Taking the Earl (Heiress Games Book 3) Page 2

  And Lucy would do anything — anything — to win it.

  Chapter One

  One year later…near Maidenstone Abbey, August 1813

  Maximus Vale knew the value of careful preparation. He glanced through the carriage window, recognized the village of Salcombe, and flicked open his watch.

  They were exactly on schedule — not that a schedule would save them if it all went to hell.

  His sister Antonia, sitting across from him, snapped her watch shut and tucked it into a hidden pocket in her boot. “Half past four,” she said. “Cress, do you have the correct time?”

  Cressida rolled her eyes. “I’ve checked at least a dozen times since we left London.”

  “Check again,” Antonia said. “You and Atticus wouldn’t have gotten us into this mess if you’d paid attention to the details.”

  Max shot Antonia a look. She was right — but now was not the time to remind Cressida of her inexperience.

  Antonia shrugged off his silent rebuke. “I’d rather see Cress on time and angry than dancing for the hangman because she can’t be bothered to check her watch.”

  “No one is going to hang,” Max said.

  Cressida pulled her watch from her reticule. “Half past four,” she said smugly. “Remember, Antonia — you can’t give me orders when you’re my lady’s maid.”

  She said it as though the thought of Antonia playing her lady’s maid was the best part of the entire job. Antonia was unmoved. “I also can’t give you orders if you’re dead.”

  Max laughed. There wasn’t much to laugh about, but he needed to stay loose for the task ahead. “If the two of you would kill each other and be done with it, I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping you out of trouble this week. Care to go back to London instead of doing the job with me?”

  Antonia and Cressida were six years apart in age — and it felt like they were six decades apart in experience. When they’d all been orphaned, Max, Antonia, and Titus had ended up on the streets. They’d quickly been separated, and it had taken Max years to find Antonia and Titus again. But Cressida and Atticus had only been four and two. A distant cousin had taken them in to raise them.

  He’d known exactly where they were. They were safer in the country than they would ever be in London. Max might never have told them that their older siblings had survived, but he’d known when their cousin had died unexpectedly the previous year — and known that there wasn’t enough money for Cressida’s dowry or Atticus’s schooling.

  So he’d brought them to London, intending to keep them sheltered from the worst of what he, Antonia, and Titus had done to survive. There was enough money now to protect them — or there had been, before Atticus and Cressida had blundered their way through a robbery and come very close to being caught. Now they were all on the run. It was only a matter of time before Durrant, the man they’d tried to steal from, found them and took revenge.

  It didn’t help that Durrant was the man who had taught Max everything he knew about crime. Max had already bought his freedom from Durrant once. He wouldn’t be able to buy it again.

  Cressida still had an air of innocence that the rest had lost long ago. But the annoyed, determined looks Cressida and Antonia gave him after he suggested that they leave were identical.

  “Can’t let you have all the fun,” Cress said. “And it’s my fault we have to do this anyway.”

  “If you’re going to do this, I’m staying to watch your back,” Antonia added.

  Max still wanted to overrule them and send them home. He’d almost done it that morning, when Antonia had practiced arranging Cress’s hair and nearly set both their dresses on fire with the curling tongs. None of them were anywhere close to ready for the roles they’d have to play.

  But they could cover much more ground together than Max could alone. Which, after all, was a good thing. He would normally spend six months preparing for a job like this. They’d only had three weeks. They’d barely had time to do any reconnaissance at all after arriving in the neighborhood, beyond a quick midnight trip to the local parish church two nights earlier to alter the church records.

  Titus, whose forgeries were as good as they could be, had laughed all the way back to their temporary lodgings in Exeter. Max was less amused. Stealing was already a capital offense — if they were caught with the amount that Max intended to take, they’d either be hung or transported. But the forgery of official records was considered treason. Which meant, if they were discovered while they were still in England, Titus and Max could be drawn and quartered. The girls would be burned at the stake if the courts decided that they’d been involved in the forgeries as well.

  They would all die highly unpleasant deaths.

  But that was nothing compared to what Durrant could do to someone who displeased him.

  Antonia kicked his foot. “Are you having second thoughts?”

  There was a note to her voice that he hadn’t heard in years — half-trusting vulnerability overlaid with aggression, like she was ready to stab him or run at a moment’s notice.

  He flexed his fingers instinctively, as though preparing to lift a man’s watch — but it would still be a couple of days before he’d have to use his finger work. “No doubts. Only thinking of what I’ll steal first.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, her hand finding the place on her thigh where he knew she kept a knife. She’d pulled it on him seven years earlier, the night he’d found her in London, before realizing he was the brother she’d thought she’d lost.

  “The plan will work,” he said.

  “I still think we should’ve cut our losses and run,” she said.

  Max had thought of it — more than once. They could scatter, taking the last few pounds Max had left after preparing for this job, and hope that Durrant finally forgot the insult. It was the worst luck that Atticus and Cressida chosen Durrant’s house to try to prove their worth as thieves — Max would have warned them against it if they’d asked him.

  If they scattered, they would have to leave behind all the money Max had saved over the years. Atticus had been recognized while escaping Durrant’s house — he looked too much like Max. All their properties and boltholes were being watched.

  But they would live. Meagerly, dangerously, but they would live. And Max would be able to find his siblings again someday, no matter where they went into hiding — he’d done it before.

  The idea of rebuilding everything, though — of starting over on the streets with nothing — made his stomach clench. His body remembered what it was like to be hungry, even if he hadn’t felt those pangs in years.

  “Do you want to be poor again?” he asked. “Go back to stealing bread and trinkets or whatever else you stole to survive before we found each other?”

  She flinched, and he regretted his words immediately. He didn’t know half of what Antonia had seen or done in the years they were apart. Titus was a mystery, too. But Titus still laughed as easily as he had when he was seven. Antonia’s smile rarely reached her eyes.

  “I won’t go back,” she said. “So you’d best not have any doubts if you’re going to follow through with this plan. I’ll leave you to the hangman if I have to.”

  He didn’t think she meant it. But he wasn’t going to fail her like he had when their family had been broken up after their father’s death. “We will get through this together. I promise.”

  It was foolhardy to promise something like that. They had never been so ill-prepared for a job of this magnitude. But there was value in hope. And if hope didn’t work….

  There was always the knowledge that, if they failed, they’d likely all be dead within the month.

  They came to a stop. Max took a breath, exhaled, and smoothed the cuffs on his new suit.

  The carriage swayed as Titus jumped down from the driver’s seat. He opened the door for them, giving a bow that was only slightly exaggerated. “Welcome home, your lordship,” he said to Max, winking as he did so.

  Max stepped out
of the carriage. He’d seen Maidenstone Abbey from a distance during their reconnaissance missions, but this was the first time he’d seen it up close. The entrance hall alone would have housed their whole family with more room than they were accustomed to. Behind it, wings of varying ages and sizes stretched into the distance and reached for the sky, as monstrously large as any house he’d seen in his life.

  In the evening light, it looked almost mystical. Maidenstone Abbey had housed monks, murderers, marauders, and monarchs — and it had survived them all.

  Max had a sharp, sudden moment of doubt — a prickling along his spine, as though a knife was poised at his back. He didn’t belong here. He shouldn’t have brought his family — not when there was so much at stake.

  But his sisters were already coming out of the carriage. Titus helped Cressida, leaving Antonia to make her own way. Antonia was a maid named Parker now, and they had to treat her as such.

  “Lord have mercy,” Antonia muttered when she came to a stop behind him.

  A footman opened the grand double doors. There were twenty-eight steps leading up to the entryway; Max had counted them automatically. Twenty-eight steps before he would have to declare his intentions.

  Twenty-eight steps to change his mind.

  He offered his arm to Cressida. Titus and Antonia stayed behind. Cress’s hand trembled slightly on his arm as they took the first step.

  “We don’t have to do this,” he said quietly.

  Two. Three. Four. Five.

  “You know we do,” she replied, just as quietly.

  They all knew it. Atticus was safe for now, but he couldn’t stay hidden forever. Eventually, someone would find him. Max couldn’t do anything then, other than hope that Durrant would leave a body to be buried.

  Nineteen. Twenty.

  They needed a job lucrative enough to pay for all of them to start a life somewhere outside England. Maidenstone Abbey had stood for hundreds of years — and there were hundreds of years’ worth of treasures hidden there.

  Twenty-three.

  Twenty-four.

  He never would have thought of Maidenstone — he’d nearly forgotten the stories his father used to tell him, and why his father had given them all such ridiculous names. But the party that was currently happening at Maidenstone had filled the gossip columns for weeks. It was intended to settle the inheritance after the old earl’s death by providing husbands for the three Briarley cousins. Some of the most illustrious members of society would be in attendance.

  And where society went, so went their jewels.

  He knew just enough about the Briarley legacy to know where to start with his scheme. His father had always dreamed of grandeur, even though he had never been anything more than a minor merchant with a small tea shop. He’d found an old book about Maidenstone someplace, and he used to tell Max stories from it — stories of murder and mayhem, and of how they might have been earls instead of tea peddlers if fate had worked out differently.

  Max had never dreamed of grandeur. He much preferred to keep his siblings well-fed and well-clothed, not hungry and dreaming.

  Twenty-five.

  He drew a breath. His steps had slowed. If he felt any guilt over what he was about to do, he swallowed it after his next exhale. It was men like the former Lord Maidenstone whose debts had driven Max’s father to an early grave. It was Lord Maidenstone, in fact, who had ignored Max when he, aged twelve and extremely desperate, had tried to collect on his father’s accounts before the orphanage came to take him and his siblings away.

  Twenty-six.

  He needed this. And he could convince himself that the Briarleys deserved what he was about to do.

  Twenty-seven.

  Twenty-eight.

  He came to a stop at the top of the stairs. The footman looked him up and down. Max’s new suit gave exactly the impression it was intended to give. The footman bowed.

  “May I take your card, sir?” he asked.

  Max pulled a card from his coat. The footman read it, looking confused — probably unsure whether to show him to the drawing room or tell him to go away.

  Max needed to be admitted to the house — and to stay for a few days — for his plan to work. A few days was all it would take. But he had to convince the footman, and everyone after that, to take him seriously.

  “May I ask what is the nature of your visit?” the footman asked. “Miss Briarley and her guests are preparing for dinner.”

  Max had timed his arrival for that. He wanted as many people as possible to know that he had arrived so that it would be harder to turn him away.

  “I would hate to interrupt her dinner, of course,” he said, with a voice that said that was exactly what he intended to do. Confidence usually won the day, and he was going to overwhelm the man with confidence if he had to. “But you may tell her that the lost heir of Maidenstone has finally come home.”

  Chapter Two

  It was the tenth day of the house party. One would think that ten days would be enough to find a husband, especially when one was a potential heiress of Maidenstone.

  Instead, ten days had only proved to Lucy that her hopes of winning Maidenstone were dwindling fast.

  She stood next to Emma, the widowed Lady Maidenstone, as their guests gathered in the drawing room for dinner. Nearby, a group of women laughed together. Those girls were younger than Lucy, but they flirted easily with the gentlemen and chatted confidently with the ladies.

  Lucy smoothed her hands over her skirts. Her dress was just as nice as theirs — she’d bought a whole new wardrobe when Ferguson had ordered her to host this party.

  But clothing didn’t make much difference, she’d discovered. She was still Lucy.

  And she still hated all this nonsense.

  She looked away from the girls and surveyed the crowd. She had to admit that the drawing rooms looked lovely filled with people. The footmen moved seamlessly through the crowd, silently refreshing drinks. The maids had done an excellent job of refreshing the main rooms every morning — no one would notice the claret that a clumsy lordling had spilled on the carpet or the deep scratch on one of the carved side chairs that had been dug in by someone’s shoe buckle.

  She only had to survive another fortnight. But if she didn’t find a husband, she would have to start thinking of where she and Julia would go next.

  None of the options were pleasant.

  “You look ill,” Emma whispered. “Do you want to plead a headache? I can entertain the guests tonight.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I have to stay. I’m running out of time.”

  Emma took a closer look at her and grabbed her arm. “Let’s take a stroll on the terrace,” she said, steering Lucy toward the door.

  Emma rarely ordered Lucy to do anything. Technically, she was the dowager countess and the lady of the house until it was inherited by one of the cousins. But she had always been content to let Lucy arrange everything.

  Today, though, she clearly had something else on her mind. “You aren’t going to find love if you keep comparing every man to a checklist,” Emma said firmly, as soon as they were far enough away from the windows that they wouldn’t be overheard.

  “I can’t see that it signifies. I need a husband, not a lover. And anyway, none of them has offered for me.”

  “Does it occur to you that they haven’t offered because you’ve made no sign of being interested in them?”

  “That’s not fair,” Lucy said.

  Emma leveled a look at her.

  Lucy grinned. “Very well, I haven’t expressed any interest. But they should have fallen all over themselves for the chance to win Maidenstone. And I’ve behaved myself perfectly. You would think that one of them, at least, would have asked me to marry them by now.”

  Until today, it hadn’t rankled quite so much that no one had taken an interest in her. It seemed rational that no one would have proposed yet — how could anyone decide to marry someone that quickly? And she’d been too busy with the party to get
to know many of the suitors anyway.

  But while Lucy had run herself ragged overseeing everything with enough rigor to make an admiral proud, her cousins had arrived and made love matches. Callista had snared the Duke of Thorington even though she had arrived straight off a ship looking for all the world like a daring privateer — which, it turned out, she was. And Octavia — Octavia — had immediately attracted Lord Rafael, Thorington’s brother.

  That morning, Callista and Thorington had married.

  That afternoon, Octavia and Rafe had disappeared together.

  And Lucy was no closer to a match than she’d ever been.

  “If someone had offered for you, would you have said yes?” Emma asked.

  “Of course,” Lucy said.

  “No matter who it was?”

  Lucy couldn’t think of a single suitor who excited her — but she didn’t exactly hate any of them. She wrinkled her nose. “I can’t say I would have been happy to say yes. But you married my grandfather for security. You surely can understand why I would say yes to someone uninteresting for the sake of winning Maidenstone.”

  “My situation was different. Marrying him paid my entire family’s debts. And anyway, I knew that it wouldn’t be forever. No offense meant, of course.”

  “So do you suggest that I marry an old man?”

  Emma laughed. “No. But I was lucky. Lord Maidenstone became a good friend. We loved each other, in our own way. And he was vastly interesting, even when he was as irritating as any man I’d met in my life. You’ll die of boredom within a week if you marry one of the men here.”

  “My duty isn’t to enjoy myself. My duty is to Maidenstone, and to keeping Julia safe.”

  Julia and Mrs. Pearce had moved to a small cottage a mile away from Maidenstone — if any guests happened to pass by, they would assume Julia was a tenant’s child, not Lucy’s. Lucy made time to sneak away and see Julia every day, but it wasn’t enough.

  “But your grandfather didn’t want you to see Maidenstone as your duty,” Emma pointed out.