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“Aye,” Angus said brightly. “That’s it. So it’s true that he leaves tomorrow? He owes me ten pounds.”
“He doesn’t have it,” she said as she rolled onto her side to face him. “Why don’t you humiliate him by spending the night with his wife?”
“As tempting an offer as that is...” Angus said, trying to smile but still protecting himself. “So he did marry? You’re the earl’s daughter?”
“I am that,” she said, turning onto her back. “And I look just like my father.”
“Oh, well, he must have been proud of that,” Angus said, trying to be polite.
“I’m thirty-six and just got married. What do you think?”
“But now you have a husband,” he said and began inching his way around the bed. On the bedside table was one of those little bottles that James Harcourt was so fond of giving to the women in his life. Laudanum. “If you are an earl’s daughter, then I should go to your father to pay my debt.”
“He has less money than James does.”
“So...” Angus said. He was at the foot of the bed now and about to turn the corner to reach the table. “You married for love.”
The woman laughed at that as she turned toward him. “He married me for the title that will pass to our children. Bastard! He only pretended to love me.” She was looking at Angus by the light of a single candle. “Under all that hair you’re a fine-looking man, aren’t you?” As she said it, her eyes widened and Angus knew that she’d seen the handbills and recognized him.
“I think perhaps you will spend the night with me or I shall start screaming. You wouldn’t like that now, would you?”
“Depends on why you’re screaming,” he said as he moved closer to her.
“Not from my husband,” she said, her eyes alight. “I don’t know how we’ll have brats when he hasn’t much down there, if you know what I mean.”
“I know,” Angus said as his hand slipped around the bottle of laudanum. As he put his knee on the side of the bed, he halted. “How do I know you’re the bride of James Harcourt?”
“You can look in that chest over there. All the documents are in there.”
“Well, then,” he said slowly. “Mayhap I will take the repayment out on Harcourt’s wife after all. But do you have anything to drink? You look like a woman who’s going to
make a man thirsty.”
“There’s a bottle of wine on the table.”
“Ah, yes, I see it,” Angus said as he blew out the candle.
Thirty minutes later, he was outside her door, and in his hand was a leather portfolio full of papers that he’d found in the trunk. On the other side of the door he could hear the woman snoring. In the end, he’d had to put most of the bottle of laudanum in her wine to make her sleep. In the wrestle before she slept—of her pulling at him and Angus pushing her away—his clothes had been torn and were now askew on his body, but he’d found what he was sure were papers that proved her connection to Harcourt.
“She’s not worth this,” he said as he thought of Edilean and tried to straighten what was left of his shirt as he hid the portfolio inside, then he went out the front door of the inn. The next thing he had to do was catch Harcourt and keep him off that ship.
8
ANGUS HURRIED TO the pub and saw that Harcourt and his cronies were still drinking, still laughing. As he looked at him, Angus marveled that a man could live with himself with what Harcourt was planning to do. He’d married one woman to get her title and he was taking the money of another woman so he’d never have to support himself.
And of what use was that title going to be when he got to America? Angus had heard that those people didn’t believe in aristocracy.
Angus was too tired to think about any of it. Right now he had anger pumping through him, which was keeping him awake, but when this was done, when the girl sailed away on her ship, he meant to hide somewhere and sleep for a week.
When Harcourt came out of the pub he was with the other men, but they soon separated.
“Going to your bride, James?” one called in a teasing voice.
“Will you make the first babe tonight?”
“I might have to hire one of these Scots to do that task for me,” he said, his voice slurring as he spoke.
For a moment Angus felt sorry for the woman he’d married. She was big and ugly, and very strong, but she wanted love just like the rest of the world.
