Fortune Favors the Wicked by Theresa Romain Page A

slipped away.
    Edward Selwyn’s eyes were tawny green. And Charlotte knew from experience that he would do anything for a bit of notoriety. Wearing a cloak for the devil of it; paying a serving girl with a coin he knew to be stolen—that sounded like Edward, who treated life as a masquerade ball.
    But arranging a theft from the Royal Mint? Shooting four guards? Stabbing a healthy young woman, who would surely have fought him? No. No, that did not sound like his way. He wanted to charm the world, not control it. He’d be more likely to stab a woman to the heart figuratively than with a knife.
    Still. Charlotte would feel more at ease once she checked the hiding-holes she knew to hold meaning for Edward. Not only because he was the father of her child and the artist who had made her infamous, but because . . . well, she hated to think of someone she knew proving she did not know him at all.
    For the next several hours, she searched every place in which Edward had once hidden secrets. First, the stone-covered crannies along the vicarage’s side of the wall where she and her sister—and later, she and Edward—used to stash messages and treasures. She pried up rocks, cursing the softness of her hands, and confirmed that the spaces beneath were empty. Once, a brownish-yellow lizard, striated and spotted in black, put out a narrow tongue at her.
    â€œSame to you,” she murmured and covered its home back over. Better to find a lizard than a hidden note confessing a crime. Or a stash of stolen coins.
    Where next to check, then? The great hollow tree just outside of the village proper had shielded many notes and packages. It might be large enough to hide some of the coins; its obviousness might divert suspicion.
    But when Charlotte, skirting the rare figure she caught sight of, reached the spot where the tree had stood for generations, it was gone. Nothing remained but a stump, with its cut edge gray-brown with age. The tree must have rotted out and fallen at last.
    For a long moment, she stared at the stump, almost dizzy. She knew it was illogical to expect the village would remain the same every time she returned, yet indeed she did. Strawfield was not the sort of place where one changed the color of one’s shutters or converted a thatch roof to wooden shakes. It persisted unchanging—until it didn’t. Change, when it came, was large and swift. A centuries-old tree felled. A lover wed.
    A young woman’s life ended, and all because of a bit of gold.
    She turned away from the old stump, holding the hem of her veil down over her face. A breeze teased her, nipping her uncovered neck with a coolness that was not unpleasant.
    Into her mind flashed Benedict Frost, stern but kind as he drew her shawl about her. Kissing her as deeply as a man drew breath, yet doing nothing Charlotte did not do to him first.
    If she had met such a man ten years before, her life might have taken a very different path. But she hadn’t. She’d met Edward instead.
    She was careful as she slipped onto his lands, watching out for some member of the grand house’s staff. She saw a man with a shovel once, but he was too far away for her to tell whether he was a gardener or whether he trespassed like Charlotte.
    For a moment, she toyed with the notion of returning to the vicarage for a shovel of her own. There were several hiding spots on this side of the wall, too, and she must check them all. No; better to leave no trace or turned earth. She could pry free the stones with her hands. She always had in the past.
    Empty. Empty. All of the nooks were empty. When she heaved the last stone back into place, her hands were raw, several fingers bruised.
    This search had not set her mind at ease, though it was a necessary first step. As she had told Frost, there was an infinity of places to search in Strawfield and the surrounding land. No one would ever find the stolen sovereigns by chance.
    This whole search had been