Free The Stanforth Secrets by Jo Beverley Page A

taking up the reins.”
    “You won’t find it so hard. Scarthwait has it all in hand and can be trusted.”
    “Still, it’s not my way to leave matters in the hands of employees without an understanding of what they are about.”
    Chloe looked at him with a touch of surprise. This was quite the opposite of Stephen’s approach to property. “Well,” she said. “I’m sure Scarthwait will be delighted. If you’re eager to take up your tasks there are a number of items of business and correspondence on the desk in the office.”
    With that Chloe went up to her bedroom, and the two young men looked at each other.
    “An interesting inheritance,” remarked Lord Randal, long fingers idly picking out a tune.
    More so than you think, thought Justin, trying to decide whether he should clear the house of all the ladies during these dangerous times. It might, however, be a sign to the enemy.
    He put those thoughts aside for later and said, “How about a game of billiards, Randal. Or shall we take brandy to the office and see what horrors await me there?”
    Lord Randal laughed. “Oh no you don’t. If you want someone to hold your hand while you grapple with balance sheets and crop records, wait until tomorrow and I’m sure Chloe will oblige. For now, I’ll take billiards and beat you hollow. I’m sure you’re out of practice, my boy.”
    This proved only too true; but, as they had taken the brandy decanter to the billiard room with them, they soon forgot to keep careful score. By the time Chloe heard their laughing voices in the corridor as they made their way to bed, neither had the slightest notion of who had won the games.
    Chloe had lain awake in bed for two hours by then, seeking her normal, peaceful sleep. She was not in the nature of deceiving herself, thus she had to accept that Justin had an effect on her which was quite out of the ordinary. She thought back, so many years it seemed, to the time of her elopement.
    Two handsome young blades, men of fashion, visiting in the area and turning the heads of all the young ladies. Even her older sister Cassandra had blushed when Stephen bowed to her in the village, and Cassandra was the most proper of young ladies. At the same time, however, Cassandra had passed on to Chloe their parents’ warning about the young Delameres, who were known to be wild in their ways.
    Chloe, riding out alone one day, as she was not allowed to, had come across the Dashing Delameres racing their horses, joined the race, and beat them hollow. The next thing she knew, one of them was asking her father’s permission to woo her and being told he must wait at least a year, until he was twenty-one and she had left Miss Mallory’s.
    Her father’s reply had seemed so unreasonable. Chloe and Stephen were in love, or thought they were. She now recognized that she had been at least partly in love with escape, with racing free in the wind, but at the time she had not been able to distinguish those feelings from love. When Stephen suggested they elope, she scarcely hesitated. He was, after all, no fortune hunter. He was an eligible parti , and her parents’ objections were ridiculous.
    Chloe rolled over in bed and beat the pillow in an attempt to force it to cradle her head in comfort. What crazy children they had been, even Justin—though he had been a year older than Stephen, twenty-one. He had traveled with them all the way to Scotland, organizing the trip perfectly. Not such a child. It was he who said it was déclassé to go to Gretna, when anywhere in Scotland would do. As a consequence, she had at least been decorously married in a church in Edinburgh, not over an anvil in a hovel.
    A memory, long suppressed, rose up of her wedding night when Justin had disappeared, leaving Stephen and Chloe alone for the first time. She had felt abandoned. She had told herself at the time it was merely the strangeness of the moment that had brought on that feeling, and yet there was the other time . .