“Then how could the twenty thousand pounds possibly all be gone?”
He gave an indifferent shrug. “I assume it isn’t all gone.”
Artemis felt her brow crinkle. Here was a point where definition was decidedly lacking. “I don’t understand.”
Bran leaned back in his chair and stared at her, his head cocked and his arms crossed over his chest. He looked … perplexed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe I took the twenty thousand pounds from your mother?”
Twenty thousand pounds.
A sum of money hefty enough to shock a room into silence.
“You think I took the money,” he said.
Yes.
Her tongue, however, tangled on itself and refused to speak the word.
“You’ve thought it these last ten years.”
“Well, didn’t you?” Even as she asked, she understood the question was aired out of reflex rather than conviction.
“No.”
The breath caught in her lungs.
She believed him.
That was the thing.
Which meant all these years she’d believed an untruth.
She couldn’t fathom that it had been an outright lie. Mother wouldn’t go that far. Yet, even as she wanted to turn away from the very possibility, she sought definition on another point. “What gave you the idea that I would have married Stoke or any man for his title?”
She found herself clutching her fork very tightly.
A humorless laugh sounded across the table. “Stoke himself.”
“But I … we …” she stammered, stunned and bewildered. “Your brother and I haven’t exchanged more than ten words in our entire lives.”
Actually, that wasn’t exactly true.
Recently, at Blake Deverill’s house party at Primrose Park, she’d had something approaching an entire conversation with the drunken sot.
How could your mother have gotten it so upside down, anyway?
Those had been Stoke’s words when she’d pressed him about theirmisunderstandingon the night he’d attempted to propose to her. At the time, she’d taken it for a drunken jape, but now she wasn’t sure what it had been about.
Or rather, perhaps she was a little more sure, but what she was becoming sure of was too extraordinary to consider with any seriousness.
Oh.
She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Bran said, “Oh?”
She shook her head, but a single word wouldn’t rattle loose.
