“Oh?” The caleche’s wheels crunched on the dusty road as he wound the horses through the gentle hills toward Amberley House. “Whatever makes you think so?”
“Don’t jest with me. It’s obvious!”
“Aye?” He looked over at her, but she was gazing straight ahead, her bright hair glistening in the slanting late-afternoon sunshine.
“I do believe I’m beginning to understand you.”
“Pray, enlighten me,” he said dryly. “I’ve been struggling to understand myself since childhood.”
She snorted. “You are playing Robin Hood,” she said with that same cocksure confidence that had drawn him to her the first time they’d spoken.
Heart’s wounds, was that but three days ago?
“Only instead of stealing from the rich,” she continued, “you’re robbing the Roundheads, who are no doubt responsible for making most of those children orphans anyway.” She sighed. “I do believe I could love you for this.”
It was his turn to snort. “The fellow you think you see isn’t me at all. I wish I could be that fellow,” he added under his breath.
“Balderdash. It’s well done of you, Trick.”
He shook his head. “My father wanted to build himself a monument, so he spent every shilling he’d ever made on the mansion and abandoned that perfectly good manor house. I wanted to see it put to use, that’s all. Filled with children, as it might have been had he ever cared a whit for his family.”
She turned to him, her heart in her eyes. “That’s why you play the highwayman, then, isn’t it? To pay for the children, since your father spent all his money on the mansion and left you without adequate funds.”
“Not precisely.” He was about to add that he’d turned his father’s illicit enterprise into a prosperous legitimate shipping company, but thought better of it. He didn’t like hiding things from her—especially after how she’d reacted to learning he was a duke—but blast it, his hands were tied.
It was no fault of his he was stuck in this situation. He’d been wracking his brain for a believable excuse to continue playing the highwayman, and she’d just dropped one in his lap. Never mind that he could support Caldwell Manor ten times over. She didn’t have to know that. Not right now, anyway.
“When I tell my brothers—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell them anything. I promised them I’d stop the highway robbery.”
“No, you didn’t. You ducked that issue cleverly.” How very perceptive she was—and how very inconvenient that could prove. “If you stop, the children will suffer, and I couldn’t bear to be responsible for such a thing. I was an orphan, myself.”
“Aye, well, any feeling human being would be sympathetic to their plight.” Trick’s mind raced, scrambling for an alternative, a way to avoid these secrets and lies. But he saw no choice. He’d promised King Charles he wouldn’t breathe a word of the real purpose behind the highwayman ruse.
He sneaked Kendra a guilty glance. She twisted her hands in her lap, and the imported lace fell back from her wrist, leaving it bare. “Why aren’t you wearing the amber bracelet?”
“It doesn’t go with this plain gown.”
He wondered why he found her flip answer so disturbing. “Are you still angry with me for being a duke?”
“I’m not sure what I feel. I don’t like being lied to.” Though she directed those words to the sky, she soon looked back to him. “Did you ever feel abandoned as a child?”
“In a sense,” he said slowly, wishing he and Kendra could go back in time and start over. He didn’t want their relationship ending up like his parents’. “My father took me from my mother when I was five—well, very nearly six, actually. I’d seen him but a few times over the years, and I’d never been more than a dozen miles from our home in Scotland.” The caleche bumped over a particularly rocky stretch of the path, and he reached to steady Kendra. “He took me to France. It was…unpleasant. He wanted me only to further his business dealings.”
“His business dealings?” She subtly shifted away from his touch. “He was a duke, was he not?”
“An impoverished one. He lost everything, including Amberley, helping finance the war. He regained his title and land after the restoration, but there was little money after the war. Not enough for him, anyway. The greedy old boar. Ruthless, too, he was. Not a man one would be proud to claim as a relation.” Trick knew he sounded resentful, but he couldn’t seem to check the bitterness in his tone. This was why he usually avoided the topic. It was wrong to speak ill of the dead.
And he certainly had nothing good to say about Father.
Gingerly, Kendra prompted: “So he rebuilt his fortune?”
Trick nodded. “Trading in spirits, among other things. Madeira was his ticket to riches. Every bottle that graced the tables at the courts—French and English alike—passed through his hands.” He hesitated, then decided to come clean with it. Enough secrets stood between the two of them already. “He was a smuggler.”
She gasped. “A smuggler?”
“Aye. One doesn’t amass a fortune paying import taxes—at least not on the scale that he managed. You can imagine why I chose not to continue his enterprise, though it was highly lucrative.” Since that half-truth caused him no small discomfort, he added, “And as he made me an accomplice in his crimes, you can imagine as well why I felt lost—abandoned—as a child.”
Some small measure of honesty, at least.
“But your mother—”
“She let me go,” he said, the words studiously detached. He would never admit it still hurt inside after all this time. “In eighteen years, she never once tried to reclaim me, or even make contact. In all that time, I haven’t seen so much as one letter.” Crickets chirped as they drove beneath a canopy of trees silhouetted against the cerulean sky. “And besides which, she’s just as bad as he was. I had fond memories of her once, when I was too young to see her for
