Dangerous in Diamonds - Madeline Hunter [116]
Her brow puckered. “How dearly?”
“By the time negotiations were completed, we had settled on eighty thousand pounds.”
Her eyes widened. “What is it actually worth?”
“No more than five, and that is being generous.”
She pondered that, her indignation well gone now. Deciding the worst was over, he removed his waistcoat and went to work on his cravat.
“You are very sure that there is nothing of value there?” she asked.
“Only soil well suited to growing flowers.”
“How very odd that everyone assumes otherwise.”
“There is no accounting for it. I kept telling them the truth, but no one would hear me.”
She came over and finished untying his cravat. She used the two ends to pull his head down so she looked right in his eyes. “Castleford, have you been bad? Does mama have to punish you?”
He pried the ends of the cravat out of her hand. “If it is bad to let an ass be an idiot, I am guilty. As for that other question—I do not care for the mother game. I have never understood why some men do. I think it is distasteful on the hearing of it, and probably perverse in the doing.”
She looked startled. “There is actually such a game? How odd. Who would think of such a thing?”
“Daphne, whatever you could think of in your wildest imagination, there is a game for it and probably has been for a thousand years.” He pulled off his shirt and advanced on her. “For example, there is the lovely lady taken up against the wall game. I’ll show you how it is played.”
She listened to his heart beat while her own blood slowed. She loved lying like this, on top of him, surrounded by his arms and listening to his life and his breaths. It was one of the best intimacies, and very sweet after pleasure’s frenzy.
“You do know that I will keep my word,” he said. His hand stroked through her hair. “There is a good farm just over the Surrey line. Not far from where you are now, actually. I will have everything you have built moved there. We will put that eighty thousand in trust for you too, so you are never dependent again.”
“I knew that you would be good to your word. I did not doubt that.”
“Then you do not mind too much? It is another ten miles out. It will be harder for you to visit The Rarest Blooms in one day.”
“I will not be visiting. I will be living there.” She waited for him to argue or to sigh. Neither came. I will be living there, and very soon you will be glad for it.
“When do you think Latham will know that he paid all that money for nothing more than a moderate-size farm?”
“When he sends in his own men to find where to mine.”
“It was a good sum, even for him, I would think.”
“He will miss it badly, if that is what you mean. His estate is not exactly boundless. That branch of the family got all the goodness. My branch has all the financial sense.”
She turned her head and rested her chin on his chest so she could see his face. “You led him into this. I do not know how you did it, but I know that you did.”
He just looked at her.
“Why do you hate him so? Not because of me, I think. It is older than that. Deeper too.”
“I do not hate him. I find him irritating and boring.”
She rested her cheek on his chest again. If he did not want to speak of it, that was fine, but his reactions to Latham were not those of a man merely irritated and bored.
His fingers stroked her back absently, as if he were not even aware of the movement. That touch soothed her, however, until she melted against him.
“He played a game once, and I was the pawn,” he said. “It was as if he tested whether he could make me as dishonorable as he was. He made sure that the price of refusing to be so was very high.”
He told her a story then of a sojourn in France and a young woman named Marie.
“She expected to get the family lands back after the war, you see,” he said. “Everyone knew that the nobility would regain their estates lost in their revolution. Her land was in Gascony and produced superior wine, she said. The fools lined up to buy a share. I learned she had sold ten percent interests to at least forty different men, each