Chapter Eleven #2
Furthermore, it seemed to her that Maximilian was going to behave exactly the way Ernest had—he wanted money, sacks of it, for his spending habits, which in Ernest’s case meant gambling, and Emmeline had learned quickly early in their marriage to hide money from him.
If he knew where the money was, he would take it, so she hid it all over the keep in small increments.
The larger coffers—and they were literally chests filled with coin—were strategically hidden away in the stores in the lower level of the keep.
Thousands of pounds were camouflaged alongside barrels of turnips, sacks of carrots, and other stores.
There was no way to get to them without weeding through a thousand boxes, barrels, and sacks.
Only a few people in the keep knew they were there.
The cook and the kitchen servants knew. Adonis and Pierre knew.
Emmeline’s maid knew, but the woman was old and hard of hearing, and when Ernest had demanded money, she’d pretended she didn’t hear him.
Ernest would find the sacks of money around the keep, and that kept him from searching for the larger stores of it.
Like a child, in a sense, he’d been baited away.
Emmeline hoped that Maximilian was just as easily satisfied.
She had hinted to Addax that the sack of coins Maximilian took from the solar on the day he arrived wasn’t all there was.
Even if Addax was Maximilian’s friend—and he’d made it clear that their friendship superseded anything Emmeline and he had built—she trusted him not to tell Maximilian.
She knew that Addax was well aware of Maximilian’s frivolous nature.
She’d gotten that sense from him quickly.
Another person to hide the money from was the Earl of Bretherdale himself, a man who had asked about it before leaving that morning to go home with Essien as his escort.
With both Maximilian and his father gone, Emmeline felt as if she could breathe again.
She was home, her new husband and his father had departed, and she was free once again.
Sort of.
There was Addax.
He was, perhaps, the biggest factor of all.
A man who had been by her side since the moment she was introduced to Maximilian.
He was the one who had stepped in to talk to her, to get to know her, but that was purely out of necessity, considering how Maximilian had behaved.
He’d been easy to get along with, and he got on very well with Maximilian, which hadn’t gone unnoticed by Emmeline.
In fact, on the day of their arrival back to Alston Castle, Emmeline had spent nearly the entire day wondering if the situation between her and Maximilian wasn’t somehow her fault.
Perhaps she had done something that had caused Maximilian to ignore her.
Perhaps she had given off a mood that was a deterrent to her new husband, so perhaps all of this had been her fault from the beginning.
He’d told her he’d liked blondes and not brunettes, and he’d told her that he liked his women younger.
That had immediately put her on her guard.
Perhaps she could have tried to change his mind, but the effort didn’t seem worth it. If she had to pretend to be something she wasn’t, or lure a man in as if she was second best against what he wanted, then he wasn’t worth it at all. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Maximilian had been the cause of it all.
Ever since she had married the man, all she had done was analyze the situation and rationalize it.
She’d wept over it and, in a fit of momentary madness, even tried to kill herself.
But that wasn’t who she was—that didn’t define her character—and she finally came to the conclusion that she was going to treat her new husband exactly the same way he was treating her.
With indifference and a lack of respect.
They were married, and she could do nothing about that, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.
Or him. She simply could not believe that a man like Addax, who was kind and thoughtful and insightful, could be friends with someone like Maximilian.
It was a mystery.
But one thing that wasn’t a mystery was Addax himself.
She’d come to the conclusion over the past couple of days that she would have given up all of Alston’s treasure if it had been Addax she married and not Maximilian.
In her view, Addax was perfect. He listened to her when she spoke, he respected her opinion, he was thoughtful to her wishes, and he was kind when she needed it.
She thought perhaps that she felt an attachment to him because he’d fished her out of the river on that dark and icy night, but she realized that she would have felt attached to him regardless of his heroic actions.
Not only was he handsome and beautifully built, but he had dark eyes that glittered at her in a way that made her feel giddy and warm.
Those dark eyes reached into her soul and touched places that no man had ever touched.
Was she infatuated with him? Without a doubt.
… But was she feeling more?
She was terrified to face that answer.
So, Emmeline went back to her usual duties now that they had returned to Alston and ignored what she might, or might not, be feeling for a man who was not her husband.
Addax spent his time with Adonis, learning about the castle’s function and the mining operations, something that he could explain to Maximilian, because Emmeline certainly didn’t want to.
She managed the records of sales and production, and she handled the money, and she knew that at some point she was going to have to explain it to her husband, but she’d made a decision early on that she wasn’t going to tell him everything.
She was only going to tell him what he needed to know.
If he was anything like Ernest, he would only be concerned with the end result—the money.
Ernest had left her alone to do what she needed to do, and she wanted Maximilian to do the same thing.
What she wanted was control.
And she was going to have it.
Seated at the enormous table that had been shipped all the way from Spain by Ernest’s father, she could see the bailey from where she was seated.
That meant she could also see the northeast tower that soared seven stories above the land.
She saw when Adonis and Addax went into the tower, no doubt to survey the landscape, and she clearly saw when Addax came shooting out of the tower as if the devil was chasing him.
She had to grin because she knew the stairs up to the top level were narrow and treacherous, only for the strong of heart.
Addax could win a tournament and defeat men like William de Wolfe, but perhaps those treacherous stairs were more than his bravery was willing to bear.
That brought a giggle.
Emmeline had been working on the production quotas for the coming month, but she set her quill down to watch Addax and Adonis on the wall walk in conversation.
Emmeline liked Adonis, but she looked upon him more like a brother, and in years past, he had hoped that she might look upon him more as a lover.
Ernest certainly had no interest in her, as young and beautiful as she was, but that didn’t stop Adonis from pining after her for a few years.
When he realized that his attention was unrequited, he simply resigned himself to working alongside the beautiful woman that he greatly admired.
Emmeline’s smile faded as she thought on Adonis and Pierre and how their lives might change if Maximilian decided he no longer wanted the father and the son to serve Alston.
The two had, of course, sworn fealty to the House of de Witt, and that meant staying with Lady de Witt after her husband passed away, so the truth was that they were sworn to the family and not to the castle itself.
They handled so much of the mining operations between the two of them that Emmeline sincerely hoped Maximilian would not send them away.
She was determined to do her best to make sure he did not.
Even if she did not want Adonis for a lover, that didn’t mean she wanted to see the man cast aside.
He’d earned his right to stay.
Emmeline watched Adonis and Addax for quite some time as they conversed upon the wall walk before she finally picked up her quill again and went back to her figures.
There was a silversmith guild in Manchester who made a large purchase of ore every year, and they were coming upon that purchase again.
Ernest had insisted on negotiating the price, even if he didn’t have any other inclination to administer the business, and Emmeline knew that the past three years had seen the prices increasingly raised.
Their mines produced good ore, and she didn’t want to see the silversmiths go anywhere else to purchase their raw material because she was afraid their displeasure in the Alston ore would get around, and it might make it difficult for her to sell to other guilds.
Just as she pondered sending the silversmith guild a missive telling them that she was going to be reducing the price per ton, someone knocked softly on the solar door.
“Come,” she said.
The panel, carved from a dark slab of oak, swung open on brass hinges to reveal Addax standing in the doorway. When Emmeline looked up and saw him, her heart leapt with joy. With a smile on her face, she set the quill down.
“Tell me something,” she said.
He came into the chamber, those dark eyes glittering at her. “Anything you wish.”
“Did you not enjoy the view from our tallest tower?”
He looked at her frowning, before turning to the oriel window and realizing she had a perfect view of the tower. Knowing his fear of heights had been discovered, he shook his head vehemently.