Roses in Moonlight (17 page)

“Bet that was hard.”

He managed not to glare at her, but that was only because his discomfort at needing help was tempered by a quite proper sense of gratitude.

“I’m not at my best,” he allowed. “I apologize.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m about ten minutes away from chucking the remote at you and telling you to get your own damned soup.”

He blinked, then smiled. “That sounds like something Sunny would say.”

“It was something Sunny said,” she said. “Apropos, don’t you think?”

“Very.” He didn’t dare move his head too much, so he continued to look at her. “Have you checked the lace?”

“Yes. Would you like to do the same?”

He held out his hand and had a snort as his reward.

“Not on your life,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Lord Robert brought gloves, if you think you can get one on. And then, and
only
then, will you touch this lace.”

“You historians are bossy.”

She pursed her lips but said nothing in reply to that.

He accepted a glove, fumbled with it, then had help in becoming properly attired for the examination of priceless artifacts. He looked the lace over, then shook his head as he handed it back to her.

“Why he doesn’t keep it in a vault, I don’t know.”

“Because then he can’t walk past it every day and look at something someone was wearing four hundred years ago,” she said. “I don’t blame him at all.”

He slid her a look. “The historian speaks.”

“Temporarily,” she agreed.

“How’s the Victorian piece?”

“Not fabulous,” she said. “You can have a look at it and form your own opinion.”

He took it, then couldn’t help but watch how she handled the lace. He had to admit he wasn’t at all surprised at the care she took. Obviously she had been very well trained, but there was something in the way she folded it that spoke of more than simple training. Whatever else Samantha Drummond was, she was a lover of old things.

He completely understood.

“Well?” she asked, looking at him.

He glanced at the embroidery, then shook his head—gingerly. “I wouldn’t waste my time with it.”

“Not worth enough money?”

“No, actually, it isn’t. What do you think?”

“My mother wouldn’t bother, either,” she said with a faint smile. “I was just testing your snob meter.”

He started to deny that he had one, then decided there was no point. He was extremely choosey about what deals he agreed to broker, but it was never the amount of money involved. Well, almost never. He looked at her.

“What do you think?”

“Your meter is performing beautifully,” she said. “I guess the drooling hasn’t damaged it.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me?” he asked crossly.

She smiled. “Nah, just a little payback. Lord Robert said you would enjoy it, so, again, since he’s an earl and I’m just a peasant, I thought I should take his advice.”

“Did he have any other astute suggestions?” Derrick asked politely.

“He said to throw the remote at you, not hand it over, and to use your credit card a lot. I don’t think I can throw the remote at you.”

“But you’ve used my credit card quite a bit, is that it?”

“Again, it’s the earl/peasant thing. I didn’t dare argue.” She smiled briefly. “And I’m not serious. I’ll pay you back for the ebooks.”

“Of course you won’t.”

“And the other cashmere sweater.”

“Not that, either.”

“And the dress. It was unfortunately quite expensive, but I couldn’t get Emily to take it back.”

He knew he should have pulled up his bank account and shown her just how little a dent she possibly could have made in it, but he wasn’t sure he had the strength. The best he could do was shake his head.

“I’ll make payments,” he lied. “If you did want to do something in return, you could order lunch.”

“If you like.”

“And stay and watch a movie with me.”

She looked more shocked than he would have expected her to. It wasn’t as if it was a date. He’d been drooling in front of her for heaven only knew how long. He wasn’t sure he could date a woman who had seen him in that condition.

“What sort of movie?”

“Anything, and I mean anything, that doesn’t involve period costumes.”

She smiled. “I’ll see what I can find.” She handed him his tablet, then rose and walked toward his door. “Any preference for an early dinner?”

“Anything that doesn’t involve broth.”

She smiled, then left him to himself.

He managed to get himself in a sitting position, then swung his feet to the floor. Getting to the loo and back to bed wasn’t nearly as taxing as he’d feared it might be. No puking, no fainting, no needing to call for aid with his trousers in an embarrassing location. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the lace sitting there, tucked safely in its plastic covering and topped by that truly worthless piece of Victorian embroidery, and shook his head. So much trouble for something a noblewoman of the sixteenth century wouldn’t have thought twice about losing.

But Samantha understood Lord Epworth perfectly. The man had scores of treasures, but that piece of lace was something special to him. He never would have hidden it away in a vault.

Derrick wondered how Samantha Drummond could possibly have known that. Perhaps she was more attuned to the historically minded collector than she let on.

•   •   •

T
wo
hours later, he was pretending to watch a modern-day romance starring two of the most vapid actors he’d ever been forced to observe whilst actually thinking about a few things that puzzled him.

First was a question about why Samantha Drummond wanted to turn her back on everything she’d worked for to that point. He wasn’t unaccustomed to taking on different personae when it suited his purposes, so he could understand it on a certain level. After all, he’d abandoned Scotland in his teens to embrace a career that his parents most definitely hadn’t approved of. That hadn’t worked out very well for him, but since that was something he never thought on when he could help it, he let that recollection slide right by.

Perhaps she hadn’t had a choice about her profession, though that gave him pause as well. Had her parents looked at their own vocations, flipped a coin, then whomever had won had chosen Samantha’s life’s work for her? If that was the case, he certainly couldn’t blame her for wanting to leave it all behind right along with her parents. It was a pity, though. She was, from what little he’d seen, good at what she did.

The second was how in the world a woman reached the age of twenty-six without having told her parents it was time she left the nest. He couldn’t say he’d exchanged many words with Gavin past curses, so he didn’t even have a conversation there to aid him in solving the mystery. Perhaps as the last child she’d felt responsible for their happiness. Perhaps she was a spineless waif of a thing who couldn’t bring herself to tell
him
to go to hell, much less her parents.

Or perhaps she was simply too kind for her own good.

He looked at her sitting in her accustomed spot—in the chair, not next to him on the bed, as it happened—somehow not surprised to find she was blinking rapidly.

“You,” he said distinctly, “are a theatrical pushover.”

She laughed a little. “I know it was garbage, but it was a romance. How can you not like a little romance?”

“Because it’s rotten stuff. Sickly sweet. Bad for the teeth and tum.”

“Cynic.”

“Probably.”

She looked at him then. “But you’re willing to go to great lengths for things not created in the twentieth century. How is that not romantic?”

He waved her on to the telly before he had to answer, though he smiled a little as he did so, because there was just something about the woman that inspired it. Which led him to the last thing that made him want to scratch his head.

She could have made tracks for more interesting locales at any moment, yet she’d chosen to stay and nursemaid him. Guilt over having left lace where it didn’t belong? A nefarious desire to watch him at his worst?

Or from the goodness of her heart?

“How about a spy flick now?” she asked cheerfully.

“I won’t last through it,” he warned.

“Are you too tired, or would it be too boring?” she asked. “You, with all your supersecret gear and getaway cars.”

“Too boring,” he agreed. “Been there, done that.”

“Nod off then, Sherlock, and let me watch another chick flick.”

He didn’t think he was going to have any choice but to oblige her, though he definitely was going to have to solve at least a couple Samantha Drummond mysteries before he let her go back into the wide world to do her art. There were also a few details about the lace to wrap up, but he would see to those in the morning. At the moment, all he wanted to do was close his eyes and ignore what he was sure was going to be a three-hankie tale of love lost and won back.

That would also help him ignore the woman who was obviously going to enjoy it thoroughly.

Mystery that she was.

S
amantha
flinched at the sound in the other room, then dismissed it. Derrick was still asleep, Oliver had promised her earlier that morning to be within yelling distance—she hadn’t asked how he was going to manage that—and she had the suite locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Maybe Derrick had fallen off his bed. She supposed she should have been concerned, but Sunny had been there just an hour ago and pronounced him fully on the mend. Samantha was convinced he was virtually indestructible, so she’d left him to his snoozing and gone inside her room to contemplate her future.

She wasn’t sure what sort of future she had stretching out in front of her, but her options seemed to be fairly limited. She supposed she might be able to get her plane ticket out of the Cookes’ house, but then again, maybe not. If she couldn’t, she had the money to buy a new one, but it would seriously dent her savings. All her cash was still taped to the underside of the nightstand, cash she had intended to last her for most of the summer. If she had to borrow anything from her parents, that would set her up for a fairly lengthy amount of indentured servitude in her mother’s current exhibit. Then again, since it was what she was accustomed to, she didn’t think it would be all that painful.

What would be painful, though, was giving up even the small amounts of freedom she’d enjoyed. She couldn’t say being on the lam, as it were, had been terribly comfortable, but at least she’d been on her own—for the most part. The part she hadn’t liked had been being on her own in, ah . . .

She could hardly say the words to herself, but there was no denying that the place she’d quickly visited two days earlier hadn’t felt all that, well, modern. While Derrick seemed to have lots of interesting friends, he surely wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of staging such an elaborate ruse to leave her thinking she’d been four hundred years in the past. What purpose would it have served? She could safely say that the man’s overwhelming desire over the past few days had been to get his lace. She couldn’t imagine he was making that up.

Which left her pretty much where she was, sitting in an obscenely expensive suite at a ridiculously exclusive hotel, trying to get over the shakes she’d had periodically since she’d stepped back through that circle of mushrooms, then helped Oliver get Derrick into the back of that chauffeur-driven car.

She’d gotten rid of them the day before when she’d spent the evening watching movies in Derrick’s room. Maybe it had been the distraction. Maybe it had been feeling like she’d been a part of something more interesting than the endless cataloging of Victorian artifacts and the chewing out of low-level museum staff. Maybe it had been feeling safe—and that in spite of the fact that the one who could have protected her most easily had been unconscious and, yes, drooling.

She supposed what she had currently were less the shakes than they were simply restlessness over what to do at present. She supposed there was no reason for her to stay any longer, but she hadn’t wanted to simply ditch Derrick before she could—

Well, she had no idea what she intended to do. Thank him for the all-expense-paid trips to Elizabethan England? Apologize again for racking up stuff on his credit card? Ask him for his address so she would know where to send the checks to start paying off that debt?

And since she hadn’t been able to face any of that, she had instead done the unthinkable and arranged a still life on the table in front of her. She had taken out her sketch pad and a pencil.

And she was too terrified to use either.

“Interesting subject.”

She tipped her chair over backward in her surprise. In fact, she tipped it so far, that she went with it. She wasn’t sure if she was more hurt or embarrassed, but the haste with which she was trying to get herself back on her feet left her little time to think about it. She had help, which surprised her. Derrick kept his hand on her arm until he apparently thought she wasn’t going to fling herself anywhere else, then he let go of her and leaned over to pick up her chair. He held on to it for a moment or two, apparently trying to catch his breath, then looked at her.

“We’re quite a pair,” he managed.

“You startled me,” she said. She looked at him critically. “At least your eyes aren’t crossed any longer.”

“A fact for which I am enormously grateful.” He moved to lean against the dresser. “What are you up to there?”

She took a deep breath. “Nothing yet.”

“I pulled you out of your happy place, perhaps.”

“Nope,” she said with a shrug. “I didn’t have any inspiration. Actually, I don’t have any talent, I’m afraid.”

He regarded her steadily. “And who told you that?”

“No one had to,” she said with a light, careless laugh. “I have two good eyes.”

“Maybe you should silence your inner critic before he destroys all your pleasure in something you might be very good at.”

She struggled to mask her surprise. “Aren’t you supportive today,” she said.

“I’m not fond of critics,” he said mildly. “And if you’re willing to turn your back on everything you’ve done to this point in favor of art, it’s likely very important to you.”

She let her mouth fall open as it wanted so desperately to. “How did you know I was turning my back on things?”

“You introduced yourself as an artist, not an historian. If that’s the case, it’s fairly logical to assume you don’t want to be associated with your past.” He tilted his head slightly. “Is that about right?”

“Who
are
you?”

“A student of the species,” he said wryly. He shoved his hands in his pockets, only wincing slightly. “Am I right or have I completely misread you? Well, past that initial misreading, of course.”

She shrugged helplessly. “Honestly, at this point I don’t have any idea who I am or what I want to do. I don’t even know what to do with the rest of the day, much less my life.”

“Well, let’s deal with today,” he suggested, “and go make an old man very happy. The rest will sort itself with enough time.”

She couldn’t say she had that much faith in the ability of time to right things, but she was willing to at least go listen to his plans. She made herself comfortable on the sofa, then watched him rub his shoulder gingerly after he’d sat down as well.

“Hurt?”

“Healing,” he clarified, “which is less painful than it is annoying. But I’m grateful.” He sat back and looked at her. “So, now we have to decide what we’re going to do.”

“We?” she echoed.

“We,” he said. “Until the general word is out that we have the lace back in our possession, I don’t think you’re safe.”

“And just how am I going to fix that?” She was appalled to find that her mouth was so dry, she could hardly swallow.

“
We
are going to fix that with a couple of well-thought-out phone calls to the less savory types, then a trip north to deliver the lace back to Lord Epworth.” He looked at her seriously. “The main problem I see is the lads who are following you—all four of them. I don’t know who hired them, or why there would be two pairs, but I have to assume it has to do with the lace.”

“That seems reasonable,” she agreed faintly.

“We can hope. I think the best way to proceed is to have Oliver deliver that Victorian rubbish for you and see who comes to observe that little handoff—”

“But that’s too dangerous for him,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t ask him to do that.”

Derrick shook his head. “You’re not; he’s offering. Insisting, actually.” He smiled. “Oliver has a rather interesting background. This is the sort of thing he lives for, so I don’t like to disappoint him when these kinds of deliveries crop up. He’ll be just fine, mostly because he won’t be alone.”

She didn’t want to ask who would be going with him. She could only assume that person wouldn’t be Derrick.

“And immediately after he lets us know the package is off,” Derrick continued, “you’ll give Lydia a little text and let her know your new friend from Scotland Yard saw to that delivery but only after he found something odd inside the wrapping. Because he’s such a stellar soul, he promised he would return that something odd to its owner. As for you, your plans for the summer have changed. You’re sorry, but that’s how it goes.”

“I’m a bit of a flake, apparently.”

He shrugged. “Oliver trotting through a less desirable part of London is one thing,” he said. “You going back to Newcastle and spending even three minutes in Lydia Cooke’s house to explain things is quite another.”

“Then what about the lace?”

“We’ll head to Castle Hammond and hand it back to His Lordship.”

She looked at him, surprised. “You’re not going to call the cops about this?”

“I think that this might be better if we keep it just in the family, if you know what I mean.”

“No press conference?”

He smiled briefly. “No press conference. Word getting back to the Cookes will probably be publicity enough.” He considered for a moment, then shifted to face her a bit more. “I have the feeling that once Lydia hears the lace is in the tender care of Scotland Yard, you’ll be off the radar. And I suspect—and I’ve been thinking about this for a bit, so it’s less a guess than it is something I’m fairly certain about—I suspect that when the Cookes understand the situation, they’ll feign ignorance of the whole thing. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if they send someone to check to see if our little scrap of textile has been returned to Castle Hammond. Case closed.”

She supposed so, but she almost didn’t dare hope that she would be free of the whole situation so easily. Then again, if those thugs were after the lace and everyone knew she didn’t have it any longer, maybe freedom was more attainable than she dared hope.

She looked at Derrick. “And the Cookes? What will happen to them?”

“I’m not entirely sure, actually,” he said. “They don’t have a history of theft, as far as we can tell.”

“How far can you tell?” she asked.

He hesitated, then smiled faintly. “We have access to a few databases with interesting facts.”

“Hacker,” she chided.

“And that’s nothing I’ll ever admit to,” he said promptly. “I don’t know if they’ve been pinching little stuff all along and this is their first attempt at something big, or if this is the first thing they’ve ever attempted to steal.”

“How are you going to tell?”

He sighed deeply. “Well, the circles I run in are rather small. Word tends to get round fairly quickly about thefts and thieves. I haven’t heard anything about the Cookes to this point, but that may change.”

“And you don’t think the cops should know?”

He shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? If I let the Cookes go unpunished and they poach something else, where does that leave me? Yet on the other hand, I have a man with an impeccable reputation who would shudder at the thought of the bobbies tramping through his private sanctuary.”

“Which is why he called you in the first place, I supposed.”

“I am discreet,” he agreed. “It’s part of our charm.”

And keeping an old man from being stressed was likely the other part. She studied him for a moment or two.

“Do you know anyone in Scotland Yard?”

“Someone,” he said enigmatically.

“Does he have a secure phone line?”

“Assuredly, and the lovely ability to keep a few things to himself,” Derrick agreed. “We’ll see what happens over the next couple of months.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know how I got mixed up in all this.”

“Well, the first item of business is to get you out of it,” Derrick said. “Oliver’s on his way, I’ve texted your contact, and that should be done this afternoon. I think we can safely head north in the morning and take care of everything else.” He considered. “I assume you left gear in Newcastle?”

She nodded. “Money, plane ticket, and lots of polyester.”

“How much money?”

“Two hundred and sixty-seven pounds.” She paused. “And twenty pence.”

“I think we can replace that.” He smiled, then his smile faded. “Thank you, Samantha. You have put up with far more than should have been required.”

She had no idea what to say about that, so she decided that saying nothing was the best plan.

“I’ll also get you a new plane ticket.”

She looked at him in surprise. “That’s very generous, but you don’t have to.”

“Least I can do.” He paused. “Unless you’d rather stay in England for the summer.”

She caught her breath at the sudden longing for exactly that. The thought of roaming over moors, sketching lakes, wandering along the endless miles of coast . . .

It took her a moment or two before she trusted herself to speak. “Oh,” she managed, “I don’t think I could.” That killed her, right there. She had to take a deep breath to get the rest out. “Got to get home, and all that. Things to do.”

“What sorts of things?”

She looked at him, sitting there on an obscenely expensive reproduction sofa, and wished things were different. She wished she were different. She wished that for once, she had the time and means to do what she wanted to instead of what her parents wanted her to do. She wished she had saved every penny she had ever earned instead of just seventy-five percent of them. That extra twenty-five surely would have been enough to let her stay in England for the summer.

But eventually the piper would have to be paid. She could either blow her money on what would amount to only a couple of months of freedom, or she could get back home, buckle down, and carve out a future for herself. Dull, but responsible. And given what she’d just been through, responsible seemed so . . . responsible.

It took her another moment or two before she could speak. She looked at Derrick.

“I know it was just for a short time,” she managed, “but when one travels to Elizabethan England, nothing’s quite the same afterward.”

He smiled seriously. “Nay, it isn’t.”

“I don’t think I can go home again,” she admitted, “but I think I probably should.”

“I would offer you a job as resident expert on Elizabethan textiles, but that isn’t really what you want, is it?”

“Nope,” she said without hesitation, ignoring what that cost her to sound so convinced. “Don’t want anything to do with anything that isn’t art. I’m officially out of the historian arena.”