18
Better late than never might be true in most instances, but Simon doubted that trite little phrase applied in his case. Not today, anyway.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon before he was released from the local police station. Lord Astonby, the constable told him, was willing to let the matter drop, and he was free to go. He supposed he ought to be grateful for that fact, but given that Delia had surely been fired by now, he couldn’t summon up much gratitude. The news, no doubt, had hit her like a ton of bricks.
He arrived at the Savoy to find things in chaos. There were journalists loitering in the lobby. The concierge was familiar to him only because the man had been the concierge at Claridge’s. A glance in the restaurant showed rushed, unhappy waiters, even more unhappy customers, and a harassed-looking ma?tre d’h?tel who’d also been brought over from Claridge’s, causing Simon to wonder in grim amusement how many Savoy employees had quit or been fired today. When he walked down the corridor to his office, he found a pair of policemen by the door, and Ross and Morgan inside waiting for him, surrounded by crates, trunks, and suitcases.
“My lord,” the two men said in unison as they stood up, clearly relieved by his arrival.
He glanced into the office next door as he came in, and his mood became even darker as he saw that it was empty. No papers untidily strewn across the desk, no piles of letters waiting to be opened, and no Delia.
“Gentlemen,” he greeted, returning his attention to the other two men as he set his dispatch case beside the packed boxes on top of his desk. “Things seemed to have changed a bit since I left this morning.”
The two other men murmured a hearty assent to that assessment of the situation.
“It’s clear we need a new place to live. The question is where.”
“Ivywild, my lord?” Ross suggested.
“Too far. I need to remain in London for now.”
“I could reserve us rooms at another hotel.”
He made a face. “I’m rather soured on living in hotels, to be honest. Find a house to lease here in town. It shouldn’t be too difficult, since it’s only March. In the meantime, put most of these things into storage and reserve us rooms at the Clarendon. Morgan, you’ll help him.”
“Of course, my lord.”
“Good. Now,” he said with a sigh, “I need to find Lady Stratham. I don’t suppose she’s still in the hotel?”
“I doubt it, my lord,” Ross replied. “I heard that Ritz has gone to the Charing Cross Hotel. Escoffier and Echenard, too. But I don’t know about Lady Stratham.”
Morgan gave a cough. “Begging your pardon, my lord, but I saw Molly, the maid who’s been looking after the countess, earlier. She was in the lobby with her ladyship, helping sort the piles of luggage for the bellboys. The girl may know where the countess has gone.”
Molly, he soon discovered, did know Lady Stratham’s whereabouts, for she’d helped the Savoy footmen load the luggage into a cab, and she’d overheard the countess tell the driver to take her to the Bristol.
Twenty minutes later, he was at the Bristol, giving his card to the concierge, and asking if Lady Stratham would be willing to see him. He had no idea what he’d do if she refused, but to his relief, the concierge returned with her consent.
That relief, however, evaporated the moment the door opened and he saw her face.
“You fired me,” she said. Her voice was as flat and cold as a frozen lake, her blue eyes like a northern glacier. “Me, and Ritz, and Escoffier, and Echenard.”
“I didn’t fire you, Delia. May I come in, or shall you make me explain while standing in the corridor?”
For a moment, he thought she would make him do that very thing, but after a moment, she stepped back and allowed him to enter her suite.
“I didn’t fire you,” he said again once she had closed the door behind him.
If he’d hoped to mitigate the damage done to her by repeating that little fact, the look on her face told him he’d failed. “We were dismissed for… hmm… how did the board put it?” She paused, tapping her fingertip against her chin, as if striving to remember. “For ‘forgetting we were servants, rather than masters.’ Yes, that was what they told Ritz this morning. I, however, didn’t merit Richard’s personal consideration, sadly. I got the hotel solicitor instead. Such an honor.”
“Delia,” he began.
“And what else did the board say? Oh, yes, our arrogance led us to the belief that we could ‘use the Savoy as the place from which to carry out our corrupt schemes of fraud, theft, and chicanery.’”
He grimaced. In firing Ritz this morning, Richard had apparently not minced words.
“Well?” she said when he didn’t reply. “Did I get that right?”
“Ritz told you all this, I suppose.”
“He did.” She folded her arms. “I’m curious why you were not the one to do so.”
“I was not aware of what Richard told Ritz when he dismissed him,” he said, stalling, trying to gauge from her icy demeanor how best to soften her enough so that he could explain his side. “I wasn’t there.”
“But those were the reasons discussed at the board meeting?”
“If it’s any consolation, I voted against your termination. Unfortunately, the other board members outvoted me.”
“A piece of news I had to hear about from the Savoy’s solicitor, not from you. Even though you already knew.”
He gave a sigh, helpless to refute that. “Unfortunately, I could not tell you anything, at least not in detail. I am bound by confidentiality agreements not to reveal any discussions of the board. Once the board voted against you, I started back here at once, hoping to arrive before Sir Charles, so that I could be with you when he brought you the news, but I was…” He paused, cursing—not for the first time today—his loss of temper this morning and its devastating results. “I was unavoidably delayed. Be that as it may,” he rushed on, not wanting to get into the weeds with irrelevant details about how he’d ended up in jail, “though Ritz, Escoffier, and Echenard clearly committed fraud, we all know you did not. There was no evidence against you.”
“Well, that’s comforting!” she cried, her face twisting with pain. “Since I was fired just the same.”
“I’m sorry, Delia. You were fired—wrongly, in my opinion—merely because of your close friendship with Ritz. But if you’re afraid any of this will become public knowledge, it won’t. It’s best if the reasons for Ritz’s termination are never known.”
“Best for whom? The Savoy?”
“Best for everyone, including you.”
She scoffed at that. “No one who knows me would ever think I’d steal anything from anyone. It’s absurd. And the idea of Ritz stealing is equally so. Nonetheless, he doesn’t have the luxury of an aristocratic title to protect him, as I do. If the press ever hears of this, his reputation could be ruined by these scurrilous lies before he ever has the chance to prove his innocence.”
“They are not lies, and he is not innocent. And because of that,” he added as she shook her head in vehement disbelief, “you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t cry about the risks to his reputation.”
“You’ve always been against him.”
“Yes,” he shot back. “Yes, I have. Because he’s a thief.”
“Why?” she scoffed. “Because he didn’t pay for some wine?”
“So he told you he’s been taking wine and not paying for it?”
“He said that was the reason for his termination, but it’s absurd. The Savoy has always dispensed wine to favored guests at no charge.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that.”
“Like what?”
He set his jaw, frustrated by the legal and moral constraints that bound him. “I cannot say.”
“I suppose you mean Escoffier’s commissions.”
He blinked, taken aback. “You know about that?”
“Of course I do. I’ve always known.”
He felt a lurch of dismay, but he quelled it, telling himself she didn’t know the whole story. “What do you know, exactly?”
“Escoffier’s reputation is worldwide. The suppliers receive a great deal of gravitas with other hotels because he does business with them, and they are grateful.”
“I see that you share Ritz’s view of things,” he said dryly. “What else do you know? What else did he tell you about today’s events?”
Her eyes narrowed on him accusingly. “Enough to understand that he is being unfairly maligned by his enemies.”
“By enemies, you mean me?”
“I was thinking of Helen,” she said. “But now that you mention it…”
“Does it matter who his enemies are? It doesn’t alter the fact that he and Escoffier have been stealing the Ritz blind, Delia. Given that you know this, I’m amazed you can justify it.”
“It’s not theft!” she cried. “It’s for the good of the hotel. It’s part of the ambience,” she went on as he laughed in disbelief. “Having aristocrats and dignitaries come to the Savoy enhances the hotel’s image and brings in more business. I explained this to you the first day we met.”
“Ah, yes, all part of aristocratic privilege,” he said contemptuously.
“Sneer if you like, but the wine, credit in the restaurant, leeway in payment, have all enabled Ritz to build the Savoy into the greatest hotel in the world. Why should Ritz have to pay for things himself that promote the hotel?”
“And extending credit to his friends who never pay?” he shot back. “Is that promotional, too?”
“They are not friends. They are investors, possible business contacts. How do you think the Savoy got the investors for their new hotel in Rome? Ritz brought them!”
“There’s far more to it than that.”
“Like what?”
He drew a deep breath, knowing he’d already said too much, and the reticence forced upon him felt like more of a stranglehold than ever. “As I explained, I cannot go into details. Suffice it to say that the investigation provided ample evidence that Ritz was abusing his position.”
“Investigation?” She glared at him, the steel in her eyes he knew so well. “You mean the investigation that has been going on for months while you were acting as a front to cover it up? The audits, the cost-cutting measures, the calls for efficiency—that was all just a hum, wasn’t it, to conceal the real purpose, which was to find a way—any way—for Helen to rid the hotel of Ritz, Escoffier, Echenard, and me. She’s always resented us. There were private detectives following us, spying on us. Did you know about that, too?”
“Not you, Delia. No detectives were following you. In fact, they hadn’t even started investigating you.”
“But you knew they would.”
“Yes,” he admitted quietly. “I knew that.”
“And you never told me. And why would you? You thought I was a thief.”
“I thought there was cause for investigation, if that’s what you mean. But I was keeping an open mind.”
“Is that what you call it?” She gave a laugh tinged with unmistakable scorn. “That business in the laundry makes perfect sense now. Did you really believe I would steal wine and free meals and laundry services?”
“I didn’t know for certain. Others were doing it, and I knew it was possible you could be doing it, too. But I finally concluded you were innocent—”
“Well, that was jolly decent of you. Did you come to this conclusion before or after we made love?”
That question hit him like a blow to the chest. “Before, but—”
“Well, it’s good to know that when you declared your love for me, when you held me in your arms and made love to me, you knew I wasn’t a common little thief. It might have been nice, though, if you had told me that I was about to be fired anyway.”
“I didn’t know if that would happen. Nothing was officially decided until the board voted this morning. I tried to mitigate—”
“You know, there was a time after we met when I thought my job might be in jeopardy, but eventually, I dismissed it. You were so moral, I thought. So honest, so upright and honorable, you’d never be so duplicitous. I trusted you, Simon, damn it. And today, I learned how misplaced that trust was.”
He stared at her, wondering how the hell he was ever going to win her back when he could not explain. When he could not give her proof that Ritz, not him, was the villain here.
“I told you things,” she went on. “Intimate things about myself I’ve never told anyone else, not even my own family. I did that because I was sure I could trust you. You could never be, I thought, the sort of man who would keep secrets from a woman, who could lie to her and make love to her at the same time. How wrong I was.” She gave a laugh. “For the fourth time in my life, I’ve been blind to the fact that I’m falling in love with a man who cannot be honest with me. When will I ever learn?”
“Ritz is the one who’s been deceiving you, not me.”
“Ritz isn’t the one who held me in his arms!” she cried. “Ritz isn’t the one who kissed me, made love to me, knowing I was suspected of fraud, knowing I might be fired for it, knowing detectives would soon be following me. Ritz never declared love for me. Ritz never—” She stopped, her lip trembling. “Ritz never broke my heart.”
Her voice wobbled on the last word, a vulnerability that tore him into pieces. “Delia, I couldn’t tell you what was going on. I still can’t. I was a member of the board, and though I’ve since resigned, I am still legally bound to silence.” He could see her face hardening even more against him as he spoke, but he persevered. “I made promises—”
“I don’t give a damn about legal agreements and promises you’ve made to other people. I care about the things you promised me. I came to you last night; I gave myself to you. I declared my love, and you declared yours. Is that not a promise? You lay with me. Is that not a promise? Through it all, I thought I could trust you. I had to learn from someone else how wrong I was.”
“Someone else? Ritz, you mean. It’s plain as day that he has filled your ears with lies about his activities, lies I am not allowed to contradict with proof.”
“Ritz may have lied to me. I don’t know. But you certainly have.”
“I did not lie,” he cut in, glad that on that score, at least, he could defend himself. “I was very careful not to tell you a single thing that was untrue.”
“Lies of omission are still lies!”
“Keeping a secret that is not mine to tell isn’t a lie. I was constrained by promises made before I ever met you.”
“For a man who doesn’t lie, you’re awfully good at deception. How many other secrets are you keeping? And how can I ever know? How can I ever believe you trustworthy?”
“So, if I had broken promises made before I met you, that would make me trustworthy in your eyes?”
“Yes!”
He gave a laugh of disbelief at what he was hearing, but then her eyes narrowed, her pointed chin went up in that way he knew so well, and he appreciated that with every moment that passed, he was digging himself into a deeper hole. Her next words confirmed it.
“I want you to leave.”
“Like hell I will.” He took a step toward her, but her next words stopped him cold.
“Ritz is taking Marie-Louise and the children and moving to Paris next month. Escoffier and Echenard are going with him, and he wants me to come, too. He’s offered me the same post at his hotel there that I’ve had here.”
Cold fear closed around his heart like a fist. Bad enough that he couldn’t offer her the evidence to prove his side. But now, he’d also have the breadth of the English Channel between them to deal with?
He swallowed hard, trying to think past the sick knot in his gut. “Are you taking up his offer?”
Even as he asked the question, he was wondering how Cassie would feel about moving to Paris, and he was wishing, not for the first time, that he’d worked harder on learning proper French as a boy. It was beginning to look as if he might need it.
“Are you taking him up on his offer?” he asked again. “Please, at least tell me that.”
It seemed an eternity before she answered.
“I haven’t decided,” she said at last, and his relief was so great, he felt weak in the knees. “Many details have yet to be worked out. But either way,” she added before he could savor this minor victory, “it has nothing to do with you, since once you leave here, you and I will not be seeing each other again.”
If she had really decided against him, she’d have taken the job, pesky details about it notwithstanding. She was, whether she realized it herself or not, giving him a chance to regain her trust. But he also knew there was only one way to do it.
“If you think I’m giving up, Delia, you couldn’t be more wrong,” he said gently.
She walked to the door and opened it. “Goodbye, Simon.”
He followed her, pausing in the doorway to look at her one more time, to inhale again the luscious scent of her. “This isn’t goodbye,” he told her. “Because you love me, and I love you. And I refuse to believe that this one issue shall divide us forever. I want to marry you, and—”
“Marry?” she cut in with such vehement scorn it made him wince. “I see no reason to marry again, and if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be you. Why should I?”
He met her hostile gaze steadily. “Because I am the right man for you, Delia. I know it, and in proving it, I won’t let anything get in my way, not Ritz, not your god-awful late husbands, not even the damned English Channel.”
With that, he walked out, realizing exactly what he had to do, bracing himself to risk everything he’d spent his life working for, everything he’d fought to prove and protect, including his honor. He just hoped it would be enough.