Kasey Michaels - The Regency Redgraves - What an Earl Wants / What a Lady Needs / What a Gentleman Desires / What a Hero Dares

Gideon drew his finger down the length of her spine, and she shifted her shoulders slightly, either in delight or to warn him to stop. He couldn’t know, and he doubted she would tell him unless he could goad her into an answer.

“Perhaps an hour was an insult to myself,” he whispered beside her ear as, instead of putting his hands to the task of closing her buttons, he slid them inside the gaping fabric, to gently cup and squeeze her unbound, uplifted breasts, his thumbs circling her taut nipples. Item three on the list of things he wanted to do to Jessica Linden he’d composed in his head during his nearsleepless night .

For a moment, she seemed ready to melt against him. For a moment.

“Richard was correct in his assessment. You are your father’s son, aren’t you, Gideon? Does nothing save rutting occupy your mind for more than a minute?”

“You—” He withdrew his hands, closing his mouth on the word bitch , and buttoned her gown as impersonally as he’d pull on his own boots. He’d figure her out, there would come a day when he called the shots, when she would be rebuffed, left feeling like a pleading, bleating fool. But clearly , he told himself, not yet .

“Thank you,” she said as she lowered her hands, and her luxurious curls tumbled free past her shoulders. She then immediately sat down and looked up at him, clear-eyed and composed, as if they’d just come upstairs, and nothing had happened between them. “How do you know my father and Clarissa were murdered?”

That she’d traded her body for information was clear now. She’d let him have her so that they could get down to business. A cold woman.

Gideon took up his wineglass once more. He could play the game as coolly as she did, better. He’d had considerable practice. “I don’t know if your stepmother was deliberately killed. She may simply have had the misfortune to be in the coach. But Turner was definitely murdered. Their hired coach supposedly overturned at night, with the full, lit coach lanterns breaking, the oil spilling out and igniting. Trapped inside the coach, your father and his wife were burned to death.”

By now, Jessica had her hand to her mouth, finally shaken out of her reserve. “My God. I always believed he was destined for hellfire. But not while he was still aboveground. Yet, clearly an accident. Why did you question it?”

Gideon set down his wineglass. “I was already aware of other deaths, other members of the Society perishing in accidents . All, like your father, wearing the rose. Orford, last spring, shot by mistake by another hunter in his party—just whom, nobody could say, as they were all drunk, all shooting as fast as their bearers could load for them. Sir George Dunmore drowned six months ago after somehow toppling into the Channel from a friend’s yacht in the middle of the night, the conclusion being that he must have slipped on the rainwet deck and tumbled overboard.”

“Both plausible conclusions,” Jessica said. “But there was another one?”

“Yes, the one that finally aroused my suspicions. A few months later it was Baron Harden’s turn to be careless. He took a tumble down a dark flight of stairs after leaving his mistress. When I heard of your father’s accident just outside London, most especially the part about the coach lamps, I was already past believing all these accidents were a matter of coincidence. I immediately traveled to the estate, to view the bodies for myself before they were interred.”

Jessica’s brown eyes widened. “That’s ghoulish. How could you even look at them?”

He was in no mood to tread softly. “The bodies were in no fit condition to be laid out in the house, thankfully. So the answer to your how is, with a fat bribe to the groom guarding the remains in the stables until the interment, my extremely discreet physician brought along for his expertise, my valet, Gibbons, holding up a lantern for us, handkerchiefs tied around all our faces and wearing riding gloves we immediately consigned to the waste bin.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I believe I was asking a rhetorical question. But thank you for that explanation. You are a determined man, aren’t you?”

“When I want answers, yes, I go after them. They actually didn’t die in the fire, Jessica. From what my physician could tell, admitting my own limited contact with dead bodies, they’d both sustained pistol shots to their skulls. Fire doesn’t melt bones, most of all, the skull. With a little prodding at the remains, the holes were not that difficult to spot.”

Jessica had gone rather pale. “Shot. Not an accident at all. At least they didn’t burn, thank God.”

“No, the fire was meant to obscure the wounds. The coachman, alas, was long gone, so I couldn’t question him.”

“Had he shot them? Perhaps set the coach on fire to cover what he was about. A robbery, I would suppose?”

Gideon shook his head, amazed at her sangfroid. She was shocked, but she showed no signs of subsiding into a swoon; her mind was ticking along in a rational fashion. “Anything’s possible. Am I being too suspicious, Jessica?”

“No,” she said quietly. “My father was always tight with his purse, so the fact he’d hired a coach rather than bring his own cattle and servants to London isn’t surprising. Lord only knows who he hired. Their deaths could have been a result of a robbery, but when combined with the other supposed accidents? All of the men members of your father’s Society?”

“They wore the rose. To me, that links them. Four accidents stretches coincidence a step too far.”

“I only wonder why he and his wife were traveling to London at that time of year. No one can count on the roads being anything but snow-filled or quagmires. Did your sleuthing extend to finding an answer to that question?”

“No, but you’re right, I should have thought of that. I was in London to settle some financial affairs for my former ward, turning them over to her bridegroom’s man of business, or else I wouldn’t have been in town myself.”

“Lucky for you, I suppose, and your theories.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Damn, why didn’t I think to ask myself that question?”

“How lowering to discover one isn’t omnipotent, Gideon,” she said sweetly, so that he glared at her. She shrugged. “I was only thinking it would be interesting to know their reason for the journey. A fanciful mind might even consider the notion they were on their way to a meeting of the Society you’re so certain was dissolved two decades ago.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d alluded to that possibility. He might as well tell her the rest.

“We’ve had some curious happenings at Redgrave Manor in the past year. Glimpses of lit lanterns moving through the estate at night, strange holes appearing inside the greenhouse which, when investigated, seem very much to have been caused by the cave-in of some sort of tunnel being dug beneath it. Oh, yes, and my father’s crypt was broken into. His remains have gone missing.”

“What?”

Well, at last! He had begun to wonder if the woman was completely unflappable.

“Yes, that was very much my reaction, as well. However, in the interests of full and honest disclosure, save for the rare sightings of curious lights at night this past month or more—possibly poachers—I can’t for certain say when the tunnel was dug, but only when that portion of it collapsed. As for the theft of my father’s body, that was only discovered when lightning struck a nearby tree and it fell, a large branch breaking one of the stained glass windows. We none of us enter the mausoleum unless it’s to shelve another Redgrave—we’ve got enough of them in there that we stack them up like bolts of cloth in a Bond Street shop, you see, and then wall them in. The stone used to wall up Barry was on the floor of the crypt, broken in two, the body gone. But again, the theft could have occurred any time in the past twenty years.”