A Rogue at Stonecliffe, page 11
From the other end of the hall came a sound like a flock of geese, and a small dog shot into view. Petunia jumped, clamping her teeth on the man’s calf. The intruder swung his leg, sending Petunia flying away. The pug hit the floor, but bounced up and returned to the fray. She swarmed around the man’s ankles, nipping and growling and yapping. More servants came running into the hall.
“How dare you!” An aristocratic voice rang out. Everyone stopped and swung around to gape at the vision of Lady Lockwood in her nightcap and dressing gown, a candle in one hand and brandishing her cane in the other, as she strode down the hall like an avenging angel.
The intruder had sense enough to break out of his paralysis and run, stumbling over Petunia in the process. He staggered up and started down the staircase just as Lady Lockwood reached it. She brought her cane down across his back, and he fell, rolling down the steps to the landing. Pulling himself to his feet, he limped down the stairs and out the front door, which stood open. Verity went tearing after him.
“Well! I never!” Lady Lockwood turned, sending an accusing look at the rest of them and slamming the candle on a small console table. “What has this world come to? Kidnapping. Random strangers popping in and out of the house.” She bent down and gave the panting pug a reassuring scratch. “There, now, Petunia, don’t fret,” she said in a kinder tone than Annabeth had ever heard her use with people. “He’s gone now.”
“And I rather suspect he won’t be returning,” Annabeth said, stifling a smile.
“I should think not.” Her grandmother’s sharp gaze fell on Annabeth, taking in her nightgown, loose hair, and bare feet. “Really, Annabeth, you shouldn’t be running about dressed like that. Go put on your slippers and dressing gown.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Annabeth ducked into her room to grab her dressing gown.
When she came back into the corridor, Verity had returned, breathing almost as hard as Petunia, and was receiving a similar lecture about proper attire from Lady Lockwood. Verity gave her a curtsy, murmuring an apology, and started back toward the servants’ staircase, but she stopped when she saw Annabeth and said in her maid’s voice, “I’m sorry, miss, I couldn’t catch ’im. Are yuh all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Did that man attack you, Annabeth?” Lady Lockwood said.
“No. Not at all. I think he was a thief. I woke up because he was rummaging around in my room. I screamed and threw something at him, and he took off.” Annabeth thought it was best not to mention that first move he had made in her direction.
“How did he get in here, anyway?” Lady Lockwood demanded. She sent a sharp look at the butler. “Are we in the habit of leaving our doors unlocked?”
“No, ma’am,” Cartwell replied, sounding just as dignified as if he wasn’t dressed in his nightcap and nightgown with his white, spindly calves showing below it. “I locked it myself.”
“He picked the lock, ma’am, and came in that way,” Verity explained.
“I see,” Lady Lockwood sniffed. “Well. Then I am going back to my bed. I would like to get at least a few hours’ sleep.”
She thumped back to her room, talking in a low voice to Petunia.
Annabeth retreated into her bedroom. She picked up the candlestick and now-broken candle that lay beside it and, reinserting the largest piece of candle, she lit it and walked over to the fireplace. The small old trunk stood open. It was the one she had taken from the rental house a few days before.
She was startled by the sound of her door opening, and she turned to see Verity, now in Lady Lockwood–approved attire of a blue flannel wrapper, lugging in a folded cot.
“I don’t care what you say. I’m sleeping here tonight,” Verity said pugnaciously as she set down the cot and faced Annabeth, arms crossed. “Lady Lockwood ordered it. So if you don’t want me in here, I’ll make my bed across your doorway in the hall.”
Annabeth nodded. Frankly, after tonight’s adventure, she would prefer to have Verity sleeping here. Somewhat stiffly, she said, “Thank you for coming to help me. Were you sleeping on that window seat?”
“Trying to.” Verity gave her the quick, infectious grin that made it so easy to like her. She came over to stand by Annabeth and gazed down at the trunk, her hands fisted on her hips. “What are you looking at that for?”
“Clearly the intruder was rummaging through it. I wasn’t sleeping with papers strewed about the floor. And that—” Annabeth pointed at the glass paperweight “—was probably what made the thud that awakened me.”
“Did they take anything?” Verity asked.
Annabeth sifted through the odds and ends and letters, running her fingers over one of her father’s small clever wooden boxes. “I don’t believe so.”
Annabeth reached into the box and pulled out a very poorly knit mitten, misshapen and marked with holes where a stitch had been dropped.
“I can see why he gave up knitting,” Verity said with a small smile.
“It was one of my first childish attempts at knitting.” Annabeth tightened her fist around it, her eyes dampening at the thought that her father had kept the thing.
“I figured. I was just trying to get a smile out of you. I can tell by the tears that I’m doing a bang-up job.”
“Logically I know it’s been five years since he died, but sometimes it feels as if it was just yesterday. Whatever my father’s faults—and I can admit that he had several—he was a kind and loving father, and I adored him.”
“That can make up for a lot.” Verity nodded.
“He might have been careless and irresponsible, his head stuck in the clouds, as Lady Lockwood is fond of pointing out, but what I remember was his smile, his tolerance, his sense of fun and curiosity.”
“I can’t say I have too much firsthand experience with good dads.” Verity moved over to her cot and slid a blade under her thin pillow. “But it sounds like he was one.”
Annabeth noted the weapon. “You must be a less restless sleeper than I. I’d wake up missing an eye if I did that.”
“I doubt I will be getting much sleep at all. As impregnable as Lady Lockwood thinks this house is, Sloane and I assumed there was a chance the intruder might try again.”
Annabeth felt the same stab of curiosity, the insistent hunger to know about Sloane and Verity. It was foolish. It made no difference. Yet somehow she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “You and Sloane seem to know each other well.”
“Yes,” Verity said, fondness in her voice. “We worked together a good deal.”
“Were you, um, more than—when you said you were together, did you mean—” She stopped, unable to complete her sentence.
“Are you asking if we were ever in a...romantic relationship?” Verity asked with a suggestive raise of her eyebrow.
Annabeth blushed and nodded her head. “I’m sorry, that’s too personal. I shouldn’t—”
“No, we weren’t,” Verity said. “That’s not to say I didn’t think about it once or twice early on—he’s a very good-looking man—but he was obviously still in love with you. He talked about you enough. And I have never had much interest in men that are interested in someone else. It’s not a good idea, anyway, to get too attached to someone in the network. We were friends and colleagues, that’s all. He saved my life once, and another time I broke him out of jail.”
“You did?” Annabeth’s eyes widened. “How?”
Verity looked up soulfully at an invisible person, clasping her hands together prayerfully beneath her chin. “Oh, sir, please, he’s my brother. I can’t bear not to see him...one last time.” She dabbed artistically at her eye and sniffed. Relaxing, she grinned. “It sounds better in French.”
Annabeth couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re very good at getting people to like you.”
“I don’t think your man would agree.” The idea didn’t seem to bother Verity much.
“Sloane’s not my—oh. Nathan? To be fair, he probably would like you more if you weren’t rude to him.”
“Me? Rude?” Verity retorted, sauciness on full display.
“Most people like Nathan.”
“He’s a very agreeable man,” Verity admitted. “Too agreeable, really.”
“How can one be too agreeable?” Annabeth asked.
Verity scoffed in response.
“Well, he’s certainly not Sloane,” Annabeth said. “Which is a good thing.”
“Is it?”
Annabeth didn’t have an answer.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SLOANE ARRIVED AT Lady Lockwood’s house the next morning so early that Annabeth was still at breakfast. The butler had tried to announce him, but Sloane had followed on the man’s heels in his usual manner, so that he was in the doorway of the dining room before Cartwell could get his name.
“I’m sorry, miss,” the butler said, with a disapproving look at Sloane, “but he would not wait in the entry.”
“It’s all right, Cartwell. You may go.” Annabeth rose to face Sloane. “I see that your manners haven’t improved over the years.”
“Probably not,” Sloane agreed. He glanced around. “Have I managed to catch you without all your retinue?”
“Grandmother rarely appears before eleven, and of course Nathan, being a gentleman, calls on us at an appropriate time in the afternoon.”
“Ooh—direct shot.” Sloane winced and laid a hand against his chest, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. And for a moment, he looked so much like the boy Annabeth had known that it made her throat tighten.
She turned away to conceal her expression, and went to the teapot on the sideboard. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
There was a moment of hesitation, then he said, “Yes, thank you. That would be nice.” He sat down across the table from her.
“Breakfast?” Annabeth asked, going back to her seat and stretching across the table to set the cup in front of him, carefully avoiding getting too close. The glint in his eye told her he knew exactly what she was doing.
“I’m not going to attack you, you know. You needn’t stay three feet away from me.”
“Of course not. I know that.”
“Then it’s yourself you don’t trust around me?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“I’m not sure if you’re trying to flirt with me or annoy me, but I have no interest in bantering with you,” Annabeth said firmly. She looked straight into his eyes. “We are not what we used to be to each other, Sloane. We aren’t even friends. We simply have a common goal, and I suggest we stick to achieving that.”
He shrugged, his face devoid of expression. “Where is Verity?”
“I’ve no idea. I have not seen her this morning. Miss Cole and I are not bosom friends.”
“Mmm-hmm. I suppose not.” He paused, then said, “Don’t be too hard on her, Anna. I don’t think she ever meant any harm, and she’ll be protection for you when I’m not here.”
Annabeth started to point out that Verity had failed to keep out an intruder last night, but she stopped. The less Sloane knew about the break-in, the better. He would start haranguing her once again about leaving the city.
“Then let’s look at the boxes. I presume that’s why you’re here.” She stood up. “I’ll get them.”
Annabeth rather wondered where Verity had gone. Annabeth would have preferred not to be alone with Sloane, but she knew they would work better without Verity or Nathan there. The two of them would only add to the sniping, and Annabeth would worry about whether Nathan might be hurt or jealous.
She returned a few minutes later with her own three boxes from her father. Last night she had opened the secret drawer of the largest box and taken out the pressed flower that was her last remaining memento of Sloane’s, as well as all the other odds and ends she kept openly in the chest.
“This is the box that was in the trunk we removed from the rental house,” she told him, handing him the small puzzle box. “I’ve not opened it before. These two are mine.”
While Sloane set to work on the sliding pieces of the puzzle box, Annabeth opened the secret compartments of both the others. They were empty, as she already knew they were, and so was the puzzle box when Sloane shifted the various pieces in the correct order.
“Well, I didn’t really expect it to be in one of yours, otherwise you would have opened it long ago. Nor really in one that he had left where anyone might take it. The most likely place is one of Hunter’s secret storage places in his home.”
“Let’s go there,” Annabeth replied.
“Without a chaperone?” Sloane widened his eyes in mock horror. “Lady Lockwood would protest.”
“Then we’d better leave quickly, before she comes down, hadn’t we?” Despite her calm tone, Annabeth’s heart sped up. She wasn’t sure whether it was in panic or excitement.
He grinned and turned to go, reaching out to take her arm in the way he had in the past. His fingers were warm against her bare skin, the touch at once so familiar and so surprising that she sucked in a breath. Sloane glanced at her and hastily dropped his hand.
“I must change,” Annabeth said, stepping back abruptly, then hurried up to her room. There, she quickly changed into a walking dress of light green that complemented her eyes—not that that mattered. It was simply her favorite. Adding her newest hat and a pelisse of a slightly darker blue, she went back downstairs.
Outside, Sloane gave her a hand to step up into the hackney. It was a small vehicle with only a single bench seat. Sloane took up more space than Annabeth thought was warranted, but she wasn’t about to let him know that his closeness bothered her. She would be aloof. Cool. They were no longer anything to one another. She was not going to let him rattle her or stir her emotions.
Still, she found it a bit annoying that he made no more effort to talk on the trip than she did. One would think he might say something. He might explain himself and his actions, might even apologize for having deceived her. Not that anything he said would change what she thought of him. How she felt about him.
However, as soon as they left the carriage and stepped into what had once been her home, the past all around her, she could not hold her tongue any longer. “Why did you not tell me?”
“Not tell you what?” Sloane closed the door behind them, keeping his eyes on his hand as he turned the key in the lock.
“You know perfectly well what. Why did you not tell me that you were working for our government, not the French? That you weren’t a traitor.”
“I told you yesterday. It defeated the purpose if I told people,” he replied, still not looking at her.
“I thought I was something more to you than just ‘people.’” Her voice thickened.
Sloane turned to her then, his blue eyes bright with emotion. “Of course you were more to me. More to me than anyone else. I loved you. You must know that.”
“No, I don’t know that. I feel as though I never really knew you. If you hid such an important thing from me, what else did you hide? Which of your words were true? What vows did you mean?”
“I didn’t lie to you.” His eyes burned into hers, and he moved closer.
As it always had, Sloane’s gaze went all through Annabeth, dancing along her nerves and flooding her chest, making her forget what she wanted to say. He had always won their arguments because when he looked at her that way, she could think of nothing else.
But not anymore. She ignored the pulse that leaped in her and the breath that quickened—the remembered pain made that easier—and said, “Not telling me is the same as lying. Letting me wonder what I had done, why you turned away from me, examining everything we’d done and said for some clue to the answer—it was cruel.”
“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world...” It was there in his face, the remorse and the pain. He reached out and gently cupped her cheek. For one aching moment, she thought he was about to kiss her, and she yearned to feel it.
Annabeth took a quick, jerky step back. “Yet you did.”
Sloane let out a breath and moved back, as if he, too, had been caught in that moment of closeness. His expression settled into its more recent cynical lines, and the hunger and regret were leached from his voice. “It would have been dangerous for you to know. My very existence depended on secrecy. Not just my life, but the lives of others.”
“You didn’t trust me.”
“Of course I trusted you. But no matter how little you said, how well you pretended, you would have looked different, acted differently, because deep down, you would have known the truth. It could have created doubt. Suspicion.”
Annabeth felt cold, then hot. “So my heart was sacrificed to create an illusion.”
For an instant, heat flashed in his eyes, then it was gone. He gave a little shrug. “I suppose, if you want to look at it that way.”
“I don’t want to look at it any way,” Annabeth retorted. “I just want all this over with. I want my life back. So I suggest we find this document as quickly as we can.”
She whirled and strode off. She went first to what had been her father’s study, where bookshelves that were set into the wall opened when she flipped up a carved decoration and pressed the small button beneath. Inside the wall was an empty cabinet.
“Clever.” Sloane ran his finger over the nearly invisible seam that separated the rosette from the rest of the wood.
“I don’t think we’ll find anything. I went through all the hiding places when we first moved out of the house,” Annabeth said, forcing a businesslike tone.
“And what if you didn’t know where all of them were?” Sloane pointed out. “Perhaps your father kept a secret place hidden even from you.”
“It’s possible,” Annabeth said doubtfully. “I suppose we’ll have to examine everything with an eye to that.” She didn’t like the thought. It meant more time being alone here with Sloane.
