ndary creatures who no longer existed.
“Sir, it pleases you to tease me, but I need to be in the kitchen or Mrs. Crozier will be very angry.”
“Mrs. Crozier scares you about as much as she scares me.” He needed to leave her. She was breathing deeply, from her struggle with the heavy dress, or from stress. He wanted to rip that ugly dress right off her again, carry her over to that narrow, sagging bed, and…
He had to stop thinking like that. He wasn’t going to take her with lies between them, not if he could wait. “I think we should talk,” he said abruptly.
The bright color on her cheeks had faded at that. “Now?” It was almost a squeak of dismay.
He shook his head. “There’s a storm coming up, and I’ve been on land for too long. I’ll be taking a boat out before things get bad. We’ll talk this evening or tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, sir.” She sounded docile enough, and he wondered if she would try to run. He could find her, of course, if she did. Fulton was her partner in crime, and he didn’t trust the solicitor to keep a secret. No, he’d find her wherever she went.
For a moment he just stood and looked at her. The light was dull in the attics, both from the early hour and the coming storm, but she looked beautiful, even in the ugly dress, with her hair down to her wrists and her face in a mulish expression. Damn. Why did she have to be who she was? He’d give ten years off his life if she was an ordinary girl, the milliner’s assistant she’d said she was, or even a solicitor’s daughter. He wouldn’t have to rush things. There could be a slow, delicious build-up to finally taking her, in a bed with clean sheets and all the time in the world.
Not now. Not until she came to him with the truth.
But soon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS FULLY AN awful day, starting with the disaster of losing her dress out the window, followed by the captain’s appearance in her room, his hands on her, holding her. He wanted to talk with her, did he? How was she going to avoid that? Oh, she could put off just about anyone, and nothing could make her say anything she didn’t want to say, but she still felt edgy.
So far she’d found next to nothing to explain how the captain would have profited from killing her father. The locked closet had proven stubbornly resistant to her lock-picking efforts. Granted, she’d had little time, daylight, or energy to give it her full attention—it was all she could do to wash herself and tumble into the hard, narrow bed. And Mrs. Crozier hadn’t let her get anywhere near the study. She needed some kind of proof, either of guilt or innocence, before she ran from this place and never looked back.
Admit it, Maddy, she told herself. You’re running from the man, not the place.
It wasn’t that she was a coward. She was simply wise enough to know when she was out of her depths, and with Captain Thomas Morgan she was floundering, weakening. Longing.
It was hard to think of him that way. He wasn’t a Thomas—it felt artificial, and she wondered if he had a pirate name, like the Dread Captain Morgan or Morgan the Black. In fact, she wasn’t even sure he was a Morgan—wasn’t that already the name of a famous pirate from centuries ago? Of course it was probably her own guilty conscience—she was the one with a false name, not the captain. But she really couldn’t think of him using that name.
She didn’t have to think of him using any name at all, except as a possible thief and murderer. Supposedly her father had driven the carriage to the edge of the cliff—he’d been found at the bottom, his neck broken, the carriage and horses abandoned. The one thing the solicitors had been able to do was quash any suggestion of suicide, and Maddy knew it was an impossibility, because Eustace Russell didn’t know how to drive. He always hired a driver. And there had been no one else out there on the windswept heart of Dartmoor. Had he died alone? Or at the hands of a killer?
She couldn’t afford to brood; she’d been brooding for too long. That was why she’d come here. She could take action, and that was exactly what she’d do, she thought, moving down the narrow staircase to Mrs. Crozier’s kitchen lair.
By late afternoon the sky was dark with clouds. The housekeeper had been at her, all day, criticizing, making her do things over and over again, which, Maddy well knew, was entirely unnecessary. Nanny Gruen had believed that a lady should know how to accomplish any household task in order to properly direct the raft of servants she would one day employ, and Maddy never did anything halfway. When she scrubbed a floor it was spotless, when she polished something it gleamed. Mrs. Crozier was simply venting her spleen, and clearly she had a great deal of it to vent.
The captain had been right—there was most definitely a storm coming. Maddy could practically feel the electricity in the air. The sun was nowhere to be seen—all day the sky had been dark and threatening, and she’d heard the rumble of distant thunder as an ominous accompaniment to the wind that rattled the windows and shook the trees in the back garden. Out front the waters of the harbor foamed, rocking the ships on their moorings, and Maddy tried not to think about the captain. He was already gone by the time she reached the kitchens, barely ten minutes after he’d left her. Her first thought had been a devout hope that he’d be on his boat for the entire day. Her second had been a fear that he’d do just that. This was no sort of day to be out on the open water, though admittedly she was no judge of the matter, having never set one foot on a boat. She might think the captain capable of heinous crimes, but she didn’t want him dead.
Was it possible that there might be more than one man behind their father’s destruction? What if the captain was merely a part of some larger scheme? There was only one problem with all this—what possible reason could anyone have to destroy the House of Russell? Stealing the money was one thing—why did they have to steal her father as well?
The Earl of Kilmartyn had managed to survive the debacle with his fortune intact, and he had seemed a logical villain. But Bryony was too smart to be tricked by some wealthy Irish rakehell, and she’d married him out of hand, despite the fact that he was suspected of murdering his wife.
So he was out of the question—she trusted her older sister’s judgment too much. But what possible reason could the captain have for killing his employer? To be sure, her father suspected him of something, had even relieved him of his command. But what could her father have done to him that would have justified murder? And what had her father suspected him of? Morgan could hardly have embezzled all that money from across the country.
Their third possibility, Viscount Griffiths, the man who now owned their country estate, Somerset, was an even less likely villain. But that scrap of paper and common sense were all that they had to go on.
“Why have you got the lass down on her knees all the time?” A deep, rumbling voice broke through her abstraction as she rubbed the scrub brush back and forth, back and forth beneath Mrs. Crozier’s direction. At least all the endless, mindless work gave her plenty of time for introspection. She looked up, way up, into the craggy, sea-worn face of the man who lived in the mews.
“Work must be done, Mr. Quarrells,” Mrs. Crozier said. “I’ll thank you not to interfere with my arrangements.”
Mr. Quarrells snorted in contempt. “I’d like to see you do a bit of work for a change. I don’t know why he puts up with you.”
“My husband and I are devoted to the captain and this household,” she said sharply, but Maddy could hear the trace of fear in Mrs. Crozier's voice. She longed to sit back on her heels, rest her aching arms during this argument, but she didn’t dare. Mrs. Crozier had taken to giving her sharp little kicks when she thought Maddy was slacking off, and she already had bruises.
“Ah, it’s his business and none of mine,” Quarrells said, disappointing Maddy, and she ducked her head. “And speaking of himself, where is he? Isn’t he back yet? He knows better than to stay out when a storm like this is brewing.”
“I have no idea, Mr. Quarrells. He didn’t tell me when he expected to return.”