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she’s not. She’s intelligent. Beautiful. She has this—this air of sophisticated gentility about her. And damn it all, it—it irritates the hell out of me!”
    Cameron studied him. “You must remember, she was probably no more than three or four years of age when she was last with her father. He was sent to Newgate shortly after her mother was killed. She may have been too young to even remember him.”
    Damien turned to face him. “The story the villagers tell is that both her parents were killed in a carriage accident. You’re certain the man accompanying the woman in the carriage was not Heather’s father?”
    “James Elliot is her father.” Cameron spoke with conviction. “I spoke with a woman who knew both her parents, James and Justine—and she mentioned they had a little girl.”
    Damien’s jaw clenched. It was Cameron who had learned Justine had been killed in a carriage accident in Lancashire. “And you’re absolutely certain this is the same Justine who was married to Elliot?”
    Cameron nodded. “There are too many similarities for it not to be,” he emphasized. “The daughter was the same age. We know Justine departed London at that time. The name listed on the passenger list was Justine Duval—her maiden surname. It has to be,” he said again.
    “So why wasn’t she using the surname Elliot?”
    Cameron’s features were grim. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Perhaps she was trying to get away from her husband. Lord knows he was a violent man—after all, he murdered those two poor fellows and ended up in Newgate.”
    Damien’s knuckles shone white. His jaw clenched hard.
    He asked the question he’d asked a hundred times before. “But that doesn’t explain why he would murder Giles. Why? As far as we’ve been able to discover, Giles had no enemies. And James Elliot was in prison for the last twenty years—Giles was just a boy when Elliot entered Newgate. They couldn’t possibly have known each other. It makes no sense!”
    Damien fell into a brooding silence. His frustration was keenly apparent.
    It wasn’t the first time tragedy had touched hislife. But he’d come home to England, only to find Giles barely cold in his grave….
    Cameron laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I know this has been difficult for you.”
    Damien blew out a weary sigh. “You must think I’m ungrateful,” he said quietly. “On the contrary. Without you I’d not know where to turn next. You’ve been an immense help, Cameron.” For indeed, the magistrate’s investigation had turned up nothing. An unfortunate accident , he’d called it. Damien might have been convinced he was right. That Giles had caught his perpetrator in the midst of a robbery, and thus been killed for it….
    But it appeared that nothing had been taken from either the house or the grounds. And more importantly, there was reason to believe James Elliot had deliberately sought out Giles at Deverell, the family estate in Yorkshire—that he’d been after something.
    “But it was you who was able to point me in the right direction,” Cameron said. “If you hadn’t found the maid Corinne…”
    Corinne. Damien’s mind traveled back. All of the household staff but the maid Corinne had stayed on to await his appearance, for Giles had expected him shortly. Indeed, he’d arrived within several weeks of Giles’s death. But Corinne, an upstairs maid, had quit the day after the magistrate had interviewed all the household servants—and disappeared.
    The magistrate was unable to locate her, and so Damien decided to carry on his own investigation. Perhaps it was nothing; perhaps there was every reason to be suspicious of the way the maid had fled. Whatever the reason, he’d been determined not to neglect the smallest detail.
    In talking with those who knew the girl, he discovered she had a sister in Northumbria—and it was there he’d found her.
    But all was not as he’d thought….
     
    At first Corinne had refused to