suitable potential marchioness he could find in the entire kingdom while he was about it? Clearly it was impossible, yet somehow or another there it still was, as real and alive as if he’d written it all over the walls of his own castle and advertised it in the Strand.
Stunned by the certainty that if he never set eyes on her again after today his life would be lived in twilight, he felt as if he was floundering in the face of the storm of powerful emotions running through him like a natural disaster. He loved her? Yes, he did love her. Tom Banburgh, who didn’t want to either love or be loved, loved Polly Trethayne with all the hope and joy he hadn’t dared feel so fully since he was a boy surging through him like a spring tide.
What was more, he loved a magnificent, delightful, grumpy and unconventional female who would never bore him or make him wish for his clubs or the sophisticated lovers he’d enjoyed before he met her. She was glaring back at him now; daring him to treat her like some delicate little gently bred female and send her back to her bed to cower there in safety. It would be a wild ride, loving her for the rest of his life, he decided with a hot look for her at the thought of starting it.
Meeting it seemed to make her forget her impression of an angry goddess confronted by a human she intended turning into a toad. Seeing puzzlement and a fine seasoning of curiosity in her gaze, he felt even more tempted to kiss that lush, doubtful mouth of hers. He’d better provoke her back into a fury before he lost all credibility with her and her brothers and Peters for life by kissing her in front of them and blurting out his shocked feelings.
‘There’s no excuse for putting your brothers in danger, even if you’re reckless enough to forget how much they depend on you for love and support, and put yourself in danger,’ he said in the hope she might be persuaded to worry about her brothers’ safety as she didn’t seem ready to about her own.
It occurred to Tom that one of the hardest parts of loving this woman might be enduring fear for her when she didn’t seem to have any for herself.
‘You were right, then, Hal, there really are pirates looking for our treasure here at night?’ Josh asked wide-eyed and ready to believe almost anything. Tom could almost feel his sister being torn between a need to take her littlest brother out of here and a belief he would immediately find a way back, or make such a noise the intruders might be scared into shooting someone out of sheer shock.
‘This isn’t the Spanish Main, Josh, and I think we’d best get you to bed after all,’ she said softly, then froze in her tracks as that soft thud she had puzzled over before silenced them all.
As if Tom had said what he was thinking, that she should give up trying to find out who was breaking in herself, she shook her head emphatically at him and glared as if he’d told her to go and drown some kittens. He supposed she knew her brothers a lot better than he did and waved a resigned hand as if to concede they probably had a right to know who was coming in and out of here at will as well. He resolved to put a stop to the whole business if there was even the sniff of real danger, but for now he’d just have to trust his own judgement that Grably’s nephew and his partner in crime were neither habitual criminals nor natural murderers.
‘You four can have the cupboard over there and Peters and I will watch the door from the basement, then,’ he told her with what he hoped was steely enough purpose to tell her she had others to care about her even if she was thinking of rushing headfirst into action. ‘It’s not too late for us to make so much noise they will run off and never come back,’ he added as the only threat he could think of to make them agree to stay out of the line of fire.
‘Josh, are you sure you can keep quiet and not get hurt if the men have to fight?’ Polly asked as if her littlest brother was at least ten years older.
‘I’m very good at not getting hurt when the others fight,’ he said matter-of-factly, and his sister nodded an admissions he was right.
‘You are that, so pray continue to be so and promise me you’ll run and get help if it looks as if we’re going to be outnumbered?’
‘I promise,’ Josh said and crossed his heart for good measure.
Tom felt as proud of the boy as if he’d been his own little brother, or even his son, and the very thought of the tribe of potential giants he and Polly Trethayne might make one day threatened to turn his brain to a mush of besotted daydreams.
‘You’re all as mad as each other,’ Peters muttered as if he thought Tom the worst lunatic of all for not abandoning their attempt to trap the intruders on the spot, or somehow make the rackety Trethayne family leave them to spring it alone. He clearly didn’t know any of them as well as Tom did, then, or he wouldn’t even consider it a real possibility.
‘Maybe, but at least in there they’ll be relatively safe,’ Tom whispered so low so that the intrepid quartet now piling into the broom cupboard as if it was the only place they would dream of being on a June night wouldn’t hear him.
He wanted to laugh at the same time as he felt oddly proud of them for being who they were. He also longed to get Polly alone so he could persuade her to trust herself and them to him for as long as they might need him. There was no question of him ever not needing her now, but one day her brothers would want to live their own lives. Until then they would be his as truly as if they really did carry Banburgh blood in their veins instead of the unique Trethayne kind he was longing to see zing through his own children mingled with his.
He half-believed they’d made enough noise and fuss to warn anyone within half a mile, but a mechanism behind the panelling in the room that had once been used as a butler’s pantry clicked and opened even as he drew breath to call the whole thing off. He scented something he remembered from long ago on the air with a real sense of dread and wished too late he’d managed to send them away. Of course they would then lay in wait farther away from him and be at even more risk, so he stopped cursing himself for a dozen different sorts of a fool and listened for what came next with a fast beating heart instead.
‘I told you we shouldn’t come back here no more,’ a half-familiar voice whispered as he followed a dimly lit and burlier figure into the hall.
‘Stow your rattle,’ the one he recalled a little too well from that first night here ordered impatiently, and Tom heard the smoothed-out tones of an educated man and raised his eyebrows in the darkness of their hiding place.
‘If we can’t find it after all these months, it ain’t here to be found, Ollie.’
‘Hold your tongue, you fool, of course it is.’
So what the devil was Grably’s nephew doing back at Dayspring? Searching for something his lunatic uncle left behind when he was carted off to the private asylum by his embarrassed brother-in-law all those years ago, Tom supposed, hearing the two men argue about where they had left to look. Was this the moment to let them know they’d been discovered and it was time this wild goose chase came to an end? Probably, but the fools were between him and the Trethaynes’ hiding place and he didn’t trust Polly or her little brothers not to leap out and put themselves in danger just because it was there.
‘He said there was a priceless treasure hidden between the moon and the earth and in the same part of the castle as he lived in when he ruled it and that idiot of a boy was kept in his proper place,’ the nephew said with the same fixed stubbornness Tom recalled hearing in his guardian’s voice all those years ago and only just managed to suppress a shudder.
He ran over their clue to the hiding place of whatever it was again in his head and this time had to bite back a laugh. There was an ancient carving of the moon and the sun orbiting the earth in a mantelpiece in one of the bedchambers
