Julius's Passion (Regency Club Venus #4) - Carole Mortimer Page 0,13

be unable, for the moment, to openly reveal your presence to her. But hopefully, it will only be for a few days, and then we can oust this charlatan from both your home and lives.”

“We hope,” James muttered morosely.

“We will succeed,” Julius stated in a voice that allowed for no other outcome.

Having moved to stand and look out the window as the two men talked, Julius now found his attention arrested by the shadow of movement in and out of the tall fir trees edging the deer park to one side of the house. For a moment, he could have sworn he—

Yes, there it was again.

The moon moved in and out of the cover of the clouds, and initially, Julius had thought the slinking shadow beneath those fir trees to be a fox or possibly a stray dog. But as the moon slipped out from behind the clouds again, he could distinguish it as being a young man. He was slender and dressed in breeches and a dark shirt beneath the warmth of a jacket. His hair and face were hidden beneath the peak of a cloth cap.

The way he continued to use the cover of the trees to hide his movements indicated he should not be there.

A poacher, perhaps? If so, he was venturing very close to the house.

There was a dense wood beyond the deer park, no doubt full of the smaller game a poacher would relish. There was also the River Orwell on the edge of the estate, which was no doubt plentiful in fish. The man appeared to be alone, so Julius could not believe he intended to kill and remove a whole deer.

Then why was he so close to the house?

Unless he had come from the house in the first place?

One of the footmen, or the butler, could be involved with the local poachers, Julius supposed.

There was also the very lucrative passage of smuggling in this area. Something Julius was all too aware of as he had several times in the past returned to England on one of those contraband ships when he could escape France by no other means. Smuggling was, he knew, a time-honored tradition in this area, with the River Orwell used as a means of transporting that contraband farther inland.

“Something wrong?” James queried.

Julius turned from the window. “Not at all,” he dismissed. “I merely wished to inform you of your sister’s curiosity regarding your name.” There was no mistaking his words for anything other than what they were: a dismissal.

Not because Julius intended to go to bed as yet. No, something about that slender poacher had piqued Julius’s interest, and he had never been one to leave a mystery unsolved.

“A good haul tonight, John.” Bethany smiled at the grizzle-faced middle-aged man as she helped unload the goods from the boats and onto the waiting packhorses. Another hour or so after this and these smuggled goods would be stored away in one or more of the many hidden locations along the River Orwell, close to Hadleigh, where John and many of the other smugglers lived.

“Aye, good ’nough,” he answered in the local burr, his breath as visible in the icy-cold night as Bethany’s. “They tell me yer uncle has an important visitor. One as ’is a close friend of the Prince Regent ’imself.”

Bethany had never bothered to ask where or how John gained his information. He just did. No doubt because it was necessary for him to know all that occurred in his small kingdom which might affect his illegal dealings.

“The Earl of Andover,” she confirmed evenly, not altogether sure how she felt about him after their earlier encounter.

She still considered the earl to be the handsomest gentleman she had ever met, but his inaction during the war years was questionable. He had also embarrassed her, deliberately, it had seemed, regarding her interest in his valet’s name.

And what of her physical response to merely having his hands grasp her arms, to a degree she was still aware of the heat his touch had engendered inside her?

“Does ya mean Lord Julius Soames?” John surprised her by enquiring.

She eyed him curiously. “You know him?”

“I wouldn’t say as I exactly know him,” the smuggler hedged.

“Of him, then?”

John weighed up the question before shaking his head. “We’ve met, shall we say.”

“And?”

“He’s a good man,” John muttered.

Bethany could not envisage any circumstances under which the haughty and condescending Julius Soames and this salt-of-the-earth Suffolk smuggler could or would ever have crossed paths, let alone engaged in conversation.

Nor