,” Cassandra put in drily. “I noticed that.”
“You see. Even Cassandra saw what an effort I made,” Joanna said, oblivious to her cousin’s sarcastic tone. “The man was stone. I finally had to kiss him in the conservatory before he became at all amorous.”
“You were too fast and loose,” Aunt Ardis decided. “You made him suspicious. That is why he was lurking around, listening.”
Cassandra sighed and turned her face to look out the window, trying to ignore the bickering between her aunt and cousin and think about what she was going to do now. Despite her brave thoughts earlier, she was close to despair over Sir Philip’s rejection of her proposal. She had had such high hopes for him, had built all her schemes around his agreeing. She had been prepared for him to be difficult to deal with—he was, after all, a Neville—but she had counted on the Neville taste for accruing money to make him see the sense of their cooperating to find the dowry. It had never entered her mind that he would reject the story altogether, that he would term it a fabrication and dismiss her as a naive fool. And never in her wildest dreams would she have foreseen that he would be more interested in kissing her than in finding a treasure!
Her cheeks warmed a little even now at the thought of his mouth on hers. She had never dreamed that such kisses existed, let alone that she could turn to hot wax inside because a man did such unthinkable, immodest things to her.
Sternly she pulled her mind away from such thoughts. She ought to be working on a way to get the Spanish dowry without his help, not mooning around about him. Cassandra felt uncharacteristically like crying. Normally she was a very equable person; she liked to think of herself as calm, decisive and strong. But the thought of not being able to recapture the treasure that the Verreres had lost so long ago was almost too much for her. From the moment she had started reading Margaret Verrere’s diaries, she had realized that the dowry was the way out of her family’s problems. She had been counting on it to take her brothers and sister and herself out of her aunt’s house.
She had seen in Sir Philip’s eyes that he knew of the decline of the Verrere fortunes, but she doubted that he knew the full extent of it. Their father had died virtually penniless. She had had to sell off much of the furniture in the house to pay off his debts. She had even, heart breaking inside her chest, had to sell many of his precious books. Worst of all, she and her siblings had had to move out of Chesilworth, their ancestral home. It was a noble hall, but very old, and the years had not been kind to it. Repairs had been neglected, not only by her father, but also by his father and his grandfather before that. The west wing had been closed off ever since she could remember, because they had no money for the extensive repairs needed there. Even in the central and east wings, there were several areas where the roof badly needed to be replaced. Air leaked in around windows; floorboards were loose or bowed; almost all of the draperies were moth-eaten. Only people who loved it as much as her family did would have remained there.
But after her father’s death there was not enough money to pay even the skeleton crew of servants necessary to keep the great house running. Her family had had to leave Chesilworth and go to live with their aunt and uncle, only a few miles away in the village of Dunsleigh. The pain of leaving their home had been bad enough, but the humiliation of living on their aunt’s charity was a constant thorn in Cassandra’s side. Uncle Barlow, their mother’s brother, was a pleasant man whom they all liked, but he was rarely at home, spending as much of his time as he could in the village or in London or off hunting with his cronies. Cassandra was sure it was his wife’s shallow, venal nature that kept him away.
Aunt Ardis was a grasping woman who resented the presence of her husband’s impecunious nieces and nephews almost as much as she enjoyed lording it over them. She had never liked her husband’s sister, Delia, a vivacious butterfly of a woman who had outshone Ardis herself at every turn. Her aunt never ceased to complain about the extra expense and trouble Cassandra and her siblings entailed, just as she never hesitated to meddle in their affairs. She characterized Cassandra as a plain, mousy bluestocking of a girl, her sister Olivia as far too bold, and her brothers as young hellions badly in need of manners. She made sure that everyone, both inside and outside the home, was aware of the great sacrifice she had made in taking them in.
Joanna considered Cassandra’s quiet plainness an excellent foil for her own beauty, and she did not mind her being there as long as her own comfort was not disturbed. Crispin and Hart, Cassandra’s twelve-year-old brothers, however, were another matter. They were noisy, messy nuisances who teased her and disturbed her rest. But most of all she disliked Olivia, who at fourteen was already turning into a real beauty and a future threat to Joanna’s dominance of the small social scene in which they moved.
More than anything else in the world, Cassandra wanted to get her family out of that household and return to Chesilworth. Her uncle was the boys’ and Olivia’s guardian, and she was sure that she could talk him into letting her raise them on her own if only she had a proper house in which to live and enough money to feed and clothe them. The Spanish dowry, she knew, would provide that money. The dowry represented freedom for all four of them—and now Sir Philip had carelessly trampled all over her hopes of attaining that freedom.
“—not that great a catch, anyway.” Cassandra’s mind came back from her gloomy thoughts at the sound of her aunt’s voice mentioning Sir Philip Neville again. She looked at her aunt in some surprise.
“What do you mean? I thought you said he was one of the best catches in England,” she reminded her aunt innocently.
Aunt Ardis frowned, thinking that the girl had too good a memory. “Oh, he would be a feather in any girl’s cap,” she admitted. “But he doesn’t have a title, you know. In that respect, even Lord Benbroke surpasses him.”
“Lord Benbroke is almost sixty years old and suffers from gout.”
“Yes, Mama,” Joanna put in quickly. “Not Lord Benbroke. I just could not marry him.”
“I didn’t mean that you should marry him, only that he had a title and Neville doesn’t. And I am sure that there are those more wealthy than he.”
“I have heard that Richard Crettigan is quite the richest man in the country,” Cassandra offered.
Aunt Ardis looked shocked. “Richard Crettigan is a...a merchant!”
“Yes, and from Yorkshire, too. Can you imagine listening to that accent all your life?” Joanna shook her head in dismay.
“But it must be comforting to know that at least there are other options for Joanna.” Cassandra returned her aunt’s and cousin’s suspicious gazes blandly.
“I have heard,” Aunt Ardis said loftily, ignoring Cassandra’s comment, “that Sir Philip is a libertine.”
Cassandra’s stomach tightened. “A libertine? Who said so?”
“I heard it from Daphne Wentworth, who told me it was common knowledge all over London. Of course, that whey-faced Teresa of hers had made no bones about setting her cap for him, and Daphne no doubt wanted no competition. Still, Mrs. Carruthers was sitting right there when she said so, and she agreed that he had a certain reputation.”
“A reputation for what?” Cassandra pressed. She wasn’t sure why her aunt’s words irritated her so, but she found herself wanting to deny them hotly.
Aunt Ardis lowered her voice conspiratorially and said, “For seduction.”
“Oh, really, Aunt Ardis, how would they know?” But despite her words, Cassandra could not help thinking of Sir Philip’s kisses and the way they had made her melt inside. She had to admit that he had seemed incredibly expert at what he was doing. Besides, there was the fact that he had made advances toward her. Cassandra did not fool herself that she was any great beauty. It followed then that Sir Philip must be interested in kissing any woman who happened to come across his path. She squirmed a little inside at the thought. “It is all rumors.”
“It’s more than rumors. I’ve heard things...” her aunt hinted darkly.
“What things?”
“The sort of things that young ladies like you and Joanna should not hear.”
“Oh, Mama...” Joanna slumped back against her seat disgustedly. “You always say that.”
Cassandra thought privately that as Joanna had set out to seduce Sir Philip into a compromising position in her bedroom, she was hardly an innocent creature whose ears should not be sullied, but she managed to keep from saying so. There was no point in getting into a wrangle with her aunt over something as unimportant as Sir Philip Neville and his reputation.
The truth was, she told herself sourly, that he was probably exactly the sort of creature that gossip had painted him. It was absurd that she should be standing up for the man who had dashed her hopes.
She turned her head to look out the window, and they continued the ride in silence.
* * *
CASSANDRA’S HEAD JERKED up, and she blinked, looking around. She realized that she had been asleep, as were her aunt and cousin in the seat across from her. She pushed aside the window curtain and peered out. It had grown dark while she slept. Her stomach growled, giving her another reminder of how long they had been traveling.
She realized that what had awakened her must have been the carriage turning, for even in the pale moonlight she could recognize the narrow lane they traveled as the one branching off toward her aunt’s house. They were almost home. Her spirits lifted in anticipation. Everything would seem better, she knew, when she was with her family.
The carriage pulled up in front of a Georgian mansion a moment later, and the front door opened. A footman hurried down to open the carriage door.
“Mrs. Moulton.” He sketched a bow in the direction of Aunt Ardis and reached up to give her a hand down.
Aunt Ardis gave him a slight nod and swept on to the front door, Joanna trailing her. Cassandra came out of the carriage last, taking the footman’s proffered hand and smiling. “Hello, John.”
A smile broke the man’s usually impassive countenance, and he said warmly, “Hello, miss. It’s good to have you home.”
“Thank you. How is your sister? Has she had the little one yet?”
“No, miss. We’re all on pins and needles.” Like most of the servants of Moulton Hall, John Sommers felt that the place had been much improved by the arrival of the Verrere family. Unlike his mistress and her daughter, the Verrere children knew everyone’s names and were always ready with a smile or a word of thanks. There had been many times when a vase broken by one of the running boys had been swept up and thrown away with never a mention made of it, and a secret supper had often been sent up to the nursery when Olivia or the twins were in disgrace about some misdeed or other.
“Cassie!” A pair of towheaded boys tore out the front door and bounded down the front steps two at a time, followed not much more sedately by a girl in blond braids.
Cassandra threw her arms wide and swept all of her siblings in. “Crispin! Hart—what happened to your hand? Olivia—oh, I think you’ve grown even prettier while I was away.”
Olivia, whose braids and childishly shorter skirts could not hide the rapidly maturing body and face of a young woman, giggled at her sister’s words. “Pooh—you haven’t been gone but three days. What happened? Why are you home early?”
“Yeah!” Crispin added. “You should have seen Uncle Barlow’s face when he heard John announce that the carriage was home. He looked like a hare that had heard the hounds.”
Hart giggled. “He was looking all over like he thought there might be a hole he could bolt into.”
“He’s been home every night since Aunt Ardis left, and it’s been ever so nice. He lets us eat dinner with him, and we talk about all sorts of things. It wasn’t as good as being with Papa, but it reminded me of home, a little....” Olivia’s voice trailed off wistfully.
Cassandra felt tears spring into her eyes. “I know, Olivia. I miss him, too.”
“It was bang-up!” Hart, who had enjoyed his uncle’s discussion of his hunting dogs far more than his father’s scholarly ramblings, added, “He said he would take us hunting with him next time he went to Buckinghamshire, if Aunt Ardis will let him.”
“Hah! Let us have fun? Not likely.”
“Now, hush, Crispin. Aunt Ardis might be well pleased to have the two of you out of the house. I shall endeavor to point out the advantages in terms of dirt and noise of having two twelve-year-olds gone from here.”
“Would you?” The twins’ expressions brightened. In their experience, Cassandra was able to do anything she put her mind to. It had been she who had always made the household budget stretch to include entertaining outings or a pony to ride or a cricket bat to replace the broken one.
“Of course I will. I’m not promising, mind you....”
“I know.” Crispin nodded gravely. A more serious boy than his twin, he realized better than Hart that Cassandra’s ingenuity and intelligence were not always sufficient weapons against their aunt’s power.
“Forget the silly hunting!” Olivia said impatiently. “Tell us what happened at the house party, Cassandra.”
“Did you meet Sir Philip?” Hart stuck in eagerly. “Is he going to help us?”
“Just a minute. I shall tell you all about it later. Let’s go in now and let me say hello to Uncle Barlow.”
She did as she said, noticing with amusement that her poor uncle did indeed look like a trapped hare as he stood in the entryway listening to his wife’s strictures on the excessive number of candles that had been lit throughout the house.
“Why, I could see from the carriage that the nursery was lit up like Christmas,” Aunt Ardis was saying as the Verreres walked in. “There is no reason for that. The children ought to be in bed anyway.”
“It didn’t seem much light to me.” Uncle Barlow tried to defend himself. “There was Olivia trying to read by the light of one candle, and she mustn’t strain those pretty eyes, you know.” He smiled benignly at his niece, not realizing, even after years of living with Ardis, that he was saying exactly the wrong thing. “Those eyes will be her fortune.”
“What nonsense! Olivia shouldn’t be reading all those heathen books, anyway,” Aunt Ardis sniffed, frowning toward her younger niece. “Olivia, straighten your skirts, you look like a hoyden. And your hair is all everywhere.”
“Yes, Aunt Ardis,” Olivia answered in a carefully colorless voice. Her high spirits had gotten her into trouble with her aunt more than once, but once she had realized how much her battles with Aunt Ardis caused Cassandra to suffer, she had learned to curb her ready tongue.
Cassandra gave her uncle a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, and whisked her brothers and sister upstairs to the bedroom shared by the two girls. The boys flopped down on the rug, and Olivia hopped onto the bed, curling her legs beneath her.
“All right,” she told her older sister eagerly. “Now tell us all. Why did Aunt Ardis come home so early?”
“Who cares about that?” Crispin retorted scornfully. “I want to hear about Sir Philip and the treasure.”
“Aunt Ardis and Joanna met with a little setback,” Cassandra told her sister, eyes twinkling, and cast a significant look at her brothers. “I shall tell you about it later.” She did not add that her younger sister would receive a carefully edited version of Joanna’s escapade.
Olivia’s eyes widened, but she made no demur as Cassandra started on the story that the brothers wanted to hear. “I am afraid the news is not good. Sir Philip refused to help us.”
Crispin groaned, and Hart sneered. “I knew we couldn’t count on a Neville. Papa always said so. You shouldn’t have asked him.”
“I don’t know how else we’re supposed to find it,” Crispin reminded him. “The Nevilles have the rest of the clues or the map or whatever it is.”
“We don’t need it,” Hart said stoutly. “Do we, Cassie? We can find it by ourselves.”
“Of course we will.” Cassandra plastered a heartening smile on her lips. “It will merely take us longer. I don’t intend to give up.”
“But how are you going to do it?” Olivia questioned. Though she had as much faith in her older sister as the twins did, she had a more practical bent of mind.
“The first thing is to find the old letters. I shall keep going over to Chesilworth every chance I get to search the attics. Once I actually have the letter in my hands, I can prove to Sir Philip that the treasure really was hidden and can be found. Then he will surely agree to help us look for it.” It was the best plan that Cassandra had been able to come up with, and though it sounded rather flimsy to her ears, she hoped it would satisfy her siblings.
“You mean he didn’t believe in the treasure?” Hart looked shocked at such heresy.
“No. He thought the diaries were something someone made up just to get Papa to buy them. He’s a very stubborn, narrow-minded man. But once he sees the evidence with his own eyes, he will have to believe me.”
“We shall help you look,” Crispin told her gravely. Though he was as high-spirited as any lad his age, he was also aware that he was now Lord Chesilworth, and he took his responsibilities seriously. While Hart might look on the hunt for the dowry as a wonderful adventure, Crispin knew that it also meant the very future of Chesilworth.
“Of course,” Olivia agreed. “Whenever that old battle-ax isn’t looking, we’ll sneak over.”
“Olivia...manners,” Cassandra reminded her absently. She smiled at her siblings, tears lurking at the corners of her eyes. “I knew I could count on you.”
Olivia bounced off the bed to hug her, and even the boys followed suit. Cassandra hugged them tightly to her, promising herself that she would not let them down. Somehow, some way, she would find those letters, and she would make Sir Philip believe her.
* * *
AUNT ARDIS DID not approve of Cassandra and her siblings visiting their old home. In the time that Cassandra had been there, the older woman had become accustomed to Cassandra’s taking from her shoulders many of the dreary tasks of running a household. As long as Cassandra stayed within her tight budget, Aunt Ardis was pleased to see the quality of their meals and the work of the servants improve. Though she told herself that of course she could have accomplished the same things had she spent the time and effort, she much preferred to spend her time on her toilette or gossiping with one of the two or three ladies in the area whom she considered of a social standing equal enough to hers.
As a result, it was most inconvenient when Cassandra took time off from her household duties to spend a whole day at Chesilworth. “I cannot imagine what you find to do there all day,” she told her niece petulantly. “The place is falling into ruins.”
Cassandra had carefully kept hidden from her aunt any hint of what they were really doing at Chesilworth. She wasn’t sure how Aunt Ardis would feel about their hunting for treasure, but she was sure that the lady would at the very least dismiss the idea as nonsense and might even go so far as to forbid her nieces and nephews from going to Chesilworth. So she replied only, “I would like to stave off the ruin if I can. I clean up a little around the place, walk through it checking for leaks—things like that.”
Her aunt looked at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. “I would think your time would be better spent here. This is your home now.”
Cassandra curled her hands into her palms but forced her voice to remain even. “Of course, Aunt Ardis, but Chesilworth is still Crispin’s inheritance. I must try to make sure that there is something left for him when he gets older. It would be too much to ask that you and Uncle Barlow continue to bear the burden of upkeep for all four of us, even when the boys are grown.”
Aunt Ardis looked taken aback by this thought. “I—well—yes. I mean, if you must, I suppose you must. But this wanting to go every single day...”
“Only when you don’t need me, of course, Aunt Ardis.”
As it turned out, her aunt usually managed to find that she needed her three or four days a week, but the other times, Cassandra and her siblings hiked over to their old home and climbed up into the musty old attics, continuing their methodical exploration.
Cassandra did most of the work, for the boys, though eager, tended to become distracted by some odd object or other or fall into an argument over some prize they found, and Olivia, too, often grew tired and thirsty and decided to take a rest outside. Still, they did make progress, and as they worked, they found that they were moving into older and older periods of dress and furniture, which kept Cassandra’s hopes up. While Olivia whooped over the elaborate tall wigs and wide, almost-flat cages of hoops that had been worn under dresses in the 1700s, Cassandra continued doggedly to dig, thinking with determination that they were not that far away now.
She was particularly eager one morning to get over to the old mansion, but it seemed as if everything interfered with it. Her aunt wanted her to do first one thing, and then another until the morning was almost gone. Then there was a crisis belowstairs, which she was called upon to resolve. Finally, just as she was about to go upstairs and change into old clothes suitable for cleaning out the attics, the butler opened the door to the sitting room and announced that they had a visitor.
“Mr. David Miller, ma’am,” he told Aunt Ardis in a frosty accent that usually indicated he did not entirely approve of the visitor, and handed her the man’s card on a small salver.
“Who?” Aunt Ardis looked blank.
“An American, I believe, ma’am. He says—” his tone indicated his personal disbelief “—that he is related to Lord Chesilworth.”
“Lord Ch—you mean Crispin?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Aunt Ardis and Joanna turned to stare at Cassandra, who shrugged, as puzzled as they. “I have never heard of him, Aunt Ardis.”
“Well, hmm...I suppose we must see him, Soames.”
As soon as Soames was out the door, Aunt Ardis turned toward Cassandra. “An imposter?” she suggested. “An American claiming to be a relative of yours?”
“I suppose someone in the Verrere family could have emigrated,” Cassandra mused, frowning.
“No doubt he thinks that Chesilworth, just because he has a title, is a wealthy man. He’s hoping to get money out of you, mark my words.”
“He will be mightily disappointed, then,” Cassandra remarked cheerfully.
A moment later Soames reentered the room, intoning, “Mr. David Miller.”
A young man followed him into the room and paused, smiling tentatively at the three women who sat there. He was in his twenties, with sky blue eyes, a thick mop of blond hair and a rakish mustache, which Cassandra suspected he had cultivated to age his boyish countenance. He was dressed fashionably, but not glaringly so, and Cassandra judged him to be a respectably handsome man. Her opinion was confirmed by the sudden flare of interest in Joanna’s eyes.
Mr. Miller bowed to them. “Please pardon my intrusion. I know I should have written to introduce myself, but when I found myself in London with unexpected time on my hands, I was seized by the urge to meet my British cousins. I hope you will not think me overly bold.”
“Pray sit down. I am Miss Cassandra Verrere,” Cassandra introduced herself. “My brother is Lord Chesilworth, but I am afraid he is still only a lad. This is my aunt, Mrs. Moulton, and her daughter, Miss Joanna Moulton.”
The young man bowed over each of the ladies’ hands politely before taking his seat. “It is the Verreres to whom I am related—quite distantly, of course,” Mr. Miller explained eagerly. “One of my ancestors was a Verrere. She and her husband settled in Boston, oh, almost two hundred years ago.”
“What?” Cassandra stared. “But what—what was your ancestress’s name?”
“Margaret Verrere. Family legend has it that it was a most romantic affair—she eloped with a man of common birth, and they fled the wrath of her family to the colonies.”
“I cannot believe it.”
“Oh, ’tis true,” David Miller assured her earnestly.
“No, I did not mean that I don’t believe the story about Margaret Verrere. It is just that—well, it is so astonishing. You see, I have been reading her journals.”
He grinned. “Splendid. I hope you enjoyed them. I am the one who sold them to Mr. Simons. I am a merchant in Boston, and every once in a while I come to London to make purchases, see the latest things, you know. Last year I decided to bring Margaret Stone’s journals—that was her married name, you know—to London and sell them. I sold them to a bookseller named Simons. This year, when I went by to see him, just to renew the acquaintance and see whether he had sold the journals, he told me that Lord Chesilworth, a Verrere himself, had bought them. I was most pleased to hear that they had found their way back to their proper family. Of course, I realized that we must be distantly related, and, well, when I had some free time on my hands, I felt that I must make your acquaintance.”
“I am so glad that you did.”
Joanna, who had lost most of her interest in the handsome young man when she learned that he was a mere merchant from Boston, was even more bored by this talk of books and ancestors. Properly, this young man, whatever his reasons for coming to Dunsleigh, should have been so captivated by her beauty that he talked of her, not musty old journals and dull relations. She stirred restively in her seat.
“Wonderful.” Mr. Miller beamed. “I was afraid that you would find me too presumptuous. I find that the English often seem to find Americans so.”
“I am very glad to meet you. I find Margaret’s story fascinating, as did my Papa. It is he who was the Lord Chesilworth who bought them from Mr. Simons. But I am afraid that Papa passed away several months ago. He would have been so delighted to meet you. He would have had many questions about the journals.”
“Must we talk about books, Cassandra?” Joanna asked plaintively.
“I am sorry, Miss Moulton.” Miller favored her with a smile. “Indeed, no doubt you found it boring, hearing two people talk about their relatives. I take it that you are not a descendant of Margaret’s family.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea who Margaret is,” Joanna said with a little giggle that more than one swain had assured her was delightful.
“No, my cousin and aunt are not Verreres,” Cassandra explained. “We are related on my mother’s side.”
“I see.”
“But tell me, Mr. Miller, pray, how did you come upon the journals and why did you decide to sell them?” Cassandra wished that Sir Philip Neville were here now to hear the full story of the journals. He had been so certain that poor Mr. Simons had played them false—perhaps Mr. Miller could put his mind to rest about the journals’ authenticity.
“My mother died almost two years ago. It was through her that I was descended from Margaret Verrere Stone. My grandmother, her mother, had been very interested in the family history, and she had preserved many old family records—family Bibles, birth and death and wedding certificates. Anyway, she had several trunkfuls of such things, which my mother had merely stored in the attic. But then, when my mother departed this world, I was going through her things, and I came upon my grandmother’s trunks. They were stuffed with old family relics, most of which I decided to get rid of. Among those things were Margaret’s journals.”
Glassy-eyed by now, Joanna seized the opportunity of a pause in Mr. Miller’s recital to say, “Perhaps you could show Mr. Miller the garden, Cassandra. Americans are always interested in English gardens, aren’t they?”
“I am sorry, Miss Moulton. I fear I am boring you with such talk. It is just that I am so thrilled to be meeting a, well, a sort of cousin, I suppose.”
“You are right, Cousin Joanna.” For once, Cassandra thought, her cousin’s wishes and her own coincided. It was always difficult to carry on a serious conversation with Joanna around, flirting and simpering and determined to keep the conversation on the one thing that truly interested her, herself. “I would be pleased to show Mr. Miller the garden. Would you care to continue our conversation there, sir?”
He agreed with alacrity, and Cassandra led him out into the formal garden behind the house. He courteously admired the various roses, delphiniums and daisies, and then he and Cassandra settled down on the bench in the grape arbor.
“Tell me the rest of it,” Cassandra urged. “Did you read Margaret’s journals? Why did you decide to sell them?”
Miller’s blue eyes twinkled. “No doubt you will consider me a crass American, Miss Verrere, but the truth is, I have little interest in books or in searching out each twig of the family tree. I found it rather intriguing to learn that there were still Verreres here in England to whom I was distantly related, but as for studying the family history—well, I’m afraid I haven’t either the time or the inclination.” He gave her a small, self-deprecating smile.
“That is perfectly understandable. I don’t expect everyone to share my interests. So you did not read the journals?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Oh, I glanced through them, but I read very little. I didn’t know what to do with them at first. I hated to throw them away. I mean, they were so old, and I thought they must be valuable to someone. Finally one of my friends suggested that I sell them in England the next time I went. He pointed out that the English were, in general, more interested in history. He thought it would be a perfect market for old books, especially since Margaret came from here and doubtless left family behind. So I took his advice and brought them with me on my last trip to London. There, as I said, I sold them to Mr. Simons.” He smiled and added, “Actually, I tried to sell them to several book dealers, but Mr. Simons was the only one who wanted them.”
“I am so glad you did,” Cassandra told him warmly. She found herself liking Mr. Miller. He was open and direct in a way that most people never were. She wasn’t sure if it was simply an American quality or an attribute of this man. Whatever it was, she found that she could not keep from smiling back at him whenever he smiled. He was also, she thought, quite handsome—better looking, in fact, than Sir Philip Neville.
“My father was thrilled to actually get to read Margaret Verrere’s words,” she continued. “Her history—the elopement—had been a particular interest of his.”
They continued to talk for some time. He was interested in Margaret Verrere’s family, his relatives, and what had happened to them in the years since Margaret eloped. When Cassandra told him that the home in which Margaret had lived was still standing and had indeed been Cassandra’s own home until her father’s death, he was struck with awe and asked her if he might see it.
Cassandra was quite happy to show Chesilworth to him, and they went that afternoon, accompanied by the twins and Olivia, who always welcomed any excuse to get away from their aunt’s house. The twins, of course, peppered David with questions about the United States as well as the ship on which he had come to England, but he answered them all with great patience.
“Are you going to hunt for the treasure with us?” Hart asked with excitement when they reached Chesilworth.
“The what?” He looked down at the boy, startled, then over at Cassandra.
“The dowry,” Hart went on impatiently. “You know. Margaret’s dowry.”
“He’s talking about something in the journals,” Cassandra explained, adding to her brother, “Mr. Miller did not read the journals.”
“There is a treasure mentioned in them?” The American looked intrigued.
“It tells how to find it,” Crispin told him, and the two boys began to eagerly explain the existence of two maps. “One is in a letter. That’s what we are looking for in the house. The other belongs to Sir Philip, but he refuses to help us, so we are going to have to figure out how to do it ourselves.”
“A treasure hunt!” David Miller exclaimed. “How delightful. I am sorry that I cannot stay longer and help you with it.”
“Yes, that would be bang-up,” agreed Hart, who, along with Crispin had liked their American relation from the moment they met him.
“Why don’t you stay?” Crispin suggested. “Couldn’t he stay, Cassie?”
“He might not be able to, boys. Don’t plague Mr. Miller.” She turned to the man with a smile. “If you were able to stay, though, we would greatly enjoy it.”
“You tempt me.” He sighed. “But I do have business in London that I must get back for. And my ship home sails in a week.” He looked torn for a moment, then shrugged and said, “Well, perhaps I could stretch my stay to a second night.”
When they reached Chesilworth, Mr. Miller exclaimed aloud, impressed by its size and age, “Why, it’s a castle!”
“Hardly.” Cassandra laughed. “The Verreres were not great land barons during the Middle Ages, but the Elizabethan who built this tried his best to make it look like one.”
“You won’t find anything like this in the United States,” he told her, still in awe. “It’s a grand place. You must have hated to leave it.”
Cassandra nodded, though it wasn’t its grandeur that made her miss Chesilworth. It was its dear familiarity and its memories, the sense of family history that lived throughout it. They showed Mr. Miller through Chesilworth, even the damp and deteriorating west wing, and the next afternoon he returned to help them search the attics. In the end, he wound up stretching his visit to yet a third day, and it was with visible reluctance that he left them then.
After his departure, the days at Moulton House settled into their usual routine. Cassandra oversaw most of her aunt’s housekeeping, and whenever she could, she sneaked away to Chesilworth, sometimes with her siblings and sometimes without.
One afternoon, about a week after Mr. Miller departed, all four of the Verreres were in the attic at Chesilworth, though only Cassandra was still looking through the trunks. The heat of the day and boredom had prompted the twins to engage in a pretend sword fight with two canes they had found against the attic wall, and Olivia stood by an open window, trying to find any stray bit of breeze.
Cassandra finished loading all the objects back into a trunk that she had just emptied and closed the lid, sending another shower of dust all over her. She coughed and sat back on her heels, drawing her hand across her forehead and sighing. Her back hurt, and she badly wanted a drink of water. She coughed again and thought about quitting the search for the day.
To her amazement, there was a sound in the hall below the attic stairs. Then her cousin’s voice rang out cheerily, “Cassandra! Oh, Cassandra!”
Joanna? Whatever had possessed Joanna to come all the way over to Chesilworth? It was not like her cousin to move an inch out of her way, let alone visit their dilapidated house. There were footsteps on the stairs, and a man’s head and shoulders appeared through the hole in the floor. Cassandra understood now why Joanna had gone to the trouble of coming to Chesilworth. She rose to her feet, staring in silence as the rest of the man came into view.
“Good day, Miss Verrere,” said Sir Philip Neville cheerfully.
Chapter Five
“SIR PHILIP!” CASSANDRA gaped at the man.
“Miss Verrere. It is a pleasure to see you again.” A twinkle danced in Neville’s brown eyes.
Cassandra was intensely, humiliatingly aware of the way she looked—sweating in a most unlady-like manner, covered with dust, wearing one of her oldest and most ragtag dresses, and her hair no doubt sticking out every which way. She looked past Sir Philip to the attic opening, where Joanna now stood, a smug smile playing on her lips. Cassandra felt as if she could cheerfully have murdered her. No wonder Joanna had gone to the trouble of coming over to Chesilworth. She had known the state in which she and Sir Philip would find Cassandra.
Cassandra rose to her feet with all the dignity she could muster, trying vainly to brush the dust off her hands onto her skirts. “I—this is indeed a surprise, Sir Philip. I had not expected to see you again, least of all here.”
“My visit to Lady Arrabeck’s was over, and I was returning home, when it occurred to me that Dunsleigh would be a pleasant place at which to make a stop.”
“How fortuitous that we lay on your way home,” Cassandra replied, bringing up a mental map in her head and placing Lady Arrabeck’s, Dunsleigh and Neville’s Haverly House on it. It seemed to her that no one in his right mind would go through Dunsleigh to travel from Arrabeck Hall to Haverly House.
“Yes, isn’t it?” Neville returned blandly.
He had to be here about the treasure. Cassandra was certain that his story about dropping in on his way home was utter folderol, even if Joanna was too poor at geography to realize it. She was grateful, though, that he had been smart enough not to tell her aunt or cousin the real reason for his visit.
He crossed the attic to where she stood, winding his way among the boxes and trunks, and bowed elegantly over her embarrassingly dusty hand.
“Please forgive my appearance,” Cassandra murmured. “’Tis dusty work in the attics.”
“I see.” A flash of amusement crossed his face. “But there is no need to apologize. You look, as always, enchanting.”
Cassandra felt a betraying heat rise in her cheeks and she glanced quickly away. “Uh—I—allow me to introduce you to my sister and brothers.”
The twins had stopped their mock battle as soon as Neville had arrived, and they edged closer now, staring at him in fascination.
“My brother Crispin, Lord Chesilworth, and his twin Hart. And this is my sister, Olivia Verrere. Children, this is Sir Philip Neville.”
Neville exchanged polite greetings with the other three, adding as he bowed over Olivia’s hand, “Ah, another beauty in the family, I see.”
Olivia’s eyes grew even wider, and Cassandra knew that he had won her sister over. Behind them, still standing beside the attic stairway, Joanna shifted and sighed noisily. She unfurled her fan and made a production of waving it in front of her.
“It is so dreadfully hot in here,” she opined. “Cassandra, I don’t see how you can stand it. I swear, I think I should faint.”
“Oh, you know I am never subject to the vapors,” Cassandra answered her pragmatically. “But perhaps you should go back downstairs, where it is less stifling.”
“Yes, of course.” Joanna gave her a cat-in-the-cream smile and went on in dulcet tones, “We ought to return to the house, Sir Philip. Cassandra and the other children could join us when they get through here.”
“Thank you for your concern, Miss Moulton.” Sir Philip sent her a brief, disinterested glance. “No doubt you should return to the house if you are feeling unwell. However, I shall remain here. Miss Verrere looks as if she could use some help.”
Joanna stared at him. “You are going to help them clean the attic?”
“If that is what they are doing, yes.” He gave her a perfunctory smile and turned back to Cassandra.
“But I—I can hardly go back to the house by myself,” Joanna protested.
“Your groom was with us.”
“Yes, of course, but that isn’t the same. I mean, he is not a gentleman.”
“You do not trust your servants to behave in a proper manner?” Neville asked, lifting his eyebrows in surprise.
“Of course—I didn’t mean—that is—”
“If you are scared to go back with Jessup,” Olivia suggested with great innocence, “then perhaps you had best wait downstairs. I am sure we will be through in a few hours. Won’t we, Cassie?”
Cassandra had to bite her lip to keep from giggling at Joanna’s outraged expression. “Yes. Joanna, that sounds like an excellent idea.”
Joanna cast a fulminating glance at Cassandra, then at the others, and finally stalked ungraciously to the nearest trunk, lifting her skirts from the dusty floor. She put on a show of dusting off the top of the trunk with her handkerchief, but it was lost on Sir Philip, who was once again looking down at Cassandra.
“Where shall I start, Miss Verrere?”
“Ah...” Cassandra glanced around vaguely, trying to pull her thoughts together. “Well, I had just finished this trunk, and I was going to move on to the one beside it. Perhaps you would like to go through that one.” She pointed to the flat-topped, brass-bound trunk on the other side.
“Of course.” He moved to the next trunk and opened it, sending dust cascading from its top.
Cassandra knelt in front of the trunk beside him and opened it. She glanced over at Sir Philip, still scarcely able to believe that he was there. Her initial embarassment over her appearance was subsiding. It didn’t really matter how she looked; what was important was that he had come.
Quietly she asked, “You have decided that you believe me, sir?”
“I never disbelieved you, Miss Verrere. I was simply of the opinion that you had been duped.”
“A vast improvement. You merely thought me a fool.”
He looked at her, his eyes dancing. “Never that, dear lady.”
“What made you change your mind?”
He shrugged. “I am not saying that I believe there is a treasure waiting for us, or that we can find these maps that will lead us to it. Let us simply say that for the moment I am willing to withhold my judgment.
The fact was—though he would not have dreamed of telling Miss Verrere this—that Sir Philip still found the idea of a hidden treasure and a secret map or two the stuff of gothic novels. He had merely found himself excessively bored at Lady Arrabeck’s house party after Cassandra left. He had kept thinking about her and the offer she had made to him. Absurd as it was, it somehow intrigued him. But more than that, Cassandra herself intrigued him. He recalled the intelligence and clarity of her large gray eyes, the humor of her wide mouth and the slender femininity of her form. He had never gotten a good look at her pale hair in the daylight, he reminded himself; he would still like to see it. And their conversation, though bizarre, had made what everyone else said to him seem insipid. Most of all, he remembered the way Cassandra had felt in his arms, the taste of her mouth beneath his, and the memories made him feel most unsettled.
He was, he told himself, too old for treasure hunts, and, of course, he did not believe for a minute that Cassandra was going to find the clues she needed in some old letter to her ancestor. Still, he had begun wondering what it would hurt to go to visit her and see those precious diaries of hers. It would do nothing worse than waste his time, and, frankly, the idea of wasting a few hours’ time in Cassandra Verrere’s company had grown more and more appealing. Even the thought of having to spend time in the company of her aunt and cousin had not been enough to put him off.
“I am sure you will be convinced soon,” Cassandra assured him, her eyes shining in a way that made his loins tighten. “Once you have read Margaret’s diaries, I know you will realize that they are real. You can see how close we are growing in our search. We are already only fifty years or so away from Margaret’s time, and we have all the way to the wall left to look.” She waved her arm toward the end of the attic. “I am sure there are things left from her father.”
“If he saved those letters.”
Cassandra frowned. The possibility that Margaret’s angry father had thrown away the letters from his wayward daughter was not something she liked to think about. She shook her head. “We will find them. We must.”
They continued to unpack the trunks, searching through the stored articles for a packet of letters. Boxes were opened and clothes unwrapped to make sure that no letters were folded inside. Sir Philip was soon distracted by an intricately carved snuffbox so small that it fit into the palm of his hand, then again by a quaint old book on manners that made him chuckle and read choice excerpts aloud.
“Whatever are you doing?” Joanna asked snappishly. She did not understand Sir Philip at all. Her hopes had soared when the footman had announced him. She was certain that he had traveled to Dunsleigh because his desire for her had overcome his brief bitterness at the trick she had tried on him.
But then he had kept on asking about Cassandra and had actually insisted on riding over to Chesilworth to find her. Of course, he had expressed great consideration for Joanna and assured her that she needn’t accompany him, but she had not been about to let such an opportunity to be alone with him get away from her. However, she could not understand why he refused to leave now, or why he was pawing through old trunks and chuckling with Cassandra over things in which Joanna could see no humor. She narrowed her eyes at Cassandra, who was smiling at Neville in a way that made her eyes positively luminous. She was almost pretty, Joanna thought in amazement, even with her hair covered in a powder of dust and a great streak of dirt across one cheek. Joanna found the revelation distinctly annoying. Did Cassandra actually think that Sir Philip Neville would have any interest in her?
“What are you doing, Cassandra?” she repeated when her cousin continued to ignore her. “Why are you looking through all these old trunks?”
“I thought there might be something of interest here,” Cassandra replied vaguely.
Joanna quirked an eyebrow, but her cousin’s interests were always so peculiar to her that Cassandra’s answer did not seem out of the ordinary. “But you are making Sir Philip all dusty.”
“I don’t mind, Miss Moulton,” Sir Philip replied cheerfully. “I am having a perfectly fine time.”
A little to his amazement, he realized that he actually was enjoying himself. It was dusty and hot in the attic, but he was doing something that he had never done before, and it was rather fun exploring the old things in the trunk and sharing his amusement at the antiquated book with Cassandra. He could think of no other woman who would care as little about the fact that he had come upon her when she was dirty and disheveled, clothed in an obviously old, ill-fitting dress. Within minutes she was talking unselfconsciously with him and chuckling over the excerpts he read from the book.
He glanced over at Joanna, whose perfect looks were beginning to melt a little in the airless attic. She was dressed like a lady and acting as one should act; moreover, her coloring and features were such as any woman would envy. But, after ten minutes in Cassandra’s company, Joanna struck him only as dull as ditch water, whereas he felt his eyes drawn over and over again to Cassandra’s animated face.
Joanna frowned at him, annoyed at his cheerfulness. The man was acting like a boor, she thought; any gentleman should have taken the hint and escorted her back to her home long ago. It was obvious to her that stronger action needed to be taken.
She rose to her feet. “I fear that the heat is too much for me. I must go back downstairs.”
“Of course, Joanna,” Cassandra replied in a pleasant voice. “Whatever you think best.”
“Good day, Miss Moulton,” Sir Philip said absently, distracted by a small stack of letters, yellowed with age and tied with a pink ribbon, that were fitted into the corner of the trunk.
He snatched them up and turned them over, aware of a surprising stab of excitement in his stomach. He did not even glance up to see the dagger look that Joanna directed toward him before she clattered down the stairs in a demonstration of ladylike rage.
“Cassandra—” he said in a low voice, not noticing that he called her by her first name, an unwarranted familiarity given the short time they had known each other.
Cassandra turned, as oblivious as he to his use of her given name. Her heart speeded up as she saw the pile of letters, even as she reminded herself that she had found dozens of other packets of letters already, and none of them had been the ones she was looking for.
She reached out for them, saying pragmatically, “I am sure these are too recent,” even as her fingers closed around them with trembling eagerness.
Cassandra brought them closer, but as soon as she saw the spidery writing, she sighed. “Oh, no! This is Edna Verrere’s writing. I would have thought I had discovered everything she ever wrote by now. She was a most faithful daughter, and she wrote her mother regularly after she married. Her mother was equally faithful about keeping her letters.”
She pulled the top letter from the pile and quickly skimmed it, just to make sure that it was indeed Edna Verrere who had written. “Yes, she’s talking about her son Reginald again—a most priggish-sounding fellow.”
“Oh, him!”
Both Cassandra and Philip looked up at the sound of one of the twins’ voices. Both the boys had made their way over to them when they saw the packet of letters, but now Hart threw himself down in disgust atop one of the trunks.
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