The Winterley Scandal by Elizabeth Beacon

Author:Elizabeth Beacon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2016-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

‘Please sit down, Hancourt,’ Lord Farenze said the next morning with a wave at the chair on the other side of his desk.

‘Thank you, my lord.’

The dreams Colm had had last night made him angry with his mind for the fantasies it indulged in when he wasn’t looking, so he hated to think what Miss Winterley’s father would have to say about them if he knew. He met the man’s almost-smile and waited for his host to say what he wanted.

‘I suppose you think me rude for summoning you here like this?’

‘You have something to say and I am here to listen, my lord.’

‘You don’t give much away, do you, Hancourt?’

‘Not if I can avoid it, Lord Farenze.’

‘It’s all right, I didn’t ask you here to warn you off again.’

‘Thank you,’ Colm said tightly.

He felt as if he was turning his back on something unique, but he would ignore this need to spend any moment he could contrive in Miss Winterley’s company. They didn’t have the mutual need, courage and passion to seize the present and damn the past. They were not in love and they would have to be fathoms deep in that to find a way round the obstacles that lay between them like razor-sharp rocks waiting to scupper them.

‘I thought you would want to know what I learned from my late wife’s diaries, since you found them and have a valid interest in parts of them.’

Colm wondered what good could come from Pamela’s incendiary outpourings, but kept silent and waited.

‘I have read them and the papers her landlord sent here after her death,’ Lord Farenze said stiffly. ‘There are questions about your father’s affairs nobody seems to have picked up when he and my first wife died together and some secret he refused to reveal even to Pamela and she found that very irritating needless to say. I have presumed and asked a friend to find out when your fortune went missing and if some of it might be recoverable so many years on.’

Colm hated the idea of someone else knowing the full depths of his father’s folly, but was almost convinced Lord Farenze meant well, as long as Colm avoided his daughter.

‘You think me interfering?’ his lordship asked with a cool look.

‘I’m not sure I want to know how my father wasted my money. I don’t want the old scandal woken up again and would not have thought you would either.’

‘The man I speak of is so close mouthed he hardly lets his right hand know what the left is doing.’

Colm thought through the formidable set of noblemen this man belonged to. Sir Gideon Laughraine trailed a bigger scandal than even Colm had behind him, but the one-time lawyer was said to know more secrets than the whole of the government put together. If he was the man Lord Farenze was refusing to name, Colm had little reason to fear his father’s secret would leak out by accident.

‘I don’t want my sister to suffer any more than she already has from our father’s idiocy,’ he admitted gruffly.

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