Page 71 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
“Hardly,” Zander said. “A paint bladder exploded in your face. Hardly my fault you don’t understand art materials. The things are highly volatile. And you did not watch where you were stepping, now did you?” Zander clucked his tongue. “Poor fellow stepped on a canvas carelessly left on the stairs and had a bit of a tumble.”
“Did you perhaps aid in the placement of the canvas?”
“No one can prove it.” His face lost its light, and his hands wrapped around her shoulders. “Hell, Fee, you have to leave.” He turned her and pushed her toward an exit. “This is a bloody nightmare.”
“Not like any nightmare I’ve ever had.” Lord Theodore stood in the door, arms crossed over his chest. With a placid face, he took in every detail of the room before his gaze settled on the man tied to a chair. “Is that… paint?”
“It is.” Zander strode forward, fury in his tight fists. “And have you brought her”—he shoved a finger in Fiona’s direction—“here? Why in hell would you do that, Theo?”
“I have brought her, though she was ordered to remain in the coach.”
“Ordered. Precisely the best way to get her to do what you asked hernotto do.” Zander shoved his fingers through his hair and began to pace the length of the room. “What now?” he said to himself. “What the hell now?”
“Now you’re going to damn well untie me!” the baron bellowed.
“No,” Zander and his brother said together.
Lord Theodore stepped forward to stand before the baron. He pulled the statue from his pocket, still dark with Zander’s blood. “Do you recognize this?”
“I do.” Zander snatched it from his brother’s hand. “He bashed me over the head with it.” He huffed. “At least it lost its cock.” He slammed the statue on the nearest drop-cloth-covered table.
“Why did you violently injure and abduct a marquess’s brother?” Theo asked, his tone hard as rock, sharp as a knife’s edge… dangerous.
“You can’t prove it,” the baron insisted. “My word against his. He’s the one that violently attacked me. And tied me up!”
“In order to escape you,” Zander added with a growl. “I’m taking you back to the coach.” He grasped her arm and steered her toward the door. Where they bumped into the dowager.
“Here you all are,” Lady Balantine said, blinking in the gloomy light. “I’m so glad I found you.”
“What fresh hell?” Zander wove his arm through hers and pulled them both from the room, found a door down the hall and pulled them into it. “Sit.”
Fiona sat in a cloth-covered chair. The room, sparsely furnished, all visible surfaces dusty beneath the gray sunlight flooding through dirty, curtainless windows, seemed ghostly, and it reminded her of the first time Fiona had followed Zander into a house where she’d not been invited. The dowager’s house had also been draped in dust cloths that day. So similar, but so much had changed.
What had not changed was her determination to steer her own future, to be included in the decisions about her life. And he was part of her life now. But… perhaps she’d… missed the mark. She’d come to save her helpless love only to find him rather in control of the situation and terribly angry with her. She tugged on Lady Balantine’s skirts, encouraging her to sit. She didn’t.
Zander pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand and stuffed the other into his pocket. Did he have a trinket there? Something discarded and bent with age, painted with rust? Something he found valuable enough to keep on him and protect during his own abduction?
Finally, he stopped and let his head fall back, his arms collapsing to his sides. “I was trying toprotect you, Fiona.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “The baron thinks I am the forger. Has it in his mind to keep me hidden away in order to make a fortune he seems to have lost. And as long as he thinks I’m the one who can make that happen”—his gaze flew to Fiona’s face—“you are safe. Unfortunately, that state of affairs can last only until I put paint to canvas. I half killed the man in an attempt to get things under control, find some means of bribing him or controlling him. But then in you waltz! The actual forger.” His voice, which had been calm and steady before, turned low as a snake’s hiss with those last three words, which wobbled out of his control. “But I do not intend for him to discover that.”
Fiona’s brain stopped working.
“Herbert… knows?” Lady Balantine sank slowly, clumsily into a nearby chair.
“Yes, he does. It would be nice if you could hold your tongue now and then, Lady Balantine.”
She sniffed. “I realize emotions are running high right now. But that is no reason for rudeness. If you stretch your memory back a bit, you'll remember that I told not a soul for years. Not even when your father—” She snapped her lips together and turned from him.
“My… father? What about him?”
She waved her hand. “Nothing. Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
Now she fell into a chair, her shoulders slumping forward. “I suppose I must tell you now. He’s dead and you’ve come for the paintings. I would have had to tell you eventually.”
“Tell. Me. What?”
She finally met his gaze. “Your father visited me. He knew I had the paintings. I don’t know how. Perhaps he followed you, had you followed. He sat in front of the six paintings you gave me very quietly for a very long time. Then he asked me if he could hide letters in each one.” She swallowed. “They will still be there if my son has not lost them, between the canvas and the frame backing. I was worried he would be angry with me, but he said not a single recriminating thing. Just sat before the paintings. Quiet.”
