Page 116 of The Bastard's Iberian Bride
“Then we won’t,” Bink said. “We’ll stay at Hackwell House.”
Kincaid’s eyes narrowed. “’T’will only be for a short while.”
“What of this body?” she asked.
Kincaid’s mouth firmed before he spoke. “Upon the road. We found a laborer with his throat spiked besides a broken, abandoned cart.”
“No horse?” Bink slid his gaze to her.
He was remembering also the woman they’d seen from their place in the bushes, the woman driving the cart, a man lounging in the back.
A shiver went up her back. “That woman driving…”
“What woman?” Kincaid cut in.
“We saw a cart upon the road, a woman driving it,” Bink said.
Anger rose in her. “Agruen will have taken her.”
Bink frowned. “Unless she was employed by him.”
She shook her head. “He hates women.”
Kincaid’s frown had faded back to his usual inscrutability, and she studied him.
“Did you track the horse?” Bink asked.
“Into the woods,” Bakeley said, “where we lost the tracks. But we found no woman, nor any trace of one.”
Bink caught her eye, and glanced back at Kincaid. Like her, he thought the wily man was concealing something. But what?
Never mind. Questioning him would be useless. She pulled out of the older man’s grasp and looked up at Bink. “Thank you, my love.” It was time to face up to whatever her father had left for her, and wait for Agruen to show his next hand. “Is this solicitor ready for us, Bakeley?”
“I am, Mrs. Gibson.” A man of middling years stood in the doorway, a tall handsome man who yanked a thread of memory in her brain so violently she felt her breath leave her. She stood very still, pushing away the urge to swoon and beating her stomach into settling. Bink’s hand touched her waist again, gentle and warm and as reliable as the back of a sturdy chair.
This man, this solicitor, had visited her mother. She’d seen him touch her mother, the way Bink was touching her now.
She eased in a breath. They’d been lovers, surely.
She blinked, shutting out the picture of her beautiful, aloof mother and this man, tucking away the knowledge. “I know you.”
He approached and reached for her hand. Another man wanting her hand. She gave it to him, allowed him to bow over it. “Yes. I was a friend of your mother’s. You were a spirited child, and I see that hasn’t changed. Mr. Gibson.” Bink freed up a hand to shake. “I’m glad you’ve kept Paulette safe. Let us get her seated before she faints.”
“I do not faint.”
“She doesn’t,” Bink said. “But let’s take a seat anyway, Paulette.”
Bink had donemuch to help fill the empty chasm in her heart, but it hadn’t closed over. Not yet, and the news the solicitor provided tugged at the frayed opening, made the wound stretch a bit wider. Outside of the details of a pension—a very small, very precarious-upon-the-whims-of-government-and-lost-upon-her-marriage pension—her trust was indeed as small as she’d learned from Bakeley.
Actually, it was even less than that. Had she not married Bink, she’d be living in the tiniest rooms, in the smallest village, in the remotest part of the kingdom. London or a grand estate would be out of the question, unless she could reconcile herself to the unsavory part of this town, or to living the life of a genteel servant.
There’d been nothing personal, not even a letter from either of her parents.
Her chest swelled with aching and pushed the pain into her throat, freezing around everything she wanted to say, obstructing her hearing. They were talking, signing, going over details, settling her back into her fathomless hole. She gripped the arms of her chair and squeezed them until she could clear her throat.
Bakeley—or Shaldon, she must think of him as Shaldon—had been present for this affair, still clinging to the old lord’s sense of his rights over them. If she could speak, she would order him out. Why Bink didn’t do it…
Her breath caught. Bink had rested the quill, leaning forward, ready to propel himself out of his chair.
