How to Catch a Duke, Grace Burrowes [short books to read .txt] 📗

with intent to steal and to contemplating extortion. Your criminal acts are undertaken not to protect anybody’s reputation, but simply to advance your own interests.”

Fleming sat forward, elbows braced on his thighs. “My sister plays too deeply, Harmonia barely spares me the time of day, Stapleton is getting on and hasn’t an heir to his influence in the Lords. The boy…Champlain’s son could use a stepfather. What is so wrong about taking some old letters that simply prove what everybody knows? Champlain was a titled trollop.”

A sharp crack resounded and Fleming’s left cheek turned bright pink.

Chapter Fourteen

“Well done, Lady Champlain,” Abigail said. “A gentleman does not speak ill of the dead.” Not before the man’s widow, in any case, and not when that woman had apparently had quite enough of being told what to do by the men in her life.

“Damn it, Fleming, you do have the letters,” Stapleton said, rising from his chair and bracing himself on the desk blotter. “You found them, you hid them, and now some damned housebreaker has taken them. Admit it! My son’s reputation, the reputation of this house, is in the hands of one of your enemies. I knew I should never have taken you into my confidence.”

“But you didn’t take him into your confidence, did you?” Stephen mused. “The problem with the letters isn’t that they confirm Champlain’s reputation as a”—he spared Lady Champlain an apologetic smile—“bon vivant, but that they prove he was kicking his heels in France at the time his son was conceived. The current heir to the Stapleton title is a cuckoo in the nest, and the letters, dated and highly descriptive of the locations in which they were written, prove that conclusively.”

Lady Champlain’s complexion went from pale to translucent, confirming that Stephen had deduced the why of the whole imbroglio. Champlain could have been the world’s greatest libertine and merited only a few raised eyebrows.

Not so, Lady Champlain.

“You can’t know that,” her ladyship said, sinking onto the sofa. “Nobody can know that. I met Champlain in Paris that year, and we found a country house to rent until summer. Nobody can know…”

“We know it now,” Abigail said gently.

At the desk, the marquess was silent, his gaze fixed on the portrait hanging over the mantel.

“Well, hell,” Fleming muttered. “If I’d known that’s why you were looking for—”

Abigail hefted her reticule. “Hush, lest I heed his lordship’s guidance regarding where I aim my second blow. You are a walking verification of the theory that excessive inbreeding has rendered the aristocracy mentally unfit.”

“I wanted to destroy the blasted letters,” Stapleton said. “That’s all I sought, to destroy them. I would have never known about them, except Champlain kept journals of his travels, for posterity, I suppose, and he noted when he wrote to whom. Her ladyship was his Sunday correspondent, Miss Abbott he wrote to twice a week. As if he feared she’d forget a marquess’s heir the moment he took ship.”

Would that I had. Stephen was watching Abigail, and she realized he had more to say but was waiting for her permission to say it.

“You’ve had Champlain’s journals for years,” Abigail observed. “Why set your highwaymen and housebreakers on me now?”

Stapleton, who’d aged about twenty years in five minutes, twisted a ring on his fourth finger. “The boy turns six next week. He’ll soon be old enough to be interested in his father’s—in Champlain’s—journals. I read through them to make sure there’s nothing a lad ought not to see regarding his father. The journals are surprisingly dull given my son’s proclivities, but then I noticed the pattern of his correspondence, and I knew something had to be done.”

“But the boy isn’t your grandson,” Fleming said. “Why go to all that trouble when the child isn’t even your blood?”

“I didn’t realize he wasn’t my grandson until recently, and what does that matter? He’ll be the next Marquess of Stapleton, and he’s just a little boy. I want to blame Harmonia, but Champlain was…he was a difficult husband. One must concede the obvious.”

Lady Champlain had regained some of her color. “Champlain wasn’t a bad man, he simply had more growing up to do.”

Abigail could not be so generous, but she could keep her judgments to herself. Champlain’s character, or lack thereof, no longer interested her.

“I don’t have the letters,” she said. “Somebody stole them earlier this year. By the time Lord Fleming was plaguing me and holding up stagecoaches, I no longer had them. I had read them often enough to be able to reconstruct them fairly well, hence, Lord Stephen was able to divine the impact of the dates.” Perhaps Abigail in some corner of her heart hadn’t wanted to see the possibilities, but then, she’d had no idea of the precise age of the Stapleton heir. “I would like the letters back, though. They are all I have…they are mementos of…”

All I have of my son. That reality was too personal to be aired in this company—too personal, and too painful.

Stephen held out a hand to her, and Abigail took it.

“Miss Abbott wants her letters back. Lady Champlain, you will please return them.”

Abigail rested against him, and perched as he was against the desk, he provided a sturdy support. The impact of his conclusion—that Champlain’s wife had stolen the letters—frankly caught her unaware.

But it made sense. Her ladyship would do anything to protect her son, and Abigail respected that.

“You took them to safeguard the boy,” Stephen said, “or perhaps to get Stapleton under control—God knows that thankless task should fall to somebody. The letters have served their purpose, Stapleton knows the slender thread by which his consequence dangles, but he also knows your own reputation will suffer should you disclose the child’s origins. Give the letters back, or I will take matters into my own hands.”

Abigail had missed Stephen, missed the scent of him, the hard, muscular feel of his body. She might have, eventually, suspected the petite, pretty Lady Champlain of taking the letters, but not in