Page 11 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

Magnus had blanched at the implication. “He sold my mother’s jewels?”

“Not to my knowledge, my lord. He merely took them.”

“And what about the money? Are you telling me that he spent it all?”

The dour solicitor had looked at Magnus gravely from behind his cluttered desk. “There’s no evidence of any expenditures on Lord Eversleigh’s part. Rather the opposite, if you’ll excuse my candor. He dismissed the staff at his London house shortly before his death, leaving nothing for its maintenance. As for his estate in Yorkshire, it has completely fallen into ruin.”

“If he didn’t spend it, and it’s not locked away in another bank somewhere⁠—”

“It is not, my lord.”

“Then it must be at his house in London,” Magnus said. “The jewels as well. You say he never left the place in the end?”

“No, sir. Except…” The solicitor consulted his notes. “He did travel to Yorkshire the year after removing his funds. To visit Moorcross Manor, I presume. It was not a lengthy stay.”

He’s hidden his fortune at the Manor, Magnus had concluded.

His mother had begun refurbishing the ancient estate in her early days as countess. In the aftermath of her death, it had become his father’s obsession. The place where he’d poured all his energies. No expense had been too great. No luxury too grand.

Moorcross Manor had been both the beginning of Magnus’s father’s descent into grief-stricken eccentricity and the culmination of it. It was only logical that he’d have brought his fortune here at the last.

It was the sole reason Magnus had come home. To retrieve the more than three hundred thousand pounds that made up his inheritance. It was a princely sum. The interest alone would be sufficient to set Magnus up for life. Somewhere far from here—an isolated villa in a remote region of France or Italy, perhaps.

There would be no more battles. No more fighting. At last, Magnus could find some degree of peace. The kind that only money could afford.

All he had to do now was find his father’s hiding place.

An easy enough task, Magnus had foolishly believed. Yet his father’s cunning had so far eluded him. Three days Magnus and Turner had been here. And three days their searches had turned up nothing.

And now this. The whole enterprise unceremoniously interrupted by a nosy female and a fruitless effort to locate her missing, and very probably nonexistent, dog.

Magnus batted at the undergrowth again in another attempt at rousting the creature. He was just on the verge of giving up when a flicker of movement beneath a nearby tangle of rose bushes caught his eye.

Casting aside his stick, Magnus dropped into a crouch to get a better view. A flare of satisfaction coursed through him. It was a dog, all right. But this was no pedigreed lady’s lapdog. It was small and black, and filthy as all hell.

It growled menacingly from its hiding place beneath the rose bushes. A thoroughly uncivilized sound, more suited to a wild animal than a lady’s pet.

If Magnus didn’t know better, he’d think it was a street dog. It certainly had the craftiness of one. The little beast had enshrouded itself in the protection of the thorns. There would be no way to catch it without being ripped to shreds.

“Brilliant,” Magnus said under his breath. “But you’ll have to do better than that.” He reached for the dog.

It shrank from his hand with snapping jaws, retreating farther beneath the branches.

“Be still, you mongrel.” Magnus delved deeper, stifling a string of oaths as the thorns raked his flesh. “I said…be still.”

Charlotte examined the valet’s craggy countenance as he leaned over her to adjust her pillow. Her head was aching dreadfully. Pain emanated from the wound on the back of her skull into her temples, eyes, teeth, and neck. She felt rattled. Physically shaken. All damp hair, aching bones, and queasy stomach. Her clothes were uncomfortably tight as well. Corset pinching at her midsection and skirts wound around her legs in a constrictive tangle. She couldn’t easily move.

But it wasn’t any of that which troubled her at present. It was this man’s completely unrecognizable face. She stared at him, growing more unsettled by the moment.

It was the oddest thing. Like a thick gray storm cloud had settled over her brain. She couldn’t remember the fellow at all. Yet, as far as she could discern, he was a longtime retainer of her husband.

Which was another troubling fact.

She had no memory whatsoever of her husband.

And he seemed the kind of gentleman that a woman would remember. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and leanly muscled, with thick black hair and piercing, steel-gray eyes. An athletic sort of man, she gathered, though not a handsome one. His face was too angular. His cheekbones too high and his jaw too sharp. Everything about him spoke of severity and ill-temper. Like a ravening wolf who would rend friend and foe alike.

And then there were the scars.