“Oy now, we aren’t ’is men,” one complained.
“And we was protecting the women from your men. They was about to break the windows themselves. We was just helping out. Not our fault they shot first and we had to shoot back.”
Eliza’s hissed exhalation at his back was the last thing he wanted to hear. Actually the last thing he wanted to hear was the men telling the truth about what happened that day. He kicked himself that he’d brought the fiasco up.
“What are they talking about, Darius?”
“They are mistaken in their recounting of the facts,” he tried to tell her over his shoulder while his real enemy lay like vipers before him.
“What were your men doing that close to the house? They were there within seconds after the last shot…”
He could practically hear the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, see it in her eyes when he turned to face her, leaving his back unprotected.
She didn’t let him get a word in but he thanked God her voice remained low when she fired accusations at him. “It was you. You forced us into your home by making ours uninhabitable.”
He shook his head. “It was already uninhabitable and that’s not what happened. I wasn’t even there.”
“Someone could have been killed. I could have been killed. Did my dowry mean that much to you that you would use trickery to get me into your home, into your bed? I could have… We could have… Oh my God.”
The emotions she felt, one by one, were displayed in her big blue eyes, eyes that now glistened with moisture as the realisation that he’d duped her in the worst way sank in.
“We didn’t have a choice, Eliza. You needed a roof over your head and yes, damn it, I needed your money.”
Her gaze, piercing and direct, came like a stabbing blow. When she met his eyes, betrayal lingered behind a fierce determination. “And now you have it. What now, Darius? I’m sick of the lies and subterfuge, of the worry. What happens now?”
*
Her voice rose on the last four syllables while her heart cracked and fell to pieces.
Eliza had started the mess that their lives had become when she’d forged the names on her father’s final letters, when she’d forged the documents promising her to Deklin Montrose rather than her sister just to buy them a few months’ grace with their heftiest creditor. Darius had been the one to force the issue after she had rejected him. Darius had been the one to call every single shot since then. He arranged the vicar. He saw to it that they were married before she’d had a chance to second-guess a thing.
But she was the one who went to him nights after their hasty wedding. She was the one who had made sure their union had been consummated so he couldn’t take her dowry and leave them behind with the shame of an annulment. She was the one who had enjoyed and even begged for everything that had happened since. She was the one who at that moment might be carrying a baby born of deceit while her family were taken away from her.
She was the one who would once again be forced into action or be left picking up the pieces.
“Darius didn’t kill our father.” She spoke the words in a loud voice, a voice that carried like the sound of thunder on the howling wind.
“Don’t do this,” her husband hissed at her. “They have nothing to go on. Don’t give them anything they can use against us.”
“You’ve done your part,” came her final reply as she stepped around him and approached Sir Percival. “My lord, our father died from natural causes in his sleep.”
“Why didn’t you report it as you only moments ago claimed you would?”
She’d forgotten that part. “We were scared. We thought our guardians the vilest of criminals and that we would be far safer to keep the secret and claim the offered protection of our neighbour, the Earl of Wickham’s own son.”
Sir Percival clearly weighed her words and counted his time before answering. “It is a crime to hide the death of a lord of the realm.”
“That was my idea,” Nathanial yelled out, furthering the lies. When would it ever end?
Percival regarded her brother with severity before his eyes softened a touch. “Why would you do it?”
Nathanial put everything he had into his acting skills as he dropped his gaze and kicked a toe across the gravel. “I was ashamed of the state of our affairs and didn’t want anyone to know just how badly my father had left us when he died. Our house was falling in and we had no funds to speak of, not even to pay for funeral rites. As Eliza said, we feared our guardians would do more harm to our already ruined prospects.”
“You can’t possibly think to believe all this rot and pigswill,” Wickham yelled, coming forward with menace aimed right at Darius. “They are protecting the pirate. He needs to be hanged for his crimes against England.”
While Eliza hated what Darius had done, how he had manipulated her, she hated the idea of him hanging for a crime he did not commit even more. “Darius only came to our area three weeks past, my lord. Our father had already been dead long before that. If Harold did indeed see our father’s body, then he can attest to how long he might have been in the dirt.”
Wickham drew breath to spew yet more accusation but Sir Percival held his hand up to stop any more arguments. Eliza saw Darius’s glare on his father and then felt it when inflicted upon her. Sir Percival said, “There are too many lies here, even a deaf man could hear the flaws
