Page 59 of Lessons for Marquesses
Everyone shared glances. Mr. Wolf started to speak and stared at her head instead.
Clutching his chest, Oliver announced he wouldn’t see forty. “By God, my daughter Cassandra has the same color. If I heard a body call her a Celtic whore —” He struck out a hand to Charlotte for assistance.
“Dear, you have lovely hair,” her aunt said, her brow knitted. “It is so much like your mother’s, you know.”
“George,” Mr. Wolf ventured. “Who told you it was bad?”
Georgiana hesitated. “It gives men ideas. My father?—”
Oliver erupted in a firestorm of curses, all directed squarely at her father. “I have four daughters, not a son among them, and not once did I think to make them a boy.”
Georgiana burned to the tips of her ears. “No one made me a boy. My parents allowed me to be who I am. And my father was a better man than most. Agreatman.”
“He left you sixty thousand in debt!”
Charlotte rose swiftly to Georgiana’s side. “Acomb, you are not helping the situation.”
Shoving his plate forward, fork in hand, Oliver rose up. “I tell you, you are going to wear your hair. You are going to spend the summer with that hair, and by the end of it, it will be your best friend, do you heed me?”
Ready to crawl into a hole,aftershe stabbed her cousin’s eyes out with his fork, Georgiana lowered her voice. “Yes, I heed you.”
Charlotte slipped the wig from her head, tucking a short lock behind Georgiana’s ear. “There. We will arrange it. It will take no effort. It is already quite pretty.”
Georgiana brushed Charlotte away. “I don’t want to be pretty.”
But did she?
Her gaze darted to Mr. Wolf who hadn’t the wherewithal to look away and pretend he wasn’t listening. She looked back to Oliver. “Someone stole my father’s money, you said. My father wouldn’t have lost such a sum, you said. And you, cousin, were to investigate it. Did you?”
She plucked her wig from Charlotte’s hand and walked calmly from the table, certain she would melt into a pool of mortification before she gained her room. But as was the usual case in her recent life, she survived intact, only to be confronted with something far worse: raging panic as she imagined her Celtic whore hair visible to the world.
After hurling the wig to bed, she bent over her knees and gulped for air. Her wig was her armor. Without it, was there a George?
“I hired three men to investigate your father’s losses.”
Georgiana sprang up at Oliver’s voice, her heart nearly flying from her chest. She had left her door open.
Oliver tread slowly toward her, lines she had never seen creasing the corners of his dark eyes. St. Clair eyes, much like her father’s. She had been too occupied by her own plight, too enthralled with Mr. Wolf, to see the worry in them. Or the pallor of his cheeks.
While most people thought it a jest when Oliver claimed he wouldn’t see forty, there was a frightening truth to it. Hisheart had been weakened by a childhood fever. Physicians prescribed lengthy rests, taking the waters, and that which provoked drinking, cursing, and stirring the blood: arguments, parliamentary or otherwise. Oliver told them all to bloody hang.
Her cousin started pacing. For a man with a heart ailment, who detested exercise, he loved to walk a room.
“The men pored over the accounts,” he said, shaking his head. “And found nothing suspicious. Their report concluded it was a case of cumulative losses, year after year.”
Georgiana absorbed the news, biting her cheek.
She had doubted much could be done if foul play were discovered. A thief didn’t steal a fortune and drop it into a treasure chest or an account easily accessed. No, she had wished more for her father’s vindication than the money. Because she had believed the monstrous debt surmountable. And maybe it would have been, if not for the Marquess of Eastwick.
“Do you believe the report?” she asked quietly.
“Yes,” he said, turning on his heel at the picnic portrait to regard it. “But do I believe those ledgers were what was presented to your father? No. Separate books were kept, I’m damn sure of it. But we haven’t a chance in hell of finding them.”
“So my father had no idea.”
“None.” After a sigh, Oliver tread back to her. He clasped her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “But I’ve more men, the secretive sort, following those bloody accountants and clerks about. They can’t take a piss without my men knowing.” Oliver winked. “And if one becomes flush with coin, we will catch them.”
Georgiana laughed at his coarse speech. She mimicked his pose, grasping his burly shoulder, just an inch or two lower than hers, and squeezed. “Thank you. Please accept my apologies for doubting you.”
