"Naturally."
"I did tell Emile that there were always motives. Particularly where you are concerned, Sophie. You would never have become a slut without very strong motives."
"Understand me, Ryder. I don't care if you own all of Jamaica. My uncle wanted this plantation and he thought my talents would give him an excellent chance at it. Don't get me wrong, I was to be used just to soften you up. In his final estimation, he didn't think you would care about living here, or care about the uncertainty of sugar profits, and thus, you would sell out to him, stuff the guineas in your aristocratic pockets, and sail happily back to England."
"And at the appropriate time I would have been told by Mr. Susson that Kimberly Hall belonged to me."
"Yes."
"And with you as my delightful mistress—you and that other woman with the big breasts of course— I would be delighted to sell to your uncle. Did he intend to send you back with me to England? As my mistress?"
"I don't know what he planned."
"Why did you agree to this?"
Her look was hard and cold. "Don't be absurd. You're so excellent at assigning motives, why have you let down here? Jeremy was to be his heir if I cooperated. If I didn't cooperate, he said he would throw both of us out. Jeremy is lame; he would never be able to make his way here."
"And naturally, you could."
She didn't react in any way, merely said in that same cold voice, "Quite probably."
"Lord David became your lover so that he would fleece Charles Grammond."
"Yes and he performed admirably." -
"And Charles Grammond was your lover so he would be quite amenable to selling his plantation to your uncle." "Yes." "How did you ever manage to rid yourself of Lord David?" She smiled. It was an impish smile, a young smile, and he found himself reacting to it. He realized it was the first genuine smile he'd ever seen from her. "I told him I had the pox." "Good God, that's wonderful." "I would have probably told you the same thing once you had sold Kimberly to my uncle."
"Ah, but the difference is that I wouldn't have simply believed you."
"That's what I told my uncle. I told him you weren't like the other men. I told him you weren't stupid. I told him that he should be very cautious with you, perhaps even fear you. He refused to heed me."
"You aren't making much sense about this fear business, but no matter. He didn't listen to you. He wasn't afraid enough of me, more's the pity."
"No. He measures all men with himself as the standard. He'd heard you were a womanizer, a young rakehell with no more morals than a tomcat. He thought it would be marvelously easy."
"I'm not a—" He stopped and frowned down at his bruised knuckles. Jesus, what an appalling thought. His mind shied away from it. He swallowed, then shrugged negligently. "Well, he was wrong, wasn't he?"
"About you being a womanizer? A tomcat? No, surely not. If you'd been like the other men, you wouldn't have realized that it wasn't me."
"Are you telling me that you didn't sleep with any of them? That it was always this other woman?"
She looked at him steadily. "Would you believe me if I told you that I had not?"
"Probably not." He raised his hand to cut her off. "No, attend me, Sophie. I have never before met a woman with such a repertoire of feminine tricks as you have, and believe me, I've been treated to the best. I wish I knew the female equivalent of a rakehell or a tomcat. You surely fit the mold. You're remarkable in your scope of seductive devices for one so young. Now, enough of that. It's not important. Back to your dear uncle. It still takes me aback that I own Kimberly Hall."
"It's true."
"But what if I hadn't come here? What if my brother had come instead?"
"Uncle Theo considered that unlikely. You see, he knows all about your family. He even hired a man back in England to find out everything he could about the Sherbrookes, about you. The man wrote back with a goodly number of details."
"He did all this before he and Thomas began their little scare campaign?"
"Oh yes. It was all well planned. Uncle Theo knew that Samuel Grayson was superstitious and could be manipulated. He knew if he played on his fears, why, he was bound to write to your brother, begging for help. And he did. He even told my uncle that he was going to write. Of course, my uncle encouraged him to write, encouraged him in his superstitions, stoked the fires, so to speak."
"I begin to believe that Uncle Theo deserves to have me wring his miserable neck."
"The man my uncle hired wrote that your brother had many responsibilities and that it was highly unlikely that he would come; your younger brother is at Oxford studying to become a man of the cloth. That left you and your fifteen-year-old sister. Naturally it was you who came. Everything went just as he'd planned. He simply misjudged you, that's all. He assumed you'd be like Lord David—frivolous, narcissistic, rather stupid, and wanting only to sleep with me. He was wrong; he simply wouldn't