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If Rufus was truly dead then Alexander wouldn’t be able to return the money, nor would he ever have an answer as to where it had come from. Much as he hated to distrust his brother, there was no avoiding the fact that Rufus’s sense of honor was extremely elastic. It was entirely possible he’d stolen that money, and Alexander was duty-bound to return it, if he only knew the source.
If Rufus was still alive then he would get those answers, but that brought with it an even worse problem. What do you do when you know someone is a criminal? Do you turn him in, or let him continue with his activities? And if he didn’t stop Rufus, someone else might, someone who might use lethal force.
Those moral questions had been unimportant while he believed Rufus was dead. If his brother really had managed to escape death once more, then there would have to be an unpleasant reckoning before long, one he dreaded.
He’d been tempted not to say anything to Adelia about the possibility of Rufus’s survival, but in the end even his contempt for her couldn’t make him cruel. If Adelia loved anyone above herself it was her son, and he couldn’t keep the possibility of hope away from her, whether she deserved it or not.
Time would tell. For now, he was going to do the one thing that could cool his body down and enable him to sleep. Pushing off from the sofa, he went in search of the night air and the clear, cool water.
CHAPTER TEN
SOPHIE HADN’T SLEPT WELL. Every time she drifted off she would reawaken with a start, feeling his mouth on hers, his hands holding her. At one point she even got up and lit the lamps again, peering through the shadows in her rooms. He wasn’t there, of course. She wasn’t sure whether that was a relief or a disappointment.
Breakfast had been a simple enough matter, with the viscount and his stepmother taking trays in their rooms. Sophie could only be glad her employer hadn’t decided she should be the one to serve him. The thought of the man still in bed, lying amidst rumpled white sheets, was disturbing. Would he wear a decent nightshirt and cap to bed? She knew he wouldn’t. The man would sleep in nothing but all that hard, bronzed skin, and he would probably enjoy trying to embarrass her if she entered his rooms.
Once the trays had gone, the rest of the household sat down for their morning meal, and by the time it was finished and the staff had been dispersed to their duties, Sophie was considering slipping off to her room when Dickens returned to the kitchens, a grim look on his face as he approached her.
Sophie felt her stomach knot in distress. Had Alexander Griffiths found out who she was? She’d hoped for an easy day of it, given that she’d already come up with a week’s worth of menus and Prunella had started in on the bread, but she simply squared her shoulders and waited for Dickens to make his pronouncement.
“You’re wanted upstairs, miss,” he said in a gloomy voice.
“I expected as much.” The viscount presumably didn’t like being told no. Despite the assurances of the rest of the staff that her employer didn’t poach among the serving class, Alexander Griffiths had proved them wrong. Not only had she refused his advances, she’d all but shoved him onto the floor and run.
Well, to be utterly truthful, refusing hadn’t truly been the case. She was putting up a good fight against the seductive gleam in his eyes, the clever touch of his hands, the wicked demands of his mouth, but sooner or later she was going to lose unless she came up with better defenses. Oh, she could fight off the Dark Viscount—wife-murderer, possible embezzler and killer of her own father—with no little effort. It was fighting off her own untoward desires that were leading her down a path to her own destruction.
She had no dowry. Her name, her real name, was tarnished. Her sisters had scattered. All she had was her face and her innocence, and that wasn’t going to last long at this rate. If he started in at this hour in the morning she would probably need to hit him over the head with a skillet.
“What does he want?” she asked, not bothering to hide her grumpy mood.
“Not his lordship, Miss Sophie. In fact, he’s gone out for the day and left no word as to when he might return. If he’s gone down to London we won’t see him for days, I should think. No, it’s Mrs. Griffiths who wants to see you.”
Sophie didn’t even have time to feel relief over the viscount’s disappearance before the thought of his stepmother made her heart sink. Here was a different danger entirely, and she wasn’t looking forward to facing the woman.
“She’ll want to see the menus, and she’ll probably ask you a dozen questions you won’t want to answer,” Dickens continued morosely. “I’ll do my best to remain with you in case she proves difficult.”
“I thought you told me the viscount approves the menus,” Sophie said.
“The moment he leaves, Mrs. Griffiths tries to take charge. She’s gotten rid of any number of servants during the few months they’ve been in residence, particularly anyone for whom his lordship shows a . . . a partiality.”
The very last thing she was going to do was question the viscount’s partiality for her. “So she could dismiss me?”
“No, miss. I don’t think even she would dare.”
She almost asked him why not, but wisdom stopped her. “Just give me a moment to tidy up,” she said, untying her apron and heading toward her room. There was always the possibility that she and Mrs. Griffiths could form some kind of alliance against the viscount. Apparently they despised each other, and the old woman would probably be more than happy to help find proof that would discredit the man.
Sophie had no intention of helping his stepmother. It didn’t matter if the man was guilty of every last thing she suspected him of—she wasn’t going to side with that harridan. If he truly had anything to do with her father’s death, then she would find it out on her own.
Sophie followed Dickens up the winding stairs to the front hall, then followed him up narrow servants’ stairs, taking time to peek in at the various floors before moving on. While the ground level of Renwick had been redecorated, the higher floors were still the same, though Sophie imagined it wouldn’t be long before those were torn apart as well. It was hard to believe her father had been dead for less than three months, that just last winter she’d been the spoiled and pampered Miss Sophie Russell, sought after and adored. Mrs. Griffiths had taken over the apartments on the third floor that had once belonged to her father, which struck Sophie as decidedly odd. Those were the best rooms in the house—why wasn’t the viscount living in them? Exactly which rooms had he claimed? The three sisters had slept in rooms on the second floor, and along with those rooms there were three guest chambers. The
third floor held guest rooms as well, but none of them had a dressing room and water closet as her father’s had.
She followed Dickens up the last flight of stairs, casting surreptitious glances around her. The lack of a housekeeper showed here—while the hallways were clean, there was a certain lack of polish and refinement that her older sister, Bryony, would never have tolerated. But then, the maids who worked at Renwick had known the place well, unlike the new staff.
It gave Sophie an odd feeling to be standing outside her father’s door, waiting, as Dickens gave a muted scratch against the thick walnut, and Sophie’s mouth went dry in sudden alarm. It’s not Alexander, she told herself, and then realized with shock that she’d thought of him in terms of his Christian name. He was the viscount, the Dark Viscount, the Damned Viscount, damned as in doomed, and she needed to remember that, even if he was frighteningly adept at making her forget.
“Come in, Dickens.”
If the woman had looked intimidating from her place of honor at the bottom of the table, she looked even more unnerving in Sophie’s father’s old rooms. These had been redecorated as well, though the job had clearly been a hasty, slapdash affair. The walls were now an unfortunate shade of salmon, unfortunate because it made Mrs. Griffiths’s high color look almost apoplectic. Her hair was arranged in such a complicated array of dubiously blond curls that Sophie suspected it might be a wig, and her black mourning dress was bedecked with enough jet and bead to weigh down a clipper ship, a notion accentuated by her massive bosom. A woman sat to one side, a worried expression on her face, and Sophie recognized the proverbial lady’s companion. Though the companion looked more well bred than the lady.
