Mistaken Identity (Saved By Desire 3) (3 page)

“Not all of them. I provide breakfast and an evening meal if the guests wish to eat here in an evening. Otherwise, they eat out.”

She hated being made to feel that she had to tell him so much. As far as she was aware, she had done nothing to give either man any indication she had done anything wrong. It wasn’t her they should be pummelling with probing questions. Still, it was better than them questioning Ben. Thankfully, neither of them saw fit to mention her brother yet. Unfortunately, neither had they come up with a justifiable reason for even lingering so much either.

Placing her hands on her hips, she turned a fierce glare on the magistrate.

“Just what is your purpose for calling round?” she demanded bluntly.

Lloyd shrugged and plucked absently at a piece of lint on his breeches. “We are just seeing what you are doing; that’s all.”

“I cannot help you. I don’t know who is poaching. I doubt you will find the person responsible for the lord’s loss sitting in my sitting room,” she replied flatly. “I suggest you tell him to keep an eye on his staff. Now, I am sure that if you are making house calls, then you need to move on and pester some of the other villagers. I haven’t ever been to the Priory, much less taken anything from them. Moreover, I haven’t seen or heard a thing. However, I cannot speak for the guests. If you want to talk to them directly, you will have to do so later. Now, if there is nothing else, I have things to be getting on with.”

She knew she was rude, but their behaviour was offensive so they could hardly take her to task for not welcoming them with open arms.

When neither man made any attempt to leave, she stalked toward the door.

“Before you go,” Lloyd called after her.

She turned to glare at him. She refused to show him how discomforted she was in his presence. It took effort not to take her instinctive step back from him, especially when he suddenly lunged to his feet and practically flew across the room until he was inches away from her.

“I am sure the owner of the Priory can withstand the loss, but I don’t expect anything else to disappear,” he murmured quietly.

“I don’t see why you are telling me,” Jessica protested brazenly.

She struggled to withhold her shudder, especially when the magistrate’s gaze dipped to her cleavage and lingered. She wished there was enough material there to cover her, but there wasn’t. Ignoring his visual assault, she squared her shoulders and threw the man a defiant look of contempt.

Lloyd studied her for a moment. He hesitated, as though about to tell her something. At the last moment, he appeared to change his mind. With a quite false smile, he bowed politely and clicked his fingers at Carruthers.

“Come on, Carruthers. It is time we were going,” he drawled.

“We are just trying to find out if anybody has seen anything, that’s all,” Carruthers mumbled.

“I haven’t,” she protested again.

“Are you sure?” Lloyd drawled quietly.

“Yes, I am sure. Now, if you don’t mind? As I have said, I have work to do,” Jessica repeated, trying to keep her desperation out of her voice.

“So do we, my dear. We are just reporting that the Priory has had a brace of pheasant stolen. If you know where they are likely to be you should tell us,” Lloyd warned without taking his eyes off her.

“I have told you what I know. I suggest you get out there and find the person responsible,” she ground out through clenched teeth.

She refused to break eye contact with him while she spoke. He would see that as some twisted victory, and she couldn’t allow that to happen, or she would never get rid of him.

“You won’t find him this house,” she added for good measure.

The magistrate suddenly glared at her. There was something in that direct look that warned Jess the man knew more but wasn’t telling her. It left her to wonder if either Lloyd or Carruthers had seen Ben with the pheasants.

Determined not to lose her freedom, Jess tipped her chin up and gave the man her most withering glare. She refused to be cowed but struggled to keep her dismay from her face when his warm, damp hand captured her chilled fingers.

The silence thickened as she watched him lift her hand to his lips. The moist kiss he placed on the back of the soft skin lingered far longer than was polite, but when she tried to pull her hand away, his fingers tightened. All the while his lips rested on her skin, his gaze remained locked on hers. She couldn’t quite make out of he was trying to be intimate or was threatening her. Either way, it was repulsive.

“Let me know if you hear of anything,” Lloyd murmured quietly.

Jess yanked her hand out of his grasp before he had lifted his head. Wiping it on the back of her skirts, she sidled around him and hurried into the hallway. Thankfully, without holding a sit-in protest, both men had to accept their direction to leave.

“I have to be getting on with dinner,” she declared in a loud voice as she moved toward the door.

She had never been so eager to get rid of anybody in her life and wished now she had never answered the door in the first place.

“Where is your brother?” Lloyd asked as he teetered on the doorstep.

Jessica stood beside the door. Now that several feet were between them she felt infinitely safer, especially with the door at her back. Although there had never been any rumours to support her theory, Jess suspected the magistrate wasn’t above flouting the law to get what
he
wanted. She just hoped he didn’t want her.

“He is out at the moment,” she replied carefully. “He has gone to the tavern for a drink.”

She sent a silent prayer that Ben had overheard everything. If he had, and understood the magistrate was on to him, then she hadn’t suffered without reason this afternoon. After the last ten minutes, as far as she was concerned, Ben needed to suffer a little as well. He needed to be the one to feel the stark emotions flowing through her right now.

She felt battered; all alone, and lost at sea. In a world of doubt, insecurity, fear, and worry, there was nothing holding a lifeline of hope. While it wasn’t all Ben’s fault, he hadn’t helped matters either. He could have come out to speak to the magistrate himself, but he hadn’t.

“Tell him we have called and want to talk to him,” Lloyd drawled.

“He won’t be able to help you. He has been here, helping me with the house,” Jess informed him briskly.

Rather than leave, Lloyd stepped forward and leaned toward her. Jess leaned back and kept her gaze averted, but could feel his fetid breath brush her cheek as he inched closer to her ear. She shuddered with revulsion.

“It is a big house for a young woman to run alone,” Lloyd murmured silkily. He glanced uninterestedly outside before he turned his lecherous gaze back to her.

“I am not alone. I have Ben,” she replied.

She began to suspect that his predatory interest in her was the reason why Lloyd wanted Ben out of the house. The thought of being at the mercy of such an odious toad as the magistrate made her feel sick.

It wasn’t that he was old, or overweight, or suffering from offensive looks. At some point in his life, he might once have been considered a handsome man. Not now, though. Years of excess hadn’t taken their toll on his pock-marked skin. Together with his thinning hair and rather stooped build, and the fact that he was at least twenty years older than her, he was about as attractive to Jess as the dead pheasants hanging in the scullery.

“I also have the guests,” she added desperately. “See? I am not alone.”

“I hope your services don’t go further than providing board and the occasional meal,” Lloyd drawled as his gaze slid down the length of her. “It would be a shame to see youth tainted by such sordid endeavours, especially with your lodgers.”

“How dare you suggest such a thing?” she demanded, outraged at the notion.

“I am not saying you are,” he smirked; pleased at the response his baiting earned him.

She mentally cursed when she realised he had gotten the response he had wanted – to prod her until she snapped. Determined not to let him get the better of her, she glared balefully at him and sucked in a calming breath.

“You would know more about sordid endeavours than I,” she snapped.

The immediate flash of anger on the magistrate’s face warned her that she had gone too far.

“Seeing as you deal with criminals and all,” she added snidely in a rather vague attempt to take the sting out of her snipe.

The magistrate nodded his appreciation of her play on words and smirked as he turned to study the road in front of the house.

“I will return when your brother is home,” he warned.

As if to show her that he didn’t believe her claims her brother was not in the house, he glanced over her shoulder into the house.

Unfortunately, just then, a barely audible thump came from the direction of the kitchen.

Jessica sighed and wondered if Ben wanted to go to prison. If he carried on the way he was, that was exactly where Lloyd and Carruthers would put him. To her delight, Rupert, the cat, chose that moment to push through the kitchen door.

“Rupert,” she chided. She could have wept as she watched him prance with ultimate feline arrogance toward her. “Have you been knocking food off the table again?”

She bent down and swept him into her arms. Having a bundle of wriggling fur between her and the magistrate made her feel a little safer. She nuzzled Rupert’s hair for a moment, and surreptitiously watched Lloyd signal to Carruthers that it was time to leave.

“Later,” Lloyd warned briskly.

Jessica didn’t bother to answer him and kept her attention on the cat in her arms. She waited by the door until Carruthers stepped across the threshold. He had barely cleared the doorway before she stepped back and kicked the door closed with considerably more force than necessary and slid the bolt home with a resounding thud.

Satisfied that the magistrate had gotten the message, she wandered back to the kitchen in search of Ben, whom she hoped was now hiding.

He wasn’t.

He sat at the kitchen table with his crossed ankles propped up on one corner, slicing into an apple as he ate.

“Have they gone?” he drawled nonchalantly.

Jessica was incensed. She was physically trembling with terror yet here he was, eating without a care in the world.

“How could you be so selfish?” Jessica asked as she dumped Rupert into Ben’s lap and snatched the knife from him.

It wasn’t for her safety that she took it; it was for his. Right now, she was so angry with him she wondered whether a good, long, stint in gaol was just what he needed. If only to snap him out of his careless disregard for, well, everything.

“What?” Ben’s brows lifted as though he hadn’t got a clue what was bothering her.

“He is going to come back, Ben,” she warned.

Ben shrugged. “They are all bluster, sis. They won’t be back. Lloyd hasn’t got anything he can pin on me, and he knows it.”

“Why did they come here in the first place then?” She countered, unwilling to let Ben dismiss what had happened so casually. “If you think they can’t touch you, why did you hide in here like a coward?”

Ben’s eyes flashed with anger as he stood.

Jess was too lost in her fury to notice. “I mean it. Think about it. If they don’t have anything on you, why did they not go to Billy’s house, or Craig’s, or Smithers’? Of all of the places in the village, why did they choose to come here?”

Ben stared at the apple in his hand as though it was going to provide him with the answers he couldn’t give himself.

Jessica’s frustration grew as she watched him shrug. She knew from the thoughtful expression on his face that he couldn’t be entirely sure if the magistrate had seen him with the pheasants or not. He was trying to bluff his way out of trouble. His response warned her that he had no understanding of what would happen if they got caught either. Nor was he particularly interested in what it felt like to be her, pestered by those horrible letches; Lloyd and Carruthers.

“Do you give a damn what happens to me?” she asked quietly. “Lloyd came to threaten
me
– not you –
me.
I am easy pickings for the likes of him if you are behind bars,” Jessica ground out. “God, you selfish ingrate.”

Tears gathered on her lashes at the thought of being in the house with the magistrate circling like a vulture outside. She would have to sell the place if that happened because the consequences to her future would be dire if she didn’t.

She wasn’t usually a violent person but, at that moment, wanted to smack her brother on the head for making her already insecure life even more uncertain.

“I won’t end up behind bars,” Ben said a little less cockily.

While the look on his face was doubtful, there was just something in his voice that made her study him a bit more closely. She knew that look and stepped closer. Her voice dipped to a menacing whisper so unlike her natural voice that Ben’s shocked gaze flew up to hers.

“Seeing as you are so confident in your ability to evade justice, you can meet the magistrate when he returns. I certainly won’t. I am done covering for you.”