After the two men left, Thorn sank back into his chair.
The Duke of Villiers had bought Eleanor a ring. But India could buy her own jewelry. What she needed was the faith that the man she married wouldn’t leave her, as she believed her parents had done.
She would never have enough faith in him: he could imagine that she would test him over and over and he would fail every time, because, damn it, he was as blind as the next man.
India was brilliant and subtle. Her brain darted ahead, planning for eventualities only she could see. In that, he was her opposite. He dealt with problems of the moment, and never bothered to look much further.
He wouldn’t even know he was failing her. Yet India’s conviction that she was unlovable —and that Thorn didn’t love her—had far more to do with her parents than with him. Perhaps if he made love to her every—
He stood up again, his mind reeling. He had just told himself that he planned to make love to India.
It was common terminology, after all. Though he never thought of sex that way: he used a rougher term for bedding a woman. Or more jovial ones. He shagged, pumped, screwed, jousted.
He never said anything about love, and he never thought it, either.
Until now.
Finally he identified the emotion that gripped him the night he’d thought India was on the point of marrying Vander. It wasn’t possession or lust—or at least, it wasn’t only those emotions.
It was love. He loved her.
And yet India didn’t believe he loved her. She never would . . . unless he took action.
He had to find those jewels and bring them to her.
He had to prove not only his own love for her, but her parents’ love.
It wasn’t easy to gather the remaining lads together. Dusso was now a senior driver with the Royal Mail, and Thorn had to bribe the office handsomely to give their driver a week’s leave. He ran down Geordie in the East End, wretchedly thin and evidently without a job. Bink had a family and lived in Kent on a tenant farm, but he didn’t seem to be earning much; Thorn promptly offered him one of the farms attached to Starberry Court.
When at last the four of them were together, Thorn explained what he wanted. “A number of years ago, a carriage went off Blackfriars Bridge, and its two passengers drowned. A leather pouch holding jewels went missing. I want to find that pouch. You three are the only ones I would trust. Hell, I think we’re probably the only men in London who have a chance of dragging it back up.”
“Yer mugging us!” Dusso exclaimed.
“Giving us the piss,” Geordie chimed in.
“I assure you that I am not.”
“Bloody hell,” Dusso said. “Iffen I’d known you was talking about the river, I wouldn’t have come. I’d rather be winding that bloody horn on the coach day and night than that.”
“One hundred guineas for each of you,” Thorn said, “and five hundred for the man who finds the jewels.”
“It’d be like finding a pea,” Geordie said, slumping in his chair. “I dream about it at night, you know. Swimming down into the black, stinking water and fearing a dead man’s claw is going to pull me down.”
Bink scowled at him. “It’s no wonder you have the collywobbles if you’re letting yourself think about it. I’ll do it,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “I’m not looking forward to it, mind. The wife complains because I work all day in the fields and still I don’t want a drop of water near me after. But I’ll do it for my girls.”
“I can’t possibly do it alone,” Thorn said. “I need a team, same as we used to do. Two to dive, and one person above to spot, make sure they both come up. One on the shore in case of trouble.”
“I’ll be on the shore,” Dusso said instantly. “Them boats have no concern for who might be bobbing about in the stream.”
Thorn shook his head. “Geordie’s on shore.”