19 #2
“And yet you have come here to warn us,” Sylvia mused, plucking a biscuit from the tea tray. Before she could bite it, however, she glanced at Oliver and said, “Oh, but where are my manners? Do you wish for refreshments, Mr. Beckett?”
Was that a quirk of reluctant amusement on his lips? It was there and gone before Iris could fully comprehend it.
“No, thank you.”
“As you wish. Now, where was I?”
“You asked Oliver why he has come to warn us,” Iris said in a near whisper. Before Sylvia could renew her question, Iris turned to him. “Why did you come here to warn us? Or is this the beginning of your punishment of me?”
“Punishment of you?” Pain laced his voice, his hands gripping so tightly to the arms of his chair the knuckles showed white. “Do you actually believe me to be the kind of man who would punish you?”
He shook his head sharply. “But we are getting off course. The reason I am here is I fear for your safety. You need to leave for London, at once, before he sets someone besides me to deal with you.”
Iris gaped at him. From the silence in the room, she rather thought the other women were gaping at him as well.
“You would protect me?” Iris finally managed. “After I have deceived you? Are you not furious at me?”
“No matter my thoughts on your deception,” he replied tightly, “that does not mean I wish to see harm come to you.”
Why, she wondered as she gazed at him, was her vision suddenly becoming blurry?
She had impeccable eyesight, after all. She had her answer a moment later as her vision suddenly cleared and the warmth of tears tracked down her cheeks.
“Oh.” She sniffled loudly, accepting the handkerchief Euphemia passed her.
But Oliver looked highly uncomfortable. He squirmed in his seat, glaring at the rug. “Don’t read too much into it.”
“Oh, we won’t,” Sylvia drawled.
A bright flush stained his cheeks, but he chose to ignore the comment. “Return to London at once,” he said, tensing as if to stand.
Until Iris spoke. “I’m not leaving,” she declared around her tears, those pesky things that would insist on falling. “I’m staying right here until after the exhibition, no matter what Lord Durand has planned for me.”
The damned stubborn woman. Oliver fell back in his seat, feeling agonizingly helpless in the face of her tearful determination.
He gripped tighter to the arms of the chair to prevent himself from dragging her into his embrace, the same heartrending urge he’d been fighting against since sitting down with these maddening women.
“You have to,” he gritted, “for your own safety.”
“If I cared for my safety, do you think I would have begun this whole thing in the first place?”
“Perhaps,” Lady Vastkern interjected gently, “Mr. Beckett is not aware of just what it is you’re fighting for, dearest. Why don’t you tell him?”
“Yes, of course.” Iris sniffled loudly again, rubbing at her cheeks and nose with the handkerchief before, taking a deep breath, she turned the full force of her gaze on him.
One that was even more bewitching than before, with eyes made luminous by her tears and a rosy hue added to her cheeks and the tip of her nose.
“Lord Durand stole my mother’s life’s work,” she blurted.
Which was just what the earl had said she would claim.
He had distrusted Lord Durand when he’d declared that, yet he completely and totally trusted Iris when she said it.
Which meant he was probably the stupidest, most foolish man in existence, especially after receiving proof that she’d deceived him.
Oliver, you fucking idiot.
Lady Vastkern chose that moment to stand.
“Perhaps we’d best give Iris and Mr. Beckett some privacy,” she said softly.
Then, Mrs. Finch and Mrs. Blount following her, she sailed from the room.
Leaving him and Iris alone. Preferable, really.
He had far too many emotions churning within for him to be at all comfortable in company.
Though having her alone was making it infinitely more difficult to keep from reaching for her.
He dug his fingernails into the wood of the chair’s arms for good measure, as if he could anchor himself in place.
“Tell me everything,” he finally managed.
She took a steadying breath, fingers picking relentlessly at the canvas cuff he had made for her.
Something that pleased him to a ridiculous degree.
Tamping down on that unwelcome emotion—it made him remember all too clearly how much he had come to care for her—he put his whole focus on what she was about to say.
Finally, she began. “My mother was a botanist, as you recall.” At his nod she continued.
“She spent the past decade or more of her life pouring her heart and soul into one very particular experiment: crossing Jacobaea vulgaris with the common daisy. Just before she was set to prepare her findings for publication, she unexpectedly died. A week later, while I was sleeping in my bed, someone stole her work and burned our home to the ground.”
A chill pierced his heart at the thought of her, oblivious in her bed, still mourning her mother while someone purposely set fire to her home right beneath her.
She could have been hurt or even killed.
He dug his fist into his thigh, an attempt to control the fear and fury coursing through him.
Ridiculous, as this had all occurred years ago, well before he had met her.
That logic, however, did little to calm his emotions.
She blinked rapidly, as if staving off more tears, and continued.
“I did not know at the time who had done such a heinous act. We searched for months with nary a trace of them. By then the trail had gone cold and we knew there was little, if any, chance that we would ever learn who had been behind it. Even worse, I knew that the world would forever remain ignorant of how utterly brilliant my mother was.”
Suddenly her face transformed, turning hard.
It was such a change that his breath stalled.
“And then I overheard that Lord Durand was claiming to have succeeded with the same experiment, utilizing the very same species of plants, with the exact same outcome. It’s not out of the realm of possibilities, of course, that someone else may have succeeded in creating the same hybrid.
It has been half a decade, after all. But Lord Durand has been publicly maligning my mother, claiming she had attempted to steal his work by claiming it for her own. ”
Her eyes burned in her wan face when she looked at him.
“But it is not true, not in the slightest. I was beside her for every failure, every success, every sleepless night. And now the earl is declaring her triumph as his own? No, he stole my mother’s work.
And I am determined to get the proof I need to stop him and protect her legacy. ”
“Dear God,” he whispered. He had never, in all his imaginings, conceived such a story.
And not for even a moment did he doubt it.
Notwithstanding his gut telling him she was not deceiving him, the truth was there in every agonized line of her face, in the tense hunch of her shoulders, in her tightly clasped hands.
Oh yes, her hands were the biggest tell.
She was not picking at the cuff as she would if she were anxious or troubled; both hands were balled into white-knuckled fists, proof of her pain and outrage.
What grief she must have gone through. To lose her mother, the woman she had loved best in the world, and then everything else that had been important to her, all within the span of a week?
And now Durand had publicly slandered her mother, claiming that woman’s work as his own.
If the earl were there, he would have punched him in the face.
Iris wrapped her arms about her midriff, eyes wounded as she stared at him. “I assure you, I am not lying.”
“I know you are not.”
That brought her up short. She blinked, mouth opening in a small oval of disbelief. “You do?”
Oliver ran a hand over his face, suddenly weary to his very bones. “Yes, I believe you.”
“Oh.” She sat silently, eyes tripping about the room as if they could not find purchase. “I—I didn’t expect that.”
“Nor did I,” he muttered to himself. Then, louder, “That does not erase the fact, however, that Lord Durand is a powerful man who wishes to do you harm. And knowing now that he would go so far as to destroy your home to steal your mother’s work, an act that could have easily led to numerous deaths, I cannot begin to imagine what he might do to keep the secret of his theft from getting out.
” He shivered in fear for her at the very thought. “You have to leave Sussex at once.”
She gaped at him before, shaking her head as if to clear it, she jutted her chin mulishly. “I will not. No,” she corrected, face screwing up, “I cannot.”
He exploded out of his seat, unable to contain his agitation a moment longer. “Damn it, Iris, why not?”
But her expression did not falter, that stubborn certainty remaining. “I cannot allow him to destroy my mother’s legacy.”
“Is her legacy more important than your life?” he demanded.
“Yes,” she blurted. Then, drawing in on herself, she looked down to her lap, avoiding his gaze. “It doesn’t matter,” she muttered.
“It matters to me.”
She sucked in a breath but did not look up. Growing desperate, he dropped to his knees before her. She finally looked at him then, eyes wide and shocked in her pale face, and so damned lovely he ached to take her in his arms and forget everything else in the perfect bliss of her embrace.
Instead, he took her hands in his. “Leave Sussex.” Then, the words fairly ripping from his lungs, “I don’t know what I will do if anything happens to you.”
Her fingers convulsed around his. “Oliver,” she whispered, a world of agony in his name.
“Please,” he said, not caring that he had been reduced to begging.
She shook her head helplessly, eyes pleading, as if asking for his understanding. “I can’t. If I leave now, if I turn my back on this and allow him to destroy my mother’s legacy, I will never forgive myself.”
He recognized her unbending determination to do what was right—and what it might cost her.
“I was like that once,” he said low as memory suffocated him.
“I, too, thought it was noble to put everything on the line for my morals, that any suffering was worth seeing justice done.” He took a deep, steadying breath as she continued to stare wide-eyed at him.
He had not spoken of what had happened to another soul, not even his mother.
It was his burden to bear, after all, his mistake that had to be shouldered.
But in that moment, feeling as if he were watching Iris careening wildly toward a cliff with no signs of stopping, he had to say something to make her understand.
“I uncovered proof that several of the other Runners were involved in shady dealings. They were accepting bribes from local businesses, promising to look the other way while the owners engaged in all manner of illegal practices. When I brought these crimes to the attention of my superiors, they ordered me to forget what I had discovered.” He closed his eyes tightly.
“I should have done as they said. I should have kept my nose out of it. I should have?.? .? .” He let out a shaky exhale.
“There are certain people you should not go up against. People in positions of power who can hurt you, and even hurt the ones you love, which is far worse. My superiors made certain I could not find work after I was forced from the Runners. But Durand is infinitely more powerful; God knows what he will do to you.”
Iris gently pulled one of her hands from his grip and cupped his cheek, a comforting warmth.
He opened his eyes with the pitiful hope that she would see reason, only to find no change in her determined expression save for a deep mourning.
“I am sorry you had to go through that, that your goodness was repaid in such a way. But if there’s even the slightest chance that I can bring Lord Durand to justice, I have to do it.
I could not live with myself if I did not.
Just as, I daresay, you couldn’t have if you had taken the safe route back then. ”
The pitiful hope he’d been harboring that she might change course was snuffed in a moment.
Iris would not waver. She would insist on staying in Sussex and following through with her plans, no matter the danger to herself.
Frustration thickened within him, a cloying molasses, nearly choking him.
Forcing himself to take slow, steady breaths, he attempted to calm his racing mind.
Surely there was a way to discourage her from making the same misguided mistakes he had.
There had to be. But to do that, he would have to keep her in his sight, and someplace safe, someplace Lord Durand would never imagine looking for her.
And there was only one place he could think of to do that.
Before he could reconsider, he blurted, “Then stay at my house.”
She gaped at him as if he had completely taken leave of his senses.
And perhaps he had. What the hell was he thinking?
To have this woman, whom he had come to care for and who had deceived him and who was planning to undermine the job he needed for his family’s very existence, stay in his house was likely the stupidest idea he’d ever had in his life.
Yet now that he’d decided on it, he could not let it go.
“Stay at my house with my family and me,” he repeated.
“You can remain hidden there, safe from Lord Durand, until the exhibition.” And he would take that time to convince her to give up her mad scheme.
That, or die trying. Which, he thought as she continued to stare in disbelief at him and he felt the heavy, aching beat of his heart, he just might.