On the fourth day of the new year, Olivia shoved a paper across the card table where she’d gathered Hargreaves and her partners in crime. “Now that Simon has agreed we may use the cottage, there’s the wording of the missive you must send to your friends at the Hall. Use your seal and have Bertram deliver it. Mrs. Susan has sewed him fancy livery so he’ll look impressive.”
Hargreaves studied the wording. “I don’t talk like this.”
“Of course, you don’t. This is a formal request, not a conversation. I’ve asked the minister to arrive with Bertram as witness that it was delivered.” She wanted no excuse for Glengarry and Ramsay to avoid Hargreaves’ demand to win back his vouchers.
“You’re a damned bossy witch,” his lordship muttered, folding up the paper. “Don’t know how Owen tolerated you.”
“Owen taught me.” Not taking offense, Olivia broke out the cards. “He disliked correspondence. He showed me his files, and I learned from them. You would have done better to have listened to him instead of playing in London.”
The viscount looked relatively healthier this afternoon, she decided, studying his aura. The black line was smaller, and there was a little more clarity in the yellow, but mostly, his midsection was still a brownish-gold. His father had drained any confidence or self-esteem from his son.
“I need whisky,” Hargreaves whined, staring blankly at his cards. “I can’t think like this.”
“Whisky is why you can’t think at all.” Olivia threw down a card and took another. “You’ve pickled your brain like an old cucumber. What will it take to help you remember the signals? And don’t say whisky. Will you notice if I stack my buttons in a certain way?”
He glared at her stack of white buttons. “We don’t play for buttons.”
“You don’t have any coins,” she reminded him. “Buttons prevent your so-called friends from offering to track your wagers.”
Drew took another card. “You marked all the kings?”
Olivia was grateful that he was willing to join her game. She hadn’t wanted to be alone with only Hargreaves as support. “I did, but only to prove what can be done when the cards are marked. You need to pick up your cards and hold them so others can’t see the backs in case they try to mark our decks.”
Drew and Hargreaves closed up their cards and concealed them with their large hands. Phoebe grinned and used hers for a fan.
Olivia rolled her eyes at her cousin. “If either Glengarry or Ramsay have auras that are as hard to read as you and Drew, I may become desperate enough to cheat. You make it difficult because neither of you honestly cares about the coin but display only curiosity in how the game works.”
Phoebe smiled and discarded two cards. “The queens are ugly.”
Hargreaves gave her a look of disgust. “You’re not supposed to let anyone know what cards you hold.”
“Phoebe won’t be playing, or she’d lose everything Drew ever earned. But you can learn from her anyway,” Olivia admonished. “Even if you can’t read auras, you can see that she shuffles the cards in her hand to put them in numerical order, and smiles when she draws one that fits with the others. So you don’t want to wager against her on this hand.”
“That wasn’t in the book,” the viscount grumbled.
“Which is why we’re practicing now.”
He shot her daggers and laid down his cards. “Two pair. I win.”
Olivia pointed at her stack of white buttons. “That was my signal not to wager against me.” She lay down her hand, a full house. “I need you to play with me as if we’re playing whist. And since I have advantages you don’t, you need to let me lead.”
He sank against his chair as if exhausted. “It’s witchery. It ain’t right.”
“Cheating isn’t right either,” she asserted. “And that’s what your friends have been doing.”
She could tell he didn’t like that but was grudgingly accepting that his companions had not been his friends. Teaching Hargreaves was a painful process, but Olivia was determined that he suffer through the game. She couldn’t carry it off alone as her father once had.
Of course, if the Hall’s inhabitants didn’t accept Hargreaves’ challenge, she might never have to play cards again.
Simon listened in on the practice session from his desk. Hargreaves was a stupid sot if he didn’t understand Olivia’s perfectly comprehensible instructions. Even from the little Simon had learned from Drew, he understood the need to bluff. Essentially, it was a game where liars won. She was right. He’d turn over tables rather than accept trickery.
But it gnawed at him to be excluded. At least the cottage was close by. He could take a few of his men over. . .
He started making lists.
When Drew entered later, Simon pushed one list at him. “The women can use all the hocus-pocus they like, but I want a few logical heads involved. Is there any chance you can help out?”
Drew raised his eyebrows over the list. “You want a chemist?”
“You mentioned you knew a professor who is a physician. We ought to have better evidence that Hargreaves is being poisoned and how. If you can think of anyone better?” Simon tapped his pen on his lists, ready to add names.
“Zander Dare is an aloof bastard. I don’t know if we can interest him, but I’ll try. And a photographer, why?” Drew studied the list more thoroughly.
“Because Lady Phoebe mentioned she knew one, and I thought physical evidence of the party might be used in court if it becomes necessary. We can wait until we receive a reply from the Hall. I want to be prepared. We’ll want to show who was there, that there were no mirrors or means of cheating, and that no one was being held at gunpoint.” Simon frowned at his list, knowing his request was odd.
Drew scraped his chair back. “I like the direction of your thoughts. Physical evidence to throw out the bastards would impress far more than the word of the women in court.”
“We’ll need a few reliable witnesses to provide oral evidence as well.” Simon rose from his chair, trying not to think of his lonely bed. “I don’t know if we can persuade the villains to confess to anything, but it won’t hurt to try.”
Drew grinned broadly. “This is a much better plan than swindling the bastards. We’ll ask Dare if he knows a truth serum.”
Simon laughed. “That would be dangerous. Imagine how wives could use that!”
Feeling a little better now that he had a bit of control, Simon headed up the stairs after the party broke up in the parlor. He’d like to talk to Olivia about some of his plans. He threw a longing look to her bedchamber, but he could hear Drew and Phoebe in their room, and Emma’s door was open so she could talk to Maggie. He resisted.
Instead, he climbed up to the nursery. Maybe by some fine chance. . .
But the governess’s room was empty. He checked on the children, and for once, they were all snug in their beds, although Evie appeared to be buried in kittens.
It was good to have a woman in the house, he decided. A woman would be here for household crises, while he was gadding about the mines or in Glasgow on business. He needed Olivia.
He had to prove to her that she needed him too.
He returned to his room and paced, wishing he really did have an abnormal power and could just whoosh Olivia out of her bed and into his.
“Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Glengarry looked like highwaymen,” Bertram, the new footman, declared in a rare display of delight, entering the parlor early the next afternoon.
Olivia tried not to show how much she depended on the missive in the footman’s hand. “The Hall replied?” she asked calmly, while her fingernails cut into her palm.
Bertram held out the letter Hargreaves had sent to the Hall that morning. “They just said we accept. I told them they had to put it in writing like you said. So they wrote on the bottom. They had to add water to the inkpot, it was so dry.”
“The stationers wouldn’t send fresh ink when I ordered it,” Hargreaves said from his usual place by the hearth. “There was no paper either.”
Olivia read the thin scrawl across the bottom of the letter that demanded the presence of Glengarry and Ramsay at Letty’s Cottage on the morrow. Glengarry had initialed the acceptance.
It was happening. This was it.
“They don’t have debtors’ prison anymore, do they?” Hargreaves asked gloomily.
The viscount was looking stronger, she noticed with relief. Whatever poisons he’d been fed were apparently leaving his system.
She hoped maybe the near brush with death had made him grow up just a little.
To her surprise, Simon joined them at the card table for their practice a little while later.
“I won’t gamble,” he insisted. “But I want to understand what you’re aboot.” He yanked over a chair and sat between Olivia and Drew.
She wasn’t certain how to take Simon’s overpowering presence—as a lover interested in what she was doing, as a host worrying over her safety, or just a curious man. Perhaps all three, she decided as his big hand brushed hers to take the buttons. He might not even know how his presence thrilled her and disturbed her concentration.
“Do you know anything about poker?” she asked cautiously.
“Enough to know I can’t bluff.” He picked up the cards she dealt as if he’d been handling them all his life.
Warily, Olivia finished dealing the cards, observing Simon’s aura. His clear red was so rampant that she wanted to fling aside the cards and climb into his lap. But passion had its bad side, and she needed to remember it.
“Did you just let Drew win?” Simon demanded when she dropped out.
“No, Drew had better cards, and I can’t read him well. Let’s take a short break while I teach you the signals.”
Looking like a moody Heathcliff, with a black forelock falling across his frowning brow and his square jaw set, Simon helped Olivia from her chair.
By the time they were out of hearing of the others, his frown had vanished. “I mean to learn all your signals until I’m back in your bed again,” he announced. His smirk was that of a naughty child.
It struck Olivia right in her midsection, and she nearly gasped for air.
He knew her too well and knew exactly the effect he was having on her, drat the bully.
They might disagree on drunkenness and the dangers of not controlling their extraordinary gifts, or that he even had one, but physically—they were an explosive match.