“Not precisely.” He was about to add that he’d turned his father’s illicit enterprise into a prosperous legitimate shipping company, but thought better of it. Not that he wanted to hide things from her, but damn it, his hands were tied.
It was no fault of his he was stuck in this situation. He’d been wracking his brain for a believable excuse to continue playing the highwayman, and she’d just dropped one in his lap. Never mind that he could support Caldwell Manor ten times over. She didn’t have to know that. Not right now.
“When I tell my brothers—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell them anything. I promised them I’d stop the highway robbery.”
“No, you didn’t. You ducked that issue cleverly.” She was entirely too perceptive for his comfort. “If you stop, the children will suffer, and I couldn’t bear to be responsible for that. I was an orphan, myself.”
“Aye, well, any feeling human being would be sympathetic to their plight.” Trick’s mind raced, searching for a way to avoid these secrets and lies. But he saw no choice. He’d promised King Charles he wouldn’t breathe a word of the real purpose behind the highwayman ruse.
He sneaked Kendra a guilty glance. She twisted her hands in her lap, and the imported lace fell back from her wrist, leaving it bare. “Why aren’t you wearing the amber bracelet?”
“It doesn’t go with this plain gown.”
He wondered why he found her flip answer so disturbing. “Are you still mad at me for being a duke?”
“I’m not sure what I feel. I don’t like being lied to.” Though she directed those words to the sky, she soon looked back to him. “Did you feel abandoned as a child?”
“In a sense,” he said slowly, wishing he could go back in time and start this marriage right. He didn’t want it to end up like his own parents’. “My father took me from my mother when I was ten. I’d seen him but a few times over the years, and I’d never been more than a dozen miles from our home in Scotland.” The caleche bumped over a particularly rocky stretch of the path, and he reached to steady Kendra. “He took me to France. A cold man, was my father. He wanted me only to further his business dealings.”
“His business dealings?” She subtly shifted away from his touch. “He was a duke, was he not?”
“An impoverished one. He lost everything, including Amberley, helping finance the war. Upon the restoration, King Charles returned his title and land to him. But believe me, Father could never have abandoned the old manor house and built that mansion without the enterprise that sustained him through the Commonwealth years. He was ruthless, underhanded—not a man one would be happy to claim as a relation.”
“What was this enterprise?”
“He traded in spirits, among other things. Madeira was his ticket to riches. Every bottle that graced the tables at the courts—French and English alike—passed through his hands.” He hesitated, then decided to come clean with it. Enough secrets stood between the two of them already. “He was a smuggler.”
She gasped. “A smuggler?”
“Aye. One doesn’t amass a fortune paying import taxes—at least not on the scale that he managed. You can see now why I elected not to continue his enterprise, no matter that it was highly lucrative.” And since that half-truth caused him no small discomfort, he added, “As I was only a pawn in his game, you can see as well why it is I felt orphaned as a child.”
Some small measure of honesty, at least.
“But your mother—”
“She let me go,” he said, the words calm and unemotional though he ached with an inner pain that would never ease. “Any warmth or love she showed me was naught but a facade. Elspeth Caldwell is a wicked woman. A Covenanter, plotting against king and country.” Crickets chirped as they drove beneath a canopy of trees silhouetted against the cerulean sky. “And a loose woman, besides.”
“How would you know all that? You were ten when you left.”
“In eighteen years, she never once tried to reclaim me, or even make contact. In all that time, I haven’t seen so much as one letter. Blackguard that my father was, I believe what he told me where she was concerned.”
The details were hazy; no matter how much he’d pressed, his father had refused to discuss his marriage. But Trick had pieced enough of the man’s rantings together to figure the gist was true.
Still, he’d never approved of the way his father hadn’t tried to make something of the union. Even when Trick was young, his parents had lived completely separate lives. Sadly, he could now see all too easily how such a thing could happen.
“Tomorrow I need to go to London,” he said.
Her eyes danced. “I love London. Have you a house in town?”
“Aye. And I’m sure you’ll find it every bit as disgustingly opulent as Amberley House.” He smiled on the outside, but cringed internally. “I’ll be going alone this time, though.”
“Oh.” The light in her eyes died. “Why?”
He had to leave—he’d actually, before this whirlwind of a wedding had come up, been planning to leave today. His shipping company needed his attention. The shipping company that he’d decided to keep secret from her for the time being, lest she figure out he could well afford to support the orphanage without resorting to robbery.
“I had arranged it,” he said dismissively, “before we met.”
