Page 36

“I am so glad you’re enjoying your stay at Wolfhaven.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Your Grace. How is your head?” The poor man was squinting one eye slightly again, a sure sign that he was hurting. She wished she knew how to make him rest. He needed it.

“My headache comes and goes. I promise I’ll rest before dinner if it makes you happy.”

“I don’t think we’ll be finding any architectural gems up here. Besides which, the attic is hot and stuffy. It would be cooler to do this in the morning.”

She did not want to go into this attic. She had never lived in a house with one before—or at least not ones she could access. The apartment building where her grandmother had resided in London, and the dormitory at Girton, may have had them, but they weren’t places one could go into. It wasn’t a fear of hot spaces where people stored their unwanted belongings, per se, but Evaine did harbor a specific unease about venturing into this space. For reasons she could not articulate.

Gareth had to push hard on the door to open it, and once he had forced it with a protest of metal hinges, her worst fears were confirmed.

The rest of the house was dusty from neglect; it was a thousand times worse up in the attic. A baby’s cradle sat forlornly in a corner. Despite the oppressive heat, chills raced down her spine.

If you want to find Marina’s treasure, you must look everywhere.

“Hot,” Gareth said. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the doorknob. Then he rolled up his sleeves, exposing his forearms, and unbuttoned his shirt a little more. Suddenly, Evaine was warm and not from being in the uninsulated, overheated attic. She swallowed past a dry throat.

Gran was right. He was a very handsome man, scars and all. Once you got used to seeing the wreckage of his face, you stopped noticing his scars. Other parts of him came into focus. His piercing blue eyes. His sensuous lips. The strong, sharp jaw that led to a long, muscular throat…

She inhaled sharply and turned away.

“Everything alright?” he asked. How had she not noticed the low timbre of his voice before? It rolled over her like a physical touch.

“Mhm. All this dust is making me sneeze.” A truthful statement, proved a split second later.

“We’ll do a quick check to see if we can find anything of value. If not, we don’t have to come back tomorrow.”

“Fair enough.” She wandered over to a stack of what appeared to be paintings, but turned out to be empty frames. An ancient pianoforte sat in the corner, visibly warped from prolonged exposure to heat and humidity. Not old enough to be of interest. Just an old chunk of wood that someone had decided to haul all the way up here instead of dragging out to the yard and burning.

She pressed one cracked ivory key. A dull thunk was the only sound that came out of the instrument. If it had ever been worth money, it wasn’t anymore. Not in this condition. “Gareth, can I ask you about those ledger pages we were looking at before the clock fell?”

“What about them?”

“I read something in Marina’s diary about how she knew that he was taking her inheritance bit by bit. You won’t be able to read those pages, unfortunately. I was reading them a second time when you surprised me this morning, and they were the worst hit by the water.”

“What did they say?” He had found an old trunk and riffled through the contents.

“She believed that he was hoarding her money.”

“That would stand a reason. My father despised spending. He certainly would have considered it wasted on a ‘worthless girl’.”

“May I be honest?”

“Are you ever anything but?” Gareth said dryly. Evaine chuckled.

“Your father sounds like an arsehole.”

“That is the mildest possible description of him.” He closed the trunk and moved on to a child’s rocking chair. Broken. “Judging from those records, Marina knew what he was doing, but she was as helpless to stop him from stealing her inheritance as she was to prevent him from abusing her physically.”

Evaine shuddered at the thought of poor Marina being stuck in this house with servants like Bess Cogswell and a duke that took advantage of her powerlessness. The girl had latched onto Gareth as her personal knight in shining armor when he was still a boy ill equipped to help her. She was isolated and far away from anyone who might have taken her side against a powerful lord. Proving her case in a court of law would have been an exercise in humiliation even if she could get anyone to believe her in the first place, and she still probably would’ve lost without incontrovertible proof that the money hadn’t been spent on her.

“You’re nothing like him, you know.” Evaine wasn’t certain what possessed her to say it. But it was true. The two men she had read about in Marina’s diary were as different as night and day.

“My father?” Gareth scoffed. “I am an exact replica of him. Or rather, I was, before the fire.”

“I don’t mean physically. I mean the way that you tried to intervene and save your foster sister by marrying her. That was very noble of you.”

“It was stupid of me to go up against him without a plan. Everything moved so fast. It was the holidays. I suppose I was trying not to ruin them by exposing the family scandal at Christmastime. Foolish, in retrospect.” He kicked a child’s metal wagon lightly. It squeaked forward. Nothing a bit of oil wouldn’t fix. He took the handle and began dragging it around in circles, testing its condition and finding it satisfactory enough to jot down a note in his book of valuables. “It was even more foolish of me to leave her here instead of taking Marina to London with me. The school would’ve understood if I took a leave of absence for a semester. I was so naive...” He sighed. “I should’ve stayed. I have regretted leaving her in his care for every single day of the past ten years.”