skill at Sedgewick’s command, he kept letting Beau know who was at fault and it wasn’t the nanny.
The brighter illumination of the room didn’t really help. Maggie’s face was like a white mask, completely expressionless. Beau watched her pick up her glass of claret and take a swig. Not champagne tonight, he thought with acid satisfaction. He’d told Sedgewick to serve a good red. The champagne days were over for Nanny Stowe at Rosecliff. No doubt she could buy it for herself soon enough with the missing million.
She had to have that million squirrelled away somewhere.
It was the obvious answer.
Yet she had flatly denied taking any money from his grandfather apart from her wage. And she had scorned him for not looking beyond the obvious.
The woman was a wretched torment. He glared at her as he picked up his glass of wine, needing a good dose of full-bodied claret to ease the angst she’d given him. She didn’t look up from her dinner. Since she’d sat down to it, she hadn’t met his gaze once. Beau was left with the strong impression she had wrapped a shield around herself and comprehensively shut him out. Her stony silence reinforced it.
The urge to smash it down spurred him into speech. “What did you do after you left Wilgilag?”
Very slowly, reluctantly, she lifted her head. Her eyes glittered like sapphires. “If you want ammunition against me, find it yourself, Mr. Prescott,” she said flatly.
Her reply gave him no joy nor satisfaction. Having made him feel like a slime, she returned her attention to her meal and continued eating. Beau couldn’t stomach any more food. She had his gut twisted into knots.
“I simply want to know more about you, Maggie,” he defended, trying to beat off the sense of being in the wrong. Very badly in the wrong.
She shook her head, not bothering to even glance up at him.
Beau seethed with frustration. He couldn’t make her talk. He recalled the artless, open way she had bubbled on before he’d put in the jab about millionaires and savagely wished he’d held his tongue on that point.
Yet had it been artless or artful? Truth or lies? Impossible to know until he’d checked out what she’d told him. One thing was certain. Because of his stupid gaffe in revealing his own train of thought, she was not about to hand him any more information about herself.
He emptied his glass and signalled to Sedgewick to refill it. The action was performed without comment, without eye contact. Beau felt himself being cold-shouldered on more than one front.
Was he wrong about Maggie Stowe? Was he hopelessly, foolishly, hurtfully wrong? He couldn’t deny that her passionate defence of her relationship with his grandfather had struck chords of truth. And guilt.
Perhaps he’d been lonely.
Those words hit hard. Beau doubted this situation would ever have arisen if he hadn’t stayed away so long. Or if he’d found the time and the woman to marry and have children—which was what his grandfather had most wanted, an extension of the family line. Having plenty of friends did not provide the same sense of closeness and caring as having someone who belonged to you, who was there all the time.
Beau could even see now why his grandfather had chosen to take Maggie Stowe in and make her one of his family...a flower-seller with the potential to be much more, given the means and the guidance. “She’s going to be my creation,” he’d boasted to Lionel Armstrong, and he would have revelled in the role of Henry Higgins; the achievement of it, the sheer theatre of making someone over and producing a star, the heady reward of her appreciative response to his teaching.
If Maggie Stowe had really had an underprivileged life, why wouldn’t she be eager to try everything on offer, hungry for it, loving it? It made sense. The only fly in that ointment was the missing million, which suggested she could be a very clever con woman.
Beau just couldn’t let that go. Not without knowing more. A lot more. He cursed himself again for letting his advantage slip. She was on guard against him now. He’d have to work other angles and hope something pertinent would turn up.
It startled him out of his dark reverie when she rose abruptly from her chair. She laid her refolded napkin on the table and looked directly at him, making his heart kick at the renewed link between them.
“I beg to be excused, Mr. Prescott,” she said with quiet dignity. “I am not feeling well.”
Which left him no loophole for insisting she stay. Beau set his glass down and rose to his feet, courtesy demanding he let her go gracefully. “I’m sorry. If there’s anything you require...”
“No. Thank you.” She turned to the butler. “Sedgewick, please apologise to Jeffrey for me. I know he will have prepared a special sweets course. Perhaps Mr. Prescott will have two helpings to make up for my leaving it.”
“I’ll ensure Jeffrey understands, Nanny Stowe,” Sedgewick returned kindly, drawing her chair back for easier movement.
“Thank you.”
She walked the length of the table with the carriage of a queen, yet when she paused by Beau, he saw she was trembling, and her face was so bloodless he wondered if she were really ill. Her eyes were no longer glittering. They reflected a sickness of soul that screwed Beau up even further.
“I’ve been presuming too much. I won’t sit at table with you again, Mr. Prescott. As you said this morning, you are not your grandfather.”
Beau opened his mouth to argue, everything within him rebelling against the evasion she intended. The mystery of her was not resolved. He wanted the challenge of her presence. He wanted more of her than he could admit to. But before he could voice the words of protest tumbling through his mind, her eyes misted with tears, making him recoil from saying anything.
“Goodnight,” she whispered huskily and moved on, walking briskly from the dining room, leaving him feeling like a monster for making her cry.
He watched her go, the flouncy little frills of the sexy red dress taunting him with what she might have given him if he’d acted differently. His loins ached with thwarted desire. His mind raged against the circumstances that trapped him into keeping his distance. The angry frustration welling up in him could barely be contained.
Sedgewick proceeded to clear her end of the table, apparently unconcerned by the incident, carrying on with his job, transferring her plates and glass to the traymobile. Beau, still on his feet, his napkin crumpled in his hand, glared at the old butler for being so deliberately officious about his duties.
“If you’ve got something to say, Sedgewick, spit it out!”
A dignified pause. A slight raising of eyebrows. A look down his noble nose at Beau. “I was thinking, sir, I have served many people in my years at Rosecliff. Amongst them, the high and mighty of this country, one might say. People who thought their wealth or power put them above others. Nanny Stowe may have come here without much to recommend her, sir, but she is a genuine lady. Mr. Vivian certainly thought so, too.”
“You don’t know what I know, Sedgewick,” Beau retorted in dark fury.
His lofty mien became ever loftier as he answered, “Possibly not, sir. I have only had two years’ close acquaintance with Nanny Stowe.”
Which neatly sliced Beau’s feet out from under him. He threw the napkin on the table, picked up his glass and strode to the sideboard to collect the decanter of claret. “Please inform Jeffrey I won’t be wanting sweets, either. Nor anything else tonight, thank you, Sedgewick,” he said in savage dismissal.
“Very well, sir.”
Armed with what was left of the good red he’d insisted upon, Beau headed for the library, haunted by a glorious mane of red hair, a red dress that was too damned bold to be worn by a woman with that shade of hair, and the authoritative words of a man who should know what he was talking about.
He found the videotape of his grandfather’s funeral