Bound by Love (Russian Connection 2)

She grimaced at his astonishment. “You cannot be more shocked than I was.”

“Don’t be so certain,” he muttered, pacing toward the window. He was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything but the sight of Leonida half-naked on the bed. “What do my mother’s letters have to do with the blackmail scheme of a Russian Countess?”

“She was approached by a gentleman who claimed he had the letters and that he would hand them over to Alexander Pavlovich’s enemies unless she agreed to pay him a great deal of money.”

“Sir Charles?”

“No,

it was a Russian who first accosted mother, but it is now obvious that Sir Charles was behind the plot.”

“The blackmailer claimed to have the letters?”

“Yes, but my mother did not believe him.”

He turned with a frown. “Why?”

Leonida shrugged. “For one thing, he would not produce them to her even when she refused to pay. And for another, he made no mention of the fact that they were partially written in a secret code.”

Stefan coughed, unable to imagine his elegant, sophisticated mother writing missives in a secret code.

“Secret code?”

“Knowing my mother the code was nothing more clever than spelling a handful of words backwards or using initials instead of full names,” Leonida admitted. “Still, the man who was threatening her seemed to know nothing more than the fact she had written to the Duchess of Huntley and that the letters held the private conversations of Alexander Pavlovich.”

“Information you suspect came from Sir Charles?”

She held up a slender hand. “Do you have a better notion?”

He restlessly paced back toward the bed. The letters had been hidden in his mother’s room since her death. And he would bet his last quid that Sir Charles Richards had never set foot inside Meadowland.

So how had the bastard known of them?

“None of it makes the least sense.”

“At least we agree on something.”

His lips twisted. He knew of any number of things they could agree upon. Most of them involving her body trembling beneath him.

“Who besides your mother knew of the letters?”

“She claims no one beyond the Duchess.”

“Then how could Sir Charles know of them?” he demanded.

“Perhaps your mother shared the letters with someone who was acquainted with him.”

He stiffened, knowing his mother too well to believe such nonsense.

“I cannot imagine my mother revealing the intimate confessions of a friend to anyone, and certainly not a person who would be willing to pass that information to a man such as Sir Charles.”

Leonida studied his hard expression, obviously sensing his annoyance at the implication his mother could somehow be involved in the blackmail scheme.

“Then perhaps someone ran across the letters in your mother’s safe and told him.”

“No one knew of that safe…” he began, only to abruptly sit on the edge of the bed as a distant memory seared through his mind. “Christ.”

“What?”