Vexing The Viscount Read Free Page A

experimental life of the flesh. However, as fascinating as this mosaic is, the find I’m about to unveil is even more beguiling.”
    To a man, his audience leaned forward in their seats.
    Lucian reached down into his small valise and pulled out an object no larger than Mlle La Tour’s journal. “A wax tablet and stylus.”
    The assembly loosed a collective sigh of disappointment.
    “Well, it seems in remarkable condition,” Sir Alistair said. “But I fail to see how a tally of grain shipments or slave purchases—”
    “I know that’s usually what one finds on these things, but not so in this case.” Lucian cradled the tablet as if it were his firstborn. He reached a finger to trace the delicate writing, then pulled back as if he’d thought better of it. “No, gentlemen, this is the treasure I promised to share with you in this lecture. Or rather, the way to find the treasure.”
    “Well, don’t riddle us, Rutland,” Lord Brumley grumbled. “We have neither the time nor the patience.”
    Nor the intellect
, Daisy added silently.
    “What is it then? Out with it,” Brumley said.
    Lucian held the tablet over his head like Moses descending from Mount Sinai. “This is the record of a Roman treasure that went astray and was never recovered—a year’s pay for the entire Roman Legion on the British isle.”
    Daisy could almost hear the men calculating the sum in ancient coin as they settled back into their seats.
    This time, Daisy leaned forward. The lure of a treasure tempted her as though she possessed a dragon’s attraction to shiny hoards. When she was a little girl, she had discovered a pirate’s cache of Spanish gold beneath the stones of herhome, Dragon Caern Castle in Cornwall. The sudden wealth changed her family’s life forever. Her uncle might be a mere baron and a former pirate, but the Spanish gold meant even dukes now sought him out for friendship and counsel.
    Though Daisy and her sisters couldn’t claim a title in their own right, a generous dowry had landed a match with a marquess for her older sister, Hyacinth. The twins, Posey and Poppy, were engaged to an earl apiece. Only Lily was still in the schoolroom.
    Daisy could have married thrice over, but she had little use for dandies. The men who danced attendance on her with visions of Spanish doubloons sparkling in their eyes were irritating in the extreme.
    And more than a little dull.
    Besides, none of them ever made her heart race like a certain skinny, dark-haired boy with an Italian accent had.
    Drat the man!
How could he not even remember her?
    “What I offer you today,” the dratted man in question was saying, “is a chance to partner with me to find this Roman payroll.”
    The thrill of finding Dragon Caern’s treasure had never paled in Daisy’s mind. It was the finest adventure she’d ever had.
    She longed to do it again.
    “After all this time, it’s not probable the treasure is still intact,” Lord Brumley said with a sniff. “Does the tablet give the location?”
    Lucian flashed a quick grin. “If it did, I’d not be likely to divulge it, would I? However, it’s not quite that simple. This tablet, though convincing, doesn’t contain the whole story. The narrative is unfinished, but it contains a sworn statement that the entire payload had been cached in one location. So I have to conclude that another as yet undiscoveredtablet contains the rest of the information. Now we—”
    “I understand you can’t give specifics, but what, in general, does the tablet say?” Sir Alistair asked. As head of the Society of Antiquaries, he was a bona fide scholar. Of all the men in the room, Daisy judged him most likely to be able to read an ancient Latin text. Daisy had a passing acquaintance with many of the others in attendance—Lord Lindley, Lord Halifax, Sir Benton Wembley, to name a few—and she’d never have guessed at their interest in antiquities.
    Perhaps it was the risqué nature of the ancient art that commanded