Shadows and Light

things.” She walked over to the sofa, sat down, and offered another hesitant smile. “Please sit down. There are some things I need to say to you.”
    Reluctantly, he sat on the other end of the sofa. Then something occurred to him that had him leaning toward her, tense. “Brooke’s all right, isn’t she?”
    “Brooke?”
    The surprise in Elinore’s eyes, warming to amusement, made him feel limp with relief. His ten-year-old sister was a delightful child, but she did tend to get into scrapes.
    “Brooke is fine,” Elinore said, pouring tea for both of them. “A bit sulky since it’s a lovely day and she’s stuck doing lessons instead of working with the new pony a certain someone recently gave her for her birthday.”
    Taking the cup of tea she offered him, Liam gave her a bland stare. “I seem to recall another someone slipping money to that certain someone with the instructions to purchase new tack for the new pony.”
    “Is that what you recall?” Elinore asked innocently. “Do you also recall that certain someone telling Brooke she could skip her lessons this morning so that he could take her for a long ride so the pony wouldn’t get bored working in the confines of the training ring?”
    Liam choked on the tea he just swallowed. “I said maybe. After the midday meal.”
    “ ‘Maybe’ means yes.”
    “Since when?”
    She just looked at him until he wanted to squirm. That was the problem with trying to argue with his mother, even playfully. She knew him too well and remembered far too many things from his own childhood.
    “After the midday meal, if she has her lessons done, I’ll take her for a ride and we’ll put the pony through his paces,” Liam said.
    “Listening to the two of you determine the definition of ‘done’ should be quite entertaining,” Elinore said placidly.
    “I—” Liam leaned back, feeling a bit sulky himself. He wasn’t going to win this round. Brooke was his little sister.
    His baby sister. He’d already been away at school when she was born, and her first years were odd flashes of memory for him. A baby who drooled and giggled when he made funny faces at her. An infant who had learned to crawl between one visit home and the next, and had sent him into a panic when he’d put her on the carpet and turned his back for what he swore had been no more than a minute, only to have her disappear on him. The toddler who giggled and ran through the gardens as fast as her chubby little legs could take her. The bright little girl who chattered about anything and everything to the point where he’d nicknamed her Squirrel. The silent, wary child she became whenever his father was around.
    As the male head of the family, he’d do his best to be firm about getting the lessons done, but the minute she turned those big blue eyes of hers on him, he’d cave. He remembered too well how it felt to be stuck indoors laboring over sums when the land beckoned.
    “Liam.” Elinore sipped her tea and didn’t look at him. “Did you mortgage the estate?”
    It didn’t surprise him that she’d known his father had intended to take a mortgage out on the estate. No doubt the old baron had taken cruel delight in telling her he was stripping the land for everything it was worth.
    When his father’s man of business had gone over the accounts with him, he’d been appalled at the amount his father had intended to wring from the already foundering estate. And he’d felt an obscene kind of gratitude that the old baron had choked to death while dining with his current mistress before the papers had been signed.
    “Yes, I took out a mortgage,” Liam said, gulping down the rest of the tea. “A small one.” Enough to pay off the tradesmen his father owed and give himself some money to honor his own bills for the next year or so. Elinore had provided him with a generous quarterly allowance ever since he’d first gone away to school, and he’d been grateful for it, but now that the estate was his, he didn’t want to live off her money.
    With proper care and management, the land should be able to provide him and his family with a good living.
    “I see.” Elinore set her cup down, then folded her hands in her lap. She focused her gaze on the terrace door. “I’ll make the same bargain with you that I made with your father.”
    Don’t treat me like I’ve become him just because I hold the title, Liam thought fiercely.
    “I’ll pay the servants’ wages and the household