The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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      ‘Do you?’

      ‘Lady Mackay will be returning to Scotland to live. She just came to say goodbye.’

      ‘She still loves you. You can see it in her eyes. My guess is that she came to beg forgiveness as she tried to inveigle her way back into your bed with money and sex. The cloak she wore was a surprise though, buttoned as it was to the neck. Not her usual style.’

      Daniel finished his drink before he spoke. ‘Let it go, Luce. There is no purpose in flogging the past.’

      ‘Maybe not, but your present difficulties can be laid squarely at the feet of Lady Mackay and rumour has it that Goldsmith is calling in his loan. Can you pay him?’

      Daniel shook his head, helping himself to more of the same smooth wine. ‘There are others as well. Nigel was busier than I had thought.’

      ‘Pity Amethyst Cameron turned out to be such a duplicitous liar. I liked her before that. Francis told me to tell you that you should follow him to America. By his accounts there is a fortune to be made there.’

      ‘I don’t have enough time left to find it.’

      ‘Your mother?’

      ‘Is finally terrified. In the past few days and for the first time ever she is cursing Nigel to a most uncomfortable afterlife.’

      ‘At least she is recognising he is the architect of much of the Montcliffe misfortune. I could sell Cosgrove Hall. It is mine outright to do as I want with and it should fetch something even in its dilapidated state. At least the land around is arable.’

      Daniel smiled. ‘I thank you for that, Luce, but it would hardly cover the first loan that was presented.’

      ‘Marry a girl whose family is flush, then, a young debutante who’d fall in love with you in a second. That would do the trick.’

      ‘I think any chaperone would be hurrying such prospects away from me. There is a big difference in thinking a family on the verge of ruin and the knowing of it. Besides, I am too jaded to be tiptoeing around such innocence.’

      And he was, Daniel thought in surprise. Even the idea of such a bride made him feel...nervous. He was thirty-four next birthday and he felt older than that again. He didn’t want a woman he could hardly speak to or one who would be running home to her mother every time the going got tough. Which it would. His leg was aching tonight and he knew very soon he’d need to get a surgeon to look at it properly.

      ‘Did you find out anything more of Gerald Whitely then? You mentioned that you were looking into it the last time we met.’

      Daniel nodded. ‘He died in the bed of a prostitute, it seems. Two shots to the head and no one ever held accountable. His crooked schemes of business were apparently funded by the Camerons’ money.’

      Lucien swore. One of the riper expressions remembered from army life.

      ‘My thoughts exactly.’

      ‘I can’t see Miss Cameron being enamoured with someone of that ilk even after all that has happened and I am sure she could not have condoned his scandalous get-rich deals, either. As an impartial viewer I would also like to say that for the first time in a long while you seemed happy when you were with her.’

      The words rang in Daniel’s head like a death knell as he struggled to change the subject to something lighter. He hadn’t been happy in so long, that was the problem. He couldn’t remember a time when he had truly laughed or enjoyed something just for the fun of it.

      A band of yellow roses in golden curls came to mind, and lips that turned up at each end even when she did not smile. After Nigel and Charlotte, honesty was the yardstick he had measured people by and Amethyst Cameron had failed that test miserably in the end.

      If the Camerons sent back an agreement to his terms, would he still go through with it, knowing all that he did? Was Montcliffe Manor worth such a sacrifice?

      Charlotte’s presence today had unsettled him, but so had his mother’s constant tears. The carrot of building up his own breeding stable also sat at the back of his mind. With luck and good management he could begin to prosper and in a couple of years he might be able to pay back much of the debt. Amethyst had come to him stipulating her own terms, after all, so she would not be clinging on to something unsustainable either.

      A marriage of convenience and with many of the terms in his favour? He could build up his breeding stock and begin again. A new life with the freedom of money and time. But even that prospect failed to allow him any renewed hopefulness and his shattered right thigh hurt like hell.

       Chapter Eight

      She would be married in an hour. Again. In a house she had no notion of and in a dress hurriedly made, with little interest on her part for the end result.

      She looked terrible, that much she could see, her eyes red and swollen and the eczema that had a tendency to appear when she was stressed staining her cheeks and the soft skin beneath her mouth.

      A blemished bride.

      An unwanted bride.

      A second-hand bride.

      A bride who would stand at the altar only because of a series of conditions that would allow her husband a separate life apart from hers. Montcliffe had signed such stipulations in haste, hadn’t he, the avenues of finding a solution to his own problems closing in.

      Unlocking the golden cross that she wore around her neck, she laid it down on the bedside table.

      ‘I do not want you to be a part of this charade, Mama.’ Her neck seemed empty without the chain, though today her mother felt close.

      Susannah Cameron had been a redhead, with a freckled skin and a verve for life that was uncompromising. She had risked the small loan her father had bequeathed to her when he had died as a down payment for the first of Robert’s boats. The best spend of my life, she had said to Robert again and again as Amethyst had grown, the love her parents shared a constant and joyous source of wonderment.

      So different from this marriage, the ghost of Gerald Whitely surfacing in threat. ‘Daniel Wylde will turn out just like me,’ some spectral voice whispered. ‘The very same, you just wait, for you are cursed and marked.’

      Swallowing, she turned away from the mirror. Her maid had helped her to dress, but had gone now to let those downstairs know that she was ready. Amethyst thought her hair looked nothing like it had when Lady Christine had threaded it with roses. Rather it was spiked and ill shaped, the golden band of her mother’s she had insisted on wearing seeming as out of kilter as her dress.

      Pure white. She wondered if she should have worn the colour, but the seamstress had already begun on it when the thought occurred and so she had taken the path of least resistance and left it as it was. At least the veil would hide some of her defects. With care she pulled the gauze across her face and smiled, glad of the opaqueness and privacy.

      A few moments later she entered the downstairs salon at Montcliffe, a room of huge proportion and elegance, though sparsely furnished.

      Lord СКАЧАТЬ