“You are shameless.” A blush rose up her neck and suffused her cheeks.
Val looped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his side. “And you are very dear. Shall we go swimming tonight?”
“You are being outrageous. Trying to shock me.”
“Trying to seduce you,” Val corrected her, pulling her in so he could kiss her temple. “Without apparent success, but I’m the patient sort and you won’t be indisposed much longer, will you?”
She shook her head.
He stayed with her for a long while after that, rocking the swing gently, holding her, and watching darkness fall over the garden. When she began to doze against him, he carried her through the darkened cottage to her bed and tucked her in.
Leaving Ellen to wonder as she drifted off to sleep how it was her furniture-merchant neighbor rubbed elbows with not one title but several, and, were she a different kind of widow in a different life, if he’d be courting her—and if she’d be allowing him to.
Val retrieved his horse from the Great Weldon livery, feeling as if his interview with Cheatham had been just the kick in the arse he needed to be completely out of charity with life. He was still disgruntled and puzzled when he returned to the estate at midday.
Darius greeted him on the driveway. “Just in time for lunch.”
Val quirked an eyebrow at his friend, who had foregone cravat and waistcoat in deference to the building heat. “You’re in dishabille.”
“And soon I’ll be romping the day away at the pond in all my naked glory, like our pet savages. What did you learn in that beehive of commercial activity known as Great Weldon?”
“Nothing positive,” Val said, leading Ezekiel to the stables. “The lane looks good.”
“The Ostrogoths about bloodied their paws getting the shells raked out for you. Make it a point to compliment them.”
“I take it they’ve had their meal?” Val put his horse in the cross ties and heaved the saddle off its back. He ignored the familiar pain shooting up his left arm and put the saddle down on its customary rack.
Darius took a seat on the only bench in the barn aisle. “Hand bothering you?”
“Hurts like blazes,” Val said easily, but what he’d learned in town hurt worse. “It was pointed out to me today by the estimable William Cheatham, Esquire, that Ellen FitzEngle has a life estate on that property known as, et cetera, until such time as she dies, remarries, or loses privileges of citizenship, whichever shall first occur, et cetera.”
Darius frowned. “A life estate?”
“Life estate, as in the right to dwell unmolested and undisturbed, free of any interference and so forth, right here, for the rest of her life, with all the blessings attendant thereto.”
“All the blessings?” Darius asked as Val groomed his horse briskly, the brush held firmly in his right hand. “As in the rents?”
“Rents, crops, and benefits not including the right to sell fixtures. This was to be her dower property, Dare. I don’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“Ellen has been collecting the rents here through Cheatham for the past five years, but she has Cheatham put the money into one of the Markham accounts in a London bank. Not a penny of it has gone into the estate.”
“That doesn’t seem in character with a woman who dotes on her own land. Your horse is about to pass out with the pleasure of your efforts.”
Val glanced at Ezekiel, who was indeed giving a heavy-lidded, horsey impression of bliss.
“Hopeless.” Val scratched the horse behind the ears with his right hand. “At least Zeke doesn’t prevaricate on estate matters.”
“Did you ever ask the lady where the money is going?”
“I did not,” Val said, tucking Zeke into a stall. “But you put your finger on the contradiction I couldn’t quite name: Ellen treasures her ground and takes better care of it than some women do their newborn children. It doesn’t make sense she’d let the rest of the estate go to ruin.”
“No sense at all. Maybe she doesn’t have a choice.”
Val fetched a rag to wipe off his bridle and boots. “The deed is clear. I now own the place in fee simple, but she has a life estate. Freddy didn’t lie exactly, he just implied title was held in fee simple absolute when it wasn’t —quite.”
“Ellen’s tenancy, or life estate, is probably a detail to him in the vast whirlwind of empty pleasures constituting his life.” Darius got off his bench and extended a hand to Skunk in the stall next to Ezekiel. “One has to wonder if this is what the previous baron intended.”
Val hung his bridle on a peg and laced the throatlatch around the headstall and reins. “No, one doesn’t. Ellen is to have those rents, the use of the hall, and so forth, but she’s to make improvements, alterations during her life as she sees fit. She wasn’t intended to toil away in a simple cottage, getting her hands literally dirty to earn her daily bread.”
“This bothers you, not just because the place is a wreck but because she isn’t getting her due.”
“It bothers me.” Val took the bench Darius had vacated. “For those reasons but also because she hasn’t told me any of this. I am the new owner and I’ve been here several weeks. If Freddy has Ellen on some sort of reduced stipend, I can certainly set that to rights.”
“And if he has her on no stipend at all?” Darius wondered aloud.
Val sighed, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back while Darius came down beside him. “She’s lied to me, Dare.”
“Not outright. Family situations are complicated, as we both know. She might have her reasons, and things might not be as they seem. Maybe she’s hoarding her rents because she doesn’t trust Freddy, and you can’t blame her for that. Have a talk with her, discuss how matters will go on from here, and clear the air.”
“You’re like her.” Val rose as he spoke. “You have this direct, brisk way of thinking things through that yields simple answers to complicated problems.”
“Maybe the problem isn’t so complicated. Maybe you just need to eat some decent food, talk to the widow, and come to an understanding.”
And Darius, damn the man’s skinny, handsome, genteelly impoverished ass, had been right. With a full belly, Val’s sense of upset had faded to something more manageable, until it occurred to him sabotaging his efforts at the manor might not have been aimed at victimizing him.
In some convoluted way, scaring off the new owner, with his deep pockets, London connections, and titled family, could be a way to further erode what little financial security the widowed baroness had attained at Little Weldon.
In other words, Ellen FitzEngle Markham might have enemies willing to go through Val to bring her harm.
He kept that alarming thought silent and lectured himself sternly about jumping to conclusions, overreacting, and leaping to the worst case. Though his mental lecture lasted the entire time it took him to assist with glazing the new windows on the north side of the house, he was still pondering the possibility when the crews left, dinner with Dare and the boys was a noisy memory, and evening shadows stretched over the terrace.
“Don’t stay out too late,” Darius warned as they stowed the hamper in the springhouse. “The boys have remarked on your late-night wanderings. And your wretched ugly self and your wretched ugly hand are in need of beauty sleep.”
“Yes, Mother.” Val sauntered off toward the woods. “Don’t wait up.”
Val took his time ambling along the bridle path, not sure what he wanted to accomplish on this visit with his neighbor. He wasn’t ready to broach the subject of the rents and her life estate, but he wanted to see her.
Blazing hell, he wanted to bury himself in her body and forget all about rents and life estates—and sore left hands and glaziers and roofing slates and all of it.
But she wasn’t on her porch when he emerged from the trees, and so Val was left with a quandary: Did he knock on her door or take her absence for an indication he wasn’t to impose? Did he come back in half an hour? Lie down on her bed and close his eyes among the pillows and linens that bore the scent of her?
