Chapter 16 #3
“I understand their fascination with shiny things,” he said dryly, “probably more thoroughly than I should.”
She held the envelope in her hands and looked at it as if she wasn’t at all sure what to do with it.
“Want me to open it for you?”
She held it out without hesitation.
“I wasn’t serious,” he said quickly. “You open it. They’re your funds.”
She took a deep breath, then with trembling hands carefully broke the seal. He watched her unfold the paper, freeze, then drop it. He picked it up and handed it back to her.
“Well?” he asked.
She laughed a little in a particularly unhinged way. “Fifty thousand pounds. He’s transferring fifty thousand pounds into my account.”
He whistled softly. “He’s very grateful. What are the details?”
“I hadn’t dared look at those.” She scanned the page, then her mouth fell open. “He gave me your fee—but he can’t do that.”
“I didn’t find the lace; you did,” Derrick said seriously. “Of course you should have it.”
She looked at him quickly. “But I couldn’t take it.”
“Well, don’t look at me,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I’m not about to pull it out of your account.”
“But you need to eat, too.”
He didn’t suppose the moment had come to tell her that he had a cool ￡50 million sitting partly in Switzerland and partly in other places, and that was just his fallback savings.
He had triple that in other investments.
The sensation of having someone worry about how he would feed himself was so novel, he thought he might like to enjoy it a bit.
“You can buy me breakfast tomorrow.”
“I can’t—”
“Buy me breakfast?”
“I can’t take your money!” She clapped her hand over her mouth, then looked at him, wide-eyed. “Sorry. I’m not usually a shouter.”
“I think, Miss Drummond, that if anyone had cause to shout, at the moment, it’s you.” He smiled. “Think you can sketch some roses now?”
“I think I can have a nervous breakdown now.” She looked at him and her eyes were full of tears. “I can’t take this.”
He didn’t think his shoulder would hold up to putting his arm around her, so he settled for patting her back. “Samantha, you’ll offend him if you don’t take it. Truly.”
“But maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You’ll really offend him if you tell him that.” He pointed at the symbol drawn next to the ledger entry that gave her Cameron Antiquities’s fee. “That wasn’t drawn by a man not in his right mind.”
“It’s a smiley face.”
“It’s a smirky face. There’s a difference. I think he suspects I may have caused you grief.”
“You’re paying handsomely for the privilege.”
“Happily,” he said, quite happily. “Now, hand me a page from your sketchbook and a pencil, if you would, and let’s see who draws the better rose.” He shot her a look. “Unless you’re afraid.”
She wasn’t smiling. “I’m always afraid.”
He felt his smile fade. “And that, Samantha Drummond, is something you should rethink. You outlasted thugs, braved Elizabethan England, and kept me from dying—”
“Sunny kept you from dying.”
“You kept me from drowning in drool,” he said dryly. “And you also held my nose while she poured her foul brew down my throat. Just think about that. I could have bitten your fingers off.”
“You were supposed to be unconscious.”
“That damned stuff she makes could leave a corpse sitting up in protest,” he grumbled, then he shot her a smile. “Don’t be afraid anymore. You have buckets of money in the bank and your whole life ahead of you. What have you to be afraid of?”
She took a deep breath. “I am afraid,” she said slowly, “that I won’t be good at what I really want to do.”
It was amazing, he thought, how it was possible to be sitting in a lovely garden on a not-uncomfortable bench and feel as if one had just been kicked in the stomach by an enthusiastic young stallion.
Goat, horse, yob: he wasn’t sure what species had almost knocked him off his perch.
He supposed it didn’t matter. All he knew was that he understood how she felt.
He had faced that fear with all the bravado of a young man and . . .
Well, not even a matched set of wild horses would induce him to discuss the details.
“I am not the one to give advice,” he said grimly, “but I don’t think art has to be perfect. We could try something easier than roses. Look, there are a few topiaries over there. I think I might manage the one that looks like a hedge.”
“That is a hedge.”
“Fancy that.”
She looked at him. “You’re nuts.”
“Quite probably,” he agreed. “Let’s go examine the fauna more closely and see what we can manage of it.”
She blinked rapidly a time or two, then nodded.
She put the paper back into the envelope and the envelope back into her bag.
Derrick supposed he wouldn’t need to thank the earl, but he likely would drop him a note later, because he had decent manners in spite of himself.
The man had been very generous. He could have called it good at half that and simply counted it as Derrick’s fee.
It was, he had to admit, somewhat reassuring to know there was still some good to be found in the world.