“Now, we talked about that, and about the benefits of that match to you. Come back with me. All is not lost on that account.”
Adam rested his hips against the desk’s edge. He removed a folded vellum document from his frock coat and set it down. “There will be no match. Here is the special license. You paid for it, so you may as well have it.”
Nigel fingered the vellum, then tossed it in the fire. Once more he tapped the letter Adam had sent. “What did you mean by the threat in it?” He picked it up and read: “ ‘If you do not want your family, the peerage, and all the realm to know about Amelia Dunham, send your coach to her home two days after Christmas. I will explain all later.’” He threw it down. “Who in hell is Amelia Dunham?”
Adam tossed the letter into the fire to join the license. “I had intended to have this out with you after I returned from Scotland, but we may as well do it now since you are here.”
“Of course I am here, when my own cousin threatens me.” His voice boomed in the little space they shared.
“Swallow your anger until you hear something insulting and wrong. You seduced Amelia at your county fete last summer. She will name you publicly if necessary. She was an innocent, and my guess is she hardly comprehended what you were about until it was too late.” He paused. “I will accept it was a seduction, and not something worse.”
“Are you judging me?You?That is a fine joke.”
“For all my sins, I never ruined an innocent. It isn’t done, and you know it. Worse, you did it as an act of revenge. Her father would not sell you some land you wanted. Her sister had just refused again. How much will it cost you to change the route of the canal you wanted to build there, with that land not open to you?”
Nigel’s face reddened. “Thousands. Fool man. Stupid woman. Stubborn, the two of them. I offered more than it was worth, too.”
“I doubt that.”
“So you know of my little indiscretion. I don’t care.”
“I don’t think the gentlemen in your clubs will think it so little. I am sure your wife will not. She tolerates your mistresses. A bastard born of an innocent you ruined is another matter.”
Nigel’s face fell. “The girl is with child?”
“She is at that.”
His cousin recovered. “And the price of your silence is a carriage to take you to Scotland?”
Adam sat in the other chair and stretched out his legs. “I am not so good as to stop there. I want much more than that. A settlement for the girl, for one thing. That is the only proper thing to do. Shall we say enough in trust to provide an income of five hundred a year?”
Nigel chewed his lower lip. “Only if she keeps the child. And if it is a boy, I want to see him from time to time.”
“I think that can be arranged. You will see him, but he will not see you. There is one other thing you must do.”
“There isn’t anything I must do, damn it. But let us have it.”
“Galahad.”
“I’ll not be selling you Galahad. Or giving him to you, or anyone else.”
“Not sell. This spring, however, you will send him here to be bred with some mares, so Crestview can rebuild its bloodlines and expand again. Two months of his services are all that is needed.” He averted his gaze. “I have chosen to believe you did not play a long game, and deliberately ruin Dunham with that massacre of his horses so he would be amenable to a land sale.”
Silence fell beside him. Nigel might have ceased breathing, it grew so quiet. He glanced over to see his cousin looking down at the carpet. And in that instant those blue eyes glanced up and their gazes met. Nigel might appear cowed, but a ruthless star sparkled in his eye.
He had indeed played that long game. Adam’s chest thickened. In that moment he knew that his dealings with Nigel would only be the most formal sort in the future. He would never be friends with this man again.
“What did you want that damned carriage for? Damned inconvenient to bring it. Scotland, you said.”
“In an hour or so I will depart, along with Miss Dunham. Caroline Dunham. We are getting married.”
Nigel was on his feet in a snap. “The hell you say. I’ll not have it. It will be the end of the allowance you get. This family is a thorn in my side and if you marry into it I am done with you.” He paced and ranted for several minutes.
Adam just waited.
He saw the exact moment when Nigel’s good sense broke through the cloud of bluster in his head and he realized what this marriage meant. No more cursing then. Only quiet contemplation. That star began sparkling again. “If you are married to her, you control her land.”
“Not to sell. I won’t have that right, of course. But the use of it, yes, as her husband that will be mine, assuming her sister is agreeable to my intentions.”
