Bodice Ripper

"Very well…Mary." He paused to feel the name on his lips. It felt wrong, but he said it again. "Mary. I decided that the solution to your family's issues would be two-fold. First, I would need to slow the flow of money out of your accounts. Then, I could address the central issues that were causing the problems."

"Obviously."

"Well, as it happens, there isn't much that your family is spending money on. I can tell you that whoever was keeping your books, they were nearly healthy by themselves. Which makes it seem a bit strange that there would be an issue at all. You can see, I hope, why I sent the servants home until I could get things in hand and the new head of the household arrived to relieve me."

Mary gave a sound to indicate that she understood, and waited for him to continue.

"I'll try to spare you the figures themselves, but I can confidently say that the way that Lord Geis's accounts were emptying, you would have been unable to feed yourselves by Christmas."

He waited for her to respond, but she made a pinched face and kept quiet. She wasn't some waif who would faint on hearing bad news, not after all the bad news she'd gotten over the past couple of weeks. She knew how to deal with those sort of issues now.

They were nearly there, now, and James walked the rest of the way in silence. How could Mary help with what he'd said so far? It sounded like a case of the money being spent or lost off the books, then. If the ledger showed the household being healthy, and the accounts were decidedly unhealthy, then the ledger must have been wrong.

He turned the knob and pushed the door to the study open, gesturing for her to go inside ahead of him.

"As you can see, there were notes beside the ledger. They are…obscure. I tried to show them to you yesterday, but you were…unavailable for comment."

Mary blushed lightly. Now that they were on the same side, it seemed as if her actions earlier were childish and embarrassing. She stepped up to the desk, and sat back into the chair when she felt him push it in for her.

"Mr. Poole, you didn't know my father, did you?"

"No, I did not."

"Well, he had a number of peculiar habits, sir. They often confounded the other people in the house, but that didn't stop him from keeping them." She picked up the papers and looked at them. Yes, she could make some sense of them. "He rose far earlier than most of the staff, and then napped throughout the afternoon."

She waited a moment, picked up a piece of newspaper from another pile and read it.

"He liked to smoke cigars, which was a foul-smelling habit all around—regardless of what polite society's view on it." She picked up a third and paused for a moment. 'P 5'. She knew who P was, and she blushed. It took her a moment to regain her composure. "And most infuriating of all, he very rarely wrote in long-hand."

She set the paper down and turned back toward James, who was standing in the doorway watching her.

"He had a strange, self-created shorthand that made very nearly no sense to anyone but himself, and was nearly indecipherable to someone who hadn't seen it before. I can see why you might have struggled with it."

"The numbers appear to be expenditures and income. That puts us within a hundred pounds each month of the expected numbers, which is much closer than the ledger shows."

"And you wanted to know what the rest of it meant, I presume?"

"Just so, Miss…Mary."

"I'm pleased to say that I can probably help you with that." She turned back toward the desk and plucked a few exemplary notes from each of the piles. "'D'—well, that is probably Davis, after all. He's worked for my father for as long as I've been alive, at least, and I'm sure that he'd be willing to give him extra spending money if Davis needed it. 'O' is my uncle Ollie. He's a Colonel in His Majesty's army. I'm not entirely sure what he would need the money for. As for 'B' and 'P'… I couldn't say."

She tried to hide the lie on her face as best she could. He frowned.

"I was afraid of that," he said, stepping forward. He took the stack of 'O' papers and fanned them out. "Oliver Geis takes the majority of the money from these stacks."

10

James

James had leaned in to look over Mary's shoulder as she spoke. It had seemed inconsequential and harmless at the time, and when she finished speaking, she turned toward him. Suddenly it was intensely clear how close together they were. His nose nearly touched hers, and he could smell the perfume on her so powerfully that it made it hard to think for even a moment.

"Good work," he said softly.

It was good work. With just that, he could get back to work, and take care of all of it. He knew it made things more difficult for him, but if he knew what he was up against he knew he could do it.

The weight that had been sitting on his chest for the past two days was gone, now, and he could feel it making his knees into jelly. He took in a deep, unsteady breath. There was that scent again, that incredible flowery smell.

Before he could think, his arms were around Mary's waist and he was pulling her up out of the chair and into him. He looked at her for a long moment, trying to stop himself, but he didn't want to stop. And then their lips were together.