Liam’s eyes were empty of emotion. “How can I trust you with her?”
“Perhaps it would help to tell you that I’m not the fortune hunter you feared. A rather large family breach was recently healed, and I’ve been welcomed back to the bosom of the Sinclairs. I came into a nice sum of money, old man—enough to support Caroline comfortably without dipping into her funds in the foreseeable future.” He paused, smiling wryly. “It is something your man—Mr. Bauer, is it not?—can confirm easily enough.”
“How long have you known?”
“Only for a week, but by then there was little point in telling you of it. There were more pressing matters to deal with. Given the current situation, I wish to take Caroline—properly chaperoned, of course—to England to meet my brother. He was always the most decent of my immediate family, and she would enjoy the travel.”
Liam was quiet for a long time. “Mac always trusted you,” he said at last. “But you used her as well.”
“I doubt anyone can use Miss MacKenzie without her cooperation. She’s a very bright girl, though one might question her taste.”
Liam’s gaze locked on his with a strange, burning ferocity. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know what she told me when she first approached me? That she wanted to help me, and all she wanted in return was you. Not your money, but you. Now I’m inclined to think she was telling the truth all along.”
“Truth? What is the truth in any of this?”
“I’ve learned one thing in my varied career, old man, and that’s that there is no one truth. Each man must find his own.”
“You missed your calling, Perry. You should have been a philosopher.”
“Perhaps it’s not too late.”
But Liam didn’t answer, didn’t speak again until Perry had reached the door and was on his way out of the room.
“Perry.”
He paused without looking back.
“You left something here that belongs to you. In the left upper drawer of the desk.”
Perry went on his guard. He walked back to the desk and opened the indicated drawer.
His pocket watch lay inside. Battered, scratched, the chain broken in one place, it was both familiar and strange. The hands were frozen in a perpetual announcement of four o’clock.
“Take it,” Liam said.
Perry did, knowing well what this meant. His throat was oddly taut. He held the watch in his palm, rereading the inscription, and then began to wind it, slowly and deliberately, until it hummed with life again.
“Go to Caroline,” Liam said. “Make sure she’s all right.”
The tightness in Perry’s throat made it damnably—and ridiculously—difficult to speak. “And Miss MacKenzie? Do you wish to—”
“The doctor told me she was well,” Liam interrupted. “She can more than take care of herself.”
So that was the way the wind blew.
Perry tucked the watch in his waistcoat pocket. He left the room, closed the door, and went to summon Rose.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Why meet we on the bridge of Time
to change one greeting and to part?
—Sir Richard Francis Burton
MAC WALKED UP the stairs with feet that dragged and legs that felt heavy as lead. Talking things out with Caroline during the past half-hour had been difficult, but she would have gone through it a thousand times rather than do what had to be done now. At least Caroline was young enough to be flexible, to change, to listen. And to bare her own heart.
Mac felt old. Too old to risk pouring out her soul to the man who waited upstairs. Too much aware of how little good it would do when she’d be here a matter of days. Or hours. She had only to ask Perry for his pendant, and then…
She didn’t knock on the door. Norton lay sprawled at the foot of the bed; his head and ears came up, and he was on top of Mac almost before she could prepare herself for his affectionate onslaught.
As she accepted the dog’s enthusiastic greeting she watched Liam become aware of her, returning from some faraway place within his own mind. He straightened on the bed, suppressing a wince of pain. He was well bandaged, and her own eyes told her he was going to be all right. Thank God and every deity that had ever existed in the history of time.