“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, his voice rumbling through her.
“It certainly doesn’t look very good,” she murmured back.
“A little paint, a new desk and rug, and it will be as good as new. Perhaps better.”
“What really happened here do you think?”
Darius’s shoulders lifted and then his breath warmed her neck as he gave his reply. “Someone was here. We can’t be sure who but it looks as though they rifled through the desk and then either threw the lantern or knocked it over.”
“Is anything missing? Anything valuable?”
Another intake of breath and Eliza wondered if he contemplated lying to her.
Eventually he sighed. “Your father’s papers are either missing or burned.”
“The ones I forged today? Or rather yesterday?”
“Only the original letters are missing. Marcus has the forgeries and left for London this afternoon. The suicide letter. The ones about the debt and you. Those are all gone.”
“What would anyone have to gain by stealing those?”
“What indeed,” he replied but then he took her hand again and led her back up the stairs. “There is nothing else we can do until sunrise. Marcus will return in a few days and then the ship can be fixed within the next week or two.”
She nodded, her body and mind numb to the possibilities. She let Darius slip the robe from her shoulders and put her into the bed. She raised her brows when he didn’t climb in with her.
“I have to go back downstairs. The fire might flare up or the intruder could return. The men and I will stand guard at every window and door for the rest of the night.”
Disappointment filled her when he doused the candle and slipped from the room without a backwards glance. He was worried about his house and she didn’t blame him for it, but she didn’t want to be alone. For the first time in seven years, she had felt complete, no longer lumbered with the responsibility of everyone in her life and everything. For the first time ever, she had felt she had help, a partner. She didn’t want that feeling to end, even though, just like her Christmas wishes, she knew it couldn’t last.
Eliza closed her eyes against the glow of the hearth and willed the rest of the world to damnation.
All she wanted was peace and quiet. She wanted her brothers and sisters to be safe and happy. She wanted to be happy.
Why was that too much to ask?
Chapter Twenty
Eliza wasn’t thinking straight if she hadn’t seen the connection yet to the letters and her father, the risks now that they were missing. But Darius discovered the enormity of the situation early the next morning.
“Cap’n?”
Darius turned towards the door at the sound of his man’s voice. Wes stood half in the burnt-out room and half in the smoke-stained corridor. “What is it? Did you find something?”
His men were supposed to be scouring the grounds for signs of who and how many had dared to breach his home. It was a new and ugly feeling for his grandfather’s house to be violated that way, for his new family to be put in the path of harm. If they were on his ship, the dangers would be minimal and he could breathe easier. If they had been on his ship, this wouldn’t have happened.
“You have a caller.”
A moment’s hesitation as confusion gave way to curiosity. “Who?”
“Harold Meddington. You want me to toss him out on his arse?”
The offer had its merits but Darius had to admit he was slightly intrigued. He had invited his sire to call if he was ever to look for a fight but his cowardly brother visiting by himself was an oddity. Darius wondered if he had come to beg for leniency.
He snorted and dusted his hands off on his trousers. Toffs didn’t beg for anything.
He’d been sifting through the mess that had once been estate ledgers for one of the properties pertaining to the earldom and notes from this man or that, as well as a few journals on animal husbandry. All of it was gone now, reduced to coals or wet beyond salvage, his grandfather’s bold strokes across every page, now bleeding puddles of incoherent ink. Lost.
He needed a break from the smell and soot and melancholy anyway.
Portraying the perfect gentleman, Darius made Harold wait while he changed his clothing and shaved his cheeks. He desperately wanted to know his brother’s business at the house but he also wanted Harold to understand that Darius was in charge and in control. He was no longer a fourteen-year-old youth able to be conked on the head and made to disappear. It was probably his father who had broken into his home the night before and attempted to burn it to the ground with the occupants fast asleep inside. But if it had been Wickham, why wasn’t he there also? Perhaps he was on his way to London to report the duke’s suicide.
The thought had occurred to him several times during the long, restless night.
For the few early morning hours after he’d gone back to bed, he lay there in the dark, the fire taking his mind far away, but then as Eliza had sighed in her sleep next to him, his arm wrapped tight around her, he’d almost laughed such was the happiness inside. Who’d have thought the pirate and then the captain who had run from women for years so he could concentrate on a career and respectability could find such…such… He couldn’t even put a word to it. Completion maybe? Satisfaction definitely.
Losing himself in Eliza had made the horror day full of nightmares
