“It is all.” The man held them out at arm’s length. “You can trust the signora to deal fairly.”
Fairly? Phyllida? Either the man was a good liar, or Phyllida had well and truly beguiled him.
Cameron reached for the letters. The Italian held them back. “You give her the payment, first.”
Like hell. “Let’s do this at the same time, shall we?”
The man gave a cool nod. He held out the letters again, and Cameron let the wad of money dangle from his fingers. Phyllida snatched the cash, and Cameron took the letters from the Italian man’s grasp.
Phyllida ran her thumb over the corner of the banknotes. “Thank you, Cameron. I hope I never see you again.”
Cameron unfolded the first letter. “Wait,” he said sternly. “Neither of you are leaving until I know that I have them all.”
“I’ve told you . . .”
The Italian held up his hand. “No. Let him look. The treacherous always must believe that others play treachery against them.”
Definitely opera. The man’s speeches came straight from them. Cameron seated himself on a scrolled iron bench and scanned the first page.
“You’re not going to read all of them, are you?” Phyllida said in exasperation.
Cameron didn’t answer. He would damn well read every word of them to make sure he had the letters in their entirety, no pages missing with which Phyllida could blackmail Ainsley later. Cam hadn’t lied to Ainsley when he’d said he had no interest in the letters, but he’d never promised he wouldn’t actually read them. He needed to, for her own good.
They were love letters without doubt. The lady addressed them to “My most beloved Friend,” and then the paper flowed with overblown adjectives and flowery phrases that sang of this friend’s manly physique, his prowess, his stamina.
In spite of this, Cameron could see that the writer had an excellent grasp of vocabulary and poetry, if in an overly sentimental style. The first letter eased from this poesy into a breezy, newsy epistle and then back out again to the flowery phrases. She’d signed it, “Ever your loving, Mrs. Brown.”
Mrs. Brown.
Oh, bloody hell.
Cameron opened the second letter and found it to be much like the first, noting the writer’s references in the middle of the letter to “trying children” and other such domestic issues. But these were the domestic issues of a palace, the trying children princes and princesses of this realm and rulers of others.
He finally understood Ainsley’s secretiveness and furtive concern. The nameless friend she’d been trying so desperately to protect was the Queen of England.
“It’s scandalous, isn’t it?” Phyllida said when he folded the last one. “She ought to be ashamed of herself.”
“Did you make any copies of these?” Cameron asked her. What a weapon Phyllida could have made of them, and yet she’d demanded, in retrospect, so little. Something was off.
“Why should I?” Phyllida shrugged. “I’m not interested in the queen’s rather pathetic fantasies.”
Cameron rose and stuffed the letters into his pocket. “These letters could utterly humiliate the queen, and you’re ransoming them to me for fifteen hundred guineas?”
“Very generous of you too. Enough for a start, I think.”
“A start of what?”
Phyllida laughed, and for the first time since he’d met her, Cameron saw the hardness depart from her. “To leave my husband, of course.” She slid her hand through the crook of the Italian’s arm. “Thank you, Giorgio. Shall we?”
Giorgio. Now Cameron recognized him. He was Giorgio Prario, a tenor who had recently taken London by storm. Isabella had hosted a soiree to help launch his career, one of those little gatherings that Isabella loved and Cameron avoided like the plague.
Prario regarded Cameron with deep brown eyes and a proud tilt to his head before he drew Phyllida away. Phyllida had her claws into him all right, poor sod.
Cameron watched them walk away, Phyllida swaying into the body of the large man. Phyllida Chase, who loved her comfort and social position above everything else, was ready to throw it all away to run off with a young opera singer. The world was becoming a strange place.
Still more bizarrely, Cameron was becoming more and more entangled with the young lady in red who crashed through the palm fronds next to him, breathless and pink- faced.
“Did you get them?” she asked.
Chapter 13
Cameron’s eyes betrayed his anger, but he didn’t growl at Ainsley for not waiting in the anteroom. He must have known that she would never be that patient.
Ainsley held out her hand for the letters, but Cameron didn’t give them to her. “I’ll keep them for now. I don’t trust Phyllida not to waylay you and try to steal them back.”
Ainsley kept her hand out for a moment, her fingers itching to feel the letters in them. “My friend will be most grateful for what you’re done.”
“Your friend, Mrs. Brown? Dear God, Ainsley.”
Ainsley lowered her arm, eyes wide. “I asked you not to read them. I remember distinctly.”
“I did it to make certain Phyllida wasn’t holding anything back. I’ve got them all, even the one with the missing page.”
He was so tall and solid. And angry. “Cameron, for heaven’s sake, please don’t tell your brother. Hart Mackenzie is notorious for opposing the queen’s policies. I can’t think what he’d do with letters like these.”
“Probably toss them onto the fire.”
Ainsley blinked. “What? But he could embarrass her, sway people’s opinion of her, turn those on the fence to his side.”
“If you think that, you have a wrong view of Hart.” Cameron closed his warm hand over her cold one. “Hart wants to win by proving he’s right—about everything—not with tittle-tattle and bedroom gossip. Hart wants to be God Almighty. No, he already thinks he’s God Almighty. Now he wants to prove it to everyone else.”
Ainsley ran her thumb over Cameron’s fingers, which were calloused and rough from his days working with horses. These weren’t the well-kept hands of a gentleman who lifted nothing heavier than cards or a glass of brandy. Cameron worked alongside the other men in the stables, doing whatever jobs had to be done.
She kissed one broad, blunt finger. “Please,” she said. “Don’t tell him. Just in case.”
“I don’t intend to. This is none of Hart’s bloody business.”