“Shaw must have kept the damning document, blackmailed Edmund with it, and threatened Edmund that if anything were to happen to him, it would be made public.” Daniel had started to pace, but he stopped. “It is little wonder Edmund spent a fortnight drinking himself sick over my father’s death.”
“Hmph,” Taunton emitted his usual eloquent opinion. “That still circles us back to the same question. What the devil can it be?”
“It is something Abel Shaw planned to give you, making you privy to the betrayal.” Julia added to Daniel’s words. “Edmund must be afraid you would make it public rather than collude with him to bury the scandal. Because you have integrity and he does not,” Julia said, her chin jutted out firmly and her eyes shining as they met his.
He beamed back at her. Murder, mayhem, and betrayals forgotten. For the moment, there was just Julia and how magnificent she was.
“Hmph.”
Taunton’s grunt snapped him out of his reverie. Damned if his cheeks didn’t burn.
Julia covered her mouth, barely stifling her laughter.
Grinning, he yanked his eyes from hers, needing to focus. “It has to be something that irrevocably tarnishes the illustrious title, for God knows, that is all Edmund gives a whit about.” Weariness settled over him, as they kept traveling over the same well-trodden path.
“What if you and Edmund aren’t the rightful heirs,” Taunton suggested.
He blinked. “Pardon?”
“Your parents were in despair over getting an heir to the dukedom. Your mother had lost so many children, Daniel, a full dozen. What if when she died, the child she birthed died with her?” He waved his brandy glass as if to direct them to fill in the rest.
“What and two changelings were placed in our stead?” he said, unable to hide his amusement.
“Daniel,” Julia chastised, but her own eyes were alight with laughter.
“My apologies, sir,” he said.
Taunton shrugged, unperturbed. “Considering I haven’t noticed any fairy wings on you, I suppose it is farfetched.”
“No. No wings, but I have a birthmark that every other generation of the Bedford lineage has inherited, and we have my grandmère’s unusual eye color.
“A birthmark?” Julia perked up. “I did not see any . . .” She snapped her mouth closed, and her cheeks bloomed a bright rose.
Taunton simply gave her a long look, but returned to the subject at hand. “It was a thought. Do you have any better?”
He shook his head, unable to summon a single idea.
Julia frowned, her ideas apparently depleted as well.
After a prolonged silence, Taunton gave him a curt nod. “Right. So then, we need to find that document before Edmund does. I approve of your idea of hiring this Weasel fellow, but I suggest we broaden the net and employ some private investigators. I also think we should return to Taunton Court. You make an easy target here, this city bursting with too many people, few of them honest. I like my odds on my own land, with my own people, where strangers would be noticed. Also, Edmund will be in London for a while, tied up with the little matter of severing a betrothal contract. Let us go home, build our defenses, strategize some more, and form our line of attack.”
“Yes, let’s,” Julia agreed.
Daniel sought Julia’s gaze, and his heart warmed at her look of determination.
He was not alone. He had friends and family who believed in him.
He had Julia.
Chapter Twenty-five
JULIA paced a well-worn path in her room, wringing her hands. The other night in the library, she had wondered if the passion she and Daniel had shared was enough to sustain a marriage. It had been the wrong question to ask. She had another, far more pressing concern. What she needed to know was if one person’s love for another was enough to bolster a marriage?
She had no answer for that question either. And it frightened her, for she desperately needed one because she had fallen completely, madly, irrevocably in love with Daniel.
He was intelligent, caring, amusing, and kind. He loved her business sense and her forthright stare. He thought her clever and brilliant. Most important, he filled the empty chambers in her heart.
She thought she knew what debilitating grief was, having witnessed her father’s and sister’s, but to truly understand grief, she had to find someone whose loss she would mourn deeply. Someone whose disappearance from her life would carve a hole deep inside of her. She had never grieved over Edmund. Theirs was a contractual arrangement based on duty, not love. Never love, she knew now.
It was different with Daniel.
She loved him.
She wanted a marriage like her parents’, and what Emily had with Jason. But more than any of that, she wanted Daniel. She wanted him whole and alive and to be hers. She was beginning to think he was all she had ever wanted, and that she had been waiting for him for her entire life. He was the something more for which she had yearned. And if he sailed home to Boston, then she would go with him. But as he was rebuilding Lakeview Manor, she had hopes to get him to stay here . . . with her.