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“I propose a wager.” She fought to keep her voice steady. “You have one more night here at Ashveil. If you uncover incontrovertible evidence of fraud here, you may take it to Parliament, the newspapers, whomever you see fit.”
His mouth twitched at the corner. “Don’t you mean, when I uncover the evidence?”
She forced a laugh, and it bounced off the arched ceiling like shards of broken glass. “You won’t. Of that I’m certain. And when you depart with nothing, you’ll leave us alone. Drop your support for this legislation and keep my grandmother’s name out of your mouth.”
His steely gaze searched her for a long moment, and once again, his stare stripped her bare, as though he could hold her in place and peel her apart layer by layer until she was exposed to him completely.
Finally, he nodded and extended a hand. “I agree. Gladly. I look forward to gathering evidence against you.”
His gray eyes didn’t just hold triumph—something hungrier lurked beneath it, something almost like relish. She recognized the particular pleasure some men took in watching a woman fail. One more reason to make certain he left this house with nothing.
She didn’t take his hand. “I promise you this, Valebrook—you will leave Ashveil Manor empty-handed.”
CHAPTER 8
“The foundations of Ashveil Manor have stood on this spot since the thirteenth century…”
Phineas scrubbed a hand down his face, wishing he’d drunk a third cup of tea with breakfast to survive the second hour of this tour. Bridget likely expected the excursion to proceed far more quickly. But Mrs. Bunton-Talmadge must have believed there would be some sort of examination at the end, and was questioning their hostess with the enthusiasm of a first-year at Oxford.
“Is the granite local?” she interrupted again.
He caught the tension in Bridget’s jaw, the strain in her serene expression. “I would imagine. The property was renovated heavily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with further additions in the early nineteenth century…”
He tuned her words out once more, focusing instead on her practiced movements, the art in her performance of weaving verifiable history with legend and outright falsehoods. She was a liar, a brilliant one, wielding each falsehood like a blade to distract and deceive.
But he held weapons as well.
“Why would a medieval knight haunt this passage?” he cut in at one point. “This addition wasn’t built until the seventeenth century.”
Or another. “The moaning in the bedchamber could just as easily be these timbers settling here—” he’d pointed over her head. “And here.”
“Some ghosts have legs,” she’d fired back after his first remark. And as for the timbers, he could have sworn he heard her muttering under her breath, “You should be grateful for any moaning in your bedchamber…”
It should have satisfied him, meticulously poking holes in her artifice until it resembled a sieve, but instead of finding joy in deconstructing her lies, he eagerly anticipated her barbed retorts, the same wit and intelligence he’d witnessed in the tavern.
They’d reached the second floor of the keep, the sprawling sixteenth-century addition at her back jutting toward the western edge of the property. “One day,” she gestured at the mullioned window overlooking the churning sea, “Lady Mary spotted her lover’s ship on the horizon, returning to shore. After months of worry, she was overjoyed and raced down these stairs to greet him.”
Mrs. Bunton-Talmadge pressed a hand to her chest. “How romantic,” she effused.
Her husband rolled his eyes.
Bridget gave the woman a smile Phineas now recognized as somewhat pitying, as though she knew she was about to deliver a fatal blow and would savor the bloodshed.
Which she did. “It was romantic… until she tripped. Lady Mary’s foot caught in the hem of her gown, and she tumbled down the stairs, fatally striking her head on the bottom step.”
Every eye, including Phineas’, swung to follow her gesturing hand.
“If you look carefully,” she continued, “you can still see the stain from her blood on the stone.”
How tragic. He tried to expel the grief nagging at his insides, a reminder of losing someone close. Likely the story of Lady Mary was untrue, another figment of Bridget’s imagination meant to manipulate her guests’ emotions.
“Oh, I have a solution!” Mrs. Bunton-Talmadge crowed. “Dilute some ox-gall with cold water, and the mark will come right out!”
“These are ghosts,” her husband grumbled, “not stains on the foyer carpet.”
“I was only being helpful!”
Bridget’s attention bounced between the pair as they bickered, and she stepped backward, directly into his path.
