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She looked up at him, uncertainty in her eyes, but that expression quickly shifted to gratitude. She shifted slightly to make room for him on the Persian rug, and he settled beside her, taking a substantial stack of papers in his hands.

The soft sound of footsteps in the corridor alerted Gideon to someone’s approach. He tensed immediately, expecting bad news, but it was only Lady Payne who appeared at the threshold.

Her blue eyes quickly found her husband, who had just settled behind his desk.

“Blake,” she said softly, her voice and gaze filled with concern.

Payne looked up from the document he had been studying, his expression softening at the sight of his wife. Without a word, he rose from behind his desk and crossed to her in three quick strides. She reached for his hand as he approached, their fingers intertwining with the unconscious ease of a couple deeply attuned to each other’s needs.

“What happened?” she murmured in a low voice.

Payne whispered something in response and gently tugged his wife away from the room.

When they returned perhaps twenty minutes later, Lady Payne’s entire demeanor had transformed from questioning to determined. She was now ready to work through the night.

She moved toward the desk and settled on the edge next to her husband, taking a bulk of documents from his pile.

Soon, Lord and Lady St. John joined them as well.

The couple had a small babe, barely a month old, sleeping in another room, and Lady St. John occasionally left to feed or soothe the baby.

It was unheard of for a lady of her station to forgo a wet nurse. On the other hand, perhaps this was the better way.

Gideon was not biologically equipped to handle that specific task, but he wished he had spent more meaningful time with his children when they were still alive, rather than delegating their care to the servants.

He absently flipped through a leather-bound journal, his thoughts dwelling on the past that he could not change, no matter how hard he tried. Then he noted something strange. He paused and went back a few pages to ensure that the inconsistencies he found were not imagined.

“Here,” he finally said, his voice cutting through the silence. “Look at this. The astonishing increase in profit margins on the northern estates… He claimed he sold his art to invest in them, but the timeline doesn’t fit. Instead, there was a substantial investment from a shipping company that quickly went bankrupt a few months later.”

He mentioned the name of the company, hoping the others would find additional documents corroborating Townsend’s involvement with them.

Leila moved to another stack of papers, and Gideon joined her to sift through more accounts.

In the next few hours, they uncovered many things that Payne, in his blind trust of his cousin, had missed: phantom investments, suspicious business ventures that disappeared over time, shipping manifests, and other disturbing information.

Payne’s face was grim as he examined a personnel ledger. “My estate managers—the ones Townsend dismissed and convinced me were skimming from me…” He looked up, his eyes blazing with anger. “There’s no evidence here of any theft or mismanagement, is there?”

“So far, none,” St. John replied.

“Of course there is none,” Payne said bitterly, sinking into a chair as if the weight of his realization was too much to bear. “He needed them gone so they couldn’t witness what he was doing. God, how could I have been so blind?”

His wife moved behind him and placed her hand on his shoulder. He covered her hand with his, squeezing her fingers absentmindedly as he continued to examine the document before him.

There was obvious love between the Paynes. St. John’s had it too, Gideon noticed.

When he married Sarah, it was common wisdom that only a tiny percentage of high society marriages were based on love.

Now it seemed the tide was shifting.

He looked at Leila, his heart making a tiny leap, as it did every time he saw her.

Was that love, this feeling he had for her? Or was it lust, perhaps heightened by the dangerous circumstances they were in? Would it vanish once they returned to a quiet, comfortable existence?

More importantly, would that comfortable existence ever be enough for Gideon? So far, it never had been.

Did Leila feel the same conflicted emotions toward him?

The thought terrified him.