Page 117 of The Bastard's Iberian Bride
She’d missed something—no everything. They’d finished this business.
She forced in a breath. “Wait just a moment.”
Mr. Tellingford loomed over his grand desk, his face a blank. Kincaid’s eyes were dark and grave, and not without compassion. He’d also stayed, another man who thought he had a say in her life.
She didn’t need his compassion or his pity. She eased in a breath around the constriction in her chest. “You knew my mother, Mr. Tellingford.”
“Yes of course.”
“Were you her lover?”
He blinked, the only alteration to his demeanor. No color rose to his cheeks, nor did he appear to tense.
Oh. Of course. He was another one who worked for Shaldon.
Memories snaked in through the fog in her head. Jock had limped into the cottage, his head in a bloody bandage, ranting in Spanish and delivering the two letters. Mama had put Jock in the spare room, changed his dressings, and fed him. Days later, this man arrived and took Jock away. And then brought him back.
Months after that, the lap desk arrived from a merchant in Cornwall, misdirected there by the smuggler who’d rescued it and who, Jock said, feared the wrath of Paul Heardwyn’s masters more than he coveted the profit of selling the finely crafted item.
Mr. Tellingford expelled an expansive sigh, designed to push all the air from the room. “My dear—”
“So that is a yes. I was but a child, but I saw things, sir. And I don’t, I don’t criticize. She was tossed away to rot in the country while my father ran off to the Continent or the Peninsula, or wherever. She was lonely. She didn’t fit in. After living the life of a spy it must have seemed like an early d-death.”
Oh drat. Her eyes were threatening to water. She took a deep breath and thought of something distracting. Money. That would do. She should be angry about how little they’d left her. The treasure Jock whispered about was probably not even real. She must ask about that.
She lifted her chin. They were all watching her, including Bink.
Who didn’t know what she knew about her father’s supposed treasure, because she hadn’t told him.
She dropped her gaze to her hands and blinked hard.
“Paulette is right.” Bink’s hand engulfed hers and squeezed. “You must tell us everything you know about her parents, and you must tell us why Agruen is after her. It most certainly is not for these pieces of paper here. Her inheritance won’t cover his brandy bill for the year.”
“She wasn’t a spy.” Kincaid said.
Her head shot up, and she looked at the dark eyes, kind, perhaps even truthful. “Jock said she was.”
“Jock was wrong,” Tellingford said.
“He wasn’t. He couldn’t have been. He told me stories, very detailed ones about Mama’s b-bravery spying during the terror, before I was born.” She struggled to swallow the bile rising. If Mama wasn’t a spy, what was she? Who was she? And why had Jock lied?
“He shouldn’t have,” Kincaid said.
“He was trying to comfort you.” The solicitor came round the desk, swallowing up the air in front of her again.
So devious were these men. Perhaps Bink was right and they were all liars.
“There now,” Tellingford said. “Your mother was a Spanish émigré’s daughter from Cornwall. Not a spy. She fell in love with your father when he worked in the Home Office and had occasion to visit your mother’s family.”
By the time Paulette was old enough to understand, her mother had been estranged from her own people.
“Why would the Home Office visit my mother’s family?”
Tellingford looked to Kincaid, who wouldn’t meet the other man’s eyes. Bakeley hadn’t moved either, and tension radiated from her husband next to her. They all looked to Kincaid. He was the man with the answers.
Kincaid’s long pause told her she was about to hear a lie.
She bit her lip, waiting, remembering. Jock had told her no stories of Cornwall, but she remembered her geography lessons. In Cornwall, there were inlets and hidden coves for the smugglers who owned that wild place.
