When her eyes opened again, she found him sitting cross-legged beside her, fully dressed, his head bent over the maps she’d purloined from Barrington’s desk. His expression looked dark in thought.
Trepidation roused her to full alertness. “Alex,” she whispered, and he lifted his chin to meet her eyes, and smiled.
That smile was like the sunrise for her. She smiled back at him. Stubble darkened his angular jaw, and his brown hair was rumpled. She tentatively reached up to brush a stray lock from his forehead. Fully a wicked woman now, with license to do such shocking and unspeakable things as to lie around with a man not one’s husband, and handle his overlong hair with a tenderness too spiced by desire to be anything bordering on virtue.
“Good morning,” he said. He leaned forward to kiss her ear. His tongue curled around her lobe as he withdrew, sending a shiver through her. “Coffee?” he asked, and waved toward a small clay pot on the nearby table. “Madame Gauthier just delivered it.”
“No,” she said, and pushed herself up into a sitting position. The maps niggled at her.
He followed her look. “These seemed to alarm you last night. I can’t make heads or tails of them.”
“Oh?” She picked them up. She had not given them a long look the night before, but as she flipped through them now, her suspicions clarified. “They’re survey maps.”
“Yes,” he said. “I gathered that much. But why did you find them significant?”
She cleared her throat and selected two particular sheets. “This,” she said, lying the sheets out side by side.
He moved closer, his shoulder brushing hers. “Explain to me what I’m looking at. A map of some kind. Topographical?”
The proximity, the casual way he reached out to stroke the back of her neck, made her dizzy. She willed herself to focus. The map consisted of shaded lines and polymorphous shapes, colored variously to signify different qualities of land. “Yes,” she said, “it’s the typical surveyor’s map, the sort drawn up when assessing the value of a property, or proposing to alter it. They come in very useful when designing a parkland. You’ve got various pieces of information here: elevation, soil composition, water tables . . .” She pulled a desperate face. “Drainage and so on. Above all, drainage! After the first redesign of the gardens at Heaton Dale, the pond started draining into the Grecian folly. Put quite a damper on the classical feel. Athens as swampland.”
He laughed. “But there’s something amiss with these maps?”
“Not with the maps per se,” she said. “Only . . .” She spread out the maps in pairs, keeping aside the widowed seventh. “Do you see?”
He considered them row by row. “Only three properties here, with copies of each.”
“Yes. The same topography,” she said. “The same surveyor, as well—you see the name at the bottom, one Mr. Hopkins. But you see how certain of the shadings are different?”
His eyes narrowed. “Very good catch,” he said softly.
She smiled. “The swampland gave me a powerful motive to learn to read these things. Certainly I no longer trusted the contractors so blindly! At any rate, one of these is false. Only I don’t know the key for the shadings, so I can’t guess which element has been falsified.”
An unpleasant smile twisted his lips. “I can,” he said. “Soil composition, you say? Would that comprise information on mineral deposits?”
“Of course,” she said. “Oh. You think—”
“I think land without significant mineral assets would sell more cheaply.” He paused. “Heverley End, for instance, sits on some very rich copper and tin deposits. One would think that Gerry would know that, but then, perhaps that’s why he’s so damned stubborn in his refusal to discuss the sale. If he were given altered survey data that obscured the mineral wealth . . . and he believed it . . . then the price of the estate would drop significantly.” His smile faded. “Still doesn’t explain why he sold it in the first place, of course.”
“Well.” She hesitated. “Heaven knows men do strange things. None of us are perfect.”
“Oh, Gerry offers ample evidence of imperfection. But not in matters like this.” He lifted her hair away from her neck, idly toying with a strand as he gazed past her toward some invisible thought. “Death before dishonorable profit,” he said lightly.
There was some curious emphasis in his tone, which all at once she divined. Gerry would not stoop to profit. That was Alex’s role.
“Oh, dear,” she said sardonically. “However will you play the black sheep now that Lord Weston is in on the game?”