Page 24 of Silence of Deceit
“Oh, I see.” Her voice might have been soft, but it burned with temper. “So long as you get the information you want, my help is warranted.”
Hugh stood back at her unexpected bad humor.
“You’re angry with me,” he observed. “Why?”
“I am not angry. I’m hurt. It’s not me you trust or value. It’s my ability.”
Guilt whipped him, hot and sudden. He recoiled from it.
“They are one and the same, are they not? Your ability does not have its own autonomy,” he argued.
She stormed past him, toward the door. Then stopped and spun back. “If all I saw when I held that ring was your arrogant face staring back at me, would you still want me here? Would you still have sent Sir to track me down and bring me to you?”
Hugh’s tongue went heavy and useless. His instant retort was something he could not say. That he wanted her everywhere, in each room he stepped into. And that another reason he’d had Sir track her down and bring her here because he’d needed to be sure she was safe. But speech eluded him, and Audrey took his silence as answer.
She jutted her chin, her eyes glassy, and opened her mouth to speak. But nothing emerged. Audrey rushed from the room, and Hugh swore under his breath. What a bloody disaster.
“Audrey, wait.” He chased after her, but she would not be persuaded to slow. “Please, just stop.”
She hesitated on the landing. The footman averted his eyes and maintained a stoic staring contest with a portrait on the wall.
“There is nothing you can say,” she replied, her voice quavering as she kept her own cool stare on the foyer below.
Damn it all to hell.Hugh tore the calling card he’d been deliberating over from his waistcoat pocket and extended it to her.
“Here.”
Her eyes flicked to it. “What is it?”
“Just take it,” Hugh said, his own temper now unchecked.
With a scowl, Audrey sighed and with her gloves on again, plucked it from his fingers.
“It’s the duke’s calling card,” he said.
She sent him a withering stare, as if to say,I know that, you fool.
He didn’t know why he was letting her have it, or what good it would do. Nor did he know how it could help dispel her fury. Maybe it couldn’t. But it was all he could think to do in the moment.
“I found it in the silver case with the others,” he added.
A clever light flashed in her eyes. She gave a small gasp, and then continued down the stairs and out the front door like a storm wind.
ChapterEight
Audrey slammed the study door behind her, startling Philip straight out of the chair behind his desk.
“Audrey, what in the—”
She held the calling card aloft, crossed the Aubusson rug, and slapped it onto the blotter in front of him. “Delia was blackmailing you.”
Stone-faced, Philip nudged the corner of the card. “I did not know her name, but after our outing with Marsden to the dead house, I figured… I speculated that it was her.”
Audrey’s stomach plummeted toward her knees. “How could you not tell me you were being blackmailed?”
A silly question, in view of everything she already knew from Mrs. Simpson and Lady Rumsford. He’d certainly been required not to breathe a word about it.
How long would it have taken her to figure out her own husband was one of her friend’s victims? No, notfriend. Delia couldn’t be that, not if she would stoop to such manipulation. She had not run into Audrey by chance on Bond Street any more than she had run into Mary. It had been calculated. A money-making venture. Though, one she had not been operating alone.
