Page 64 of Counting on Love

She tried not to think of him sitting here through the night. There was something more intimate about that than picturing him in bed. Which she would never do!

Reginald opened a worn book with a frayed cover and pushed it in front of her on the desk. He pointed to a column.

“Please tell me I’m wrong.”

Georgiana drew a breath, debating whether to look. But she knew she was going to. It was either look at the page or at the hollow at the base of Reginald’s throat, right there in front of her. She turned to calculating the costs and revenues and then compared her result to the total that had been recorded at the bottom.

“That is incorrect.” The significance of that fact gave her a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Have you another ledger? Another year?”

He pulled out another from a short stack on his desk and opened it to a page he had dog-eared.

“Six years ago. Randomly selected quarter. This page.”

She ran her finger down the column. Then looked into Reginald’s pallid face.

“Oh,” she said, full of sympathy, but unsure what else to say. They were each off by thirty pounds. If that was true of every quarter, the books were off by one hundred and twenty pounds a year. For who knew how many years.

“Damn it!” he swore. “I’m sorry. I should not have burdened you. God! If I wasn’t so tired I never—I’m sorry, it’s inexcusable. I just hoped I was wrong, and you would—”

She waved his protest away. Now was not the time to be polite. Or ladylike, for that matter. No matter what Mama thought. “How many have you checked?”

“Three quarters. From randomly pulled years.”

“And they are all off?”

He nodded. “Not always by the same amounts. But usually close. Maybe I’m wrong.” He heaved a sigh. “But if I am, it’s not by much. I was concentrating on the numbers without paying much attention to what they were for, so after I talked to you I realized I should be looking for patterns, but…” He waved a hand toward the bookshelf where she had seen rows and rows of old ledgers. “It will take years.”

“If your steward was dipping—”

“But he wasn’t! Not Bradwell. I would stake my life on his honesty. And his competence. I can’t make sense of it.”

She said nothing. His father’s steward had been stealing from the family. And now the man was dead, and nothing could be done. And his father was dying. Reginald wanted to do this one simple thing for his family, and it had devolved into a nightmare.

He murmured, “And I feel as if I could decipher the books…”

Oh, Reginald. Her heart broke for the man because she knew he wanted to do what he loved, what he lived for, and was instead trying to reconcile himself to doing what was expected.

Gently, she said, “It’s not ancient Greek. You can’t translate it.”

“No. No, it’s not Greek, unfortunately. It’s numbers.”

Numbers.

“I—”

“Oh, God, Georgiana. No. I’m not asking you, of course, I’m not. I’m just bemoaning my own inadequacy. I know Bradwell is not an embezzler. But something is not right. And I’m concerned this is something that will come back to haunt Jasper. He should at least know there is something hidden. And the answer is in those books somewhere. The money came in. It went out. It has to add up.”

He could not have seduced her more effectively than that.

“I’ll help you.”

“I can’t ask that.”

“Reginald, you can’t put something like this in front of me and then snatch it away. It would be as if Bastion took away that manuscript and said, ‘Never mind.’”

He looked at her hard, then shook his head.

“Bradwell was the family’s accountant for forty-seven years. Forty-seven. Do you know how many ledgers that spans? Jasper is not going to let me lock you away in the library—”

“Reginald—”

“—for hours at a time, days on end. He has a million things planned.”

“Reginald, I don’t think he’ll notice.” She looked down at her hands and willed them not to tremble with excitement. “It won’t take me all that long.”