An Heir of Deception (The Elusive Lords) Read online

  “Where is he staying? The guesthouse? Have I just sent him in search of other accommodations?” Charlotte imagined he’d be departing the place shortly.

  “Oh no, it’s nothing like that. Alex purchased Gretchen Manor two years back. Do you remember it?”

  Charlotte briefly lowered her lids, only able to dip her head in response. Of course she remembered the Palladian-style manor house with its portico, towering columns and lush, green lawns. She’d fallen in love with it on sight. The house was no more than ten miles down the road, an easy distance by carriage or on horseback. Alex lived but a stone’s throw away.

  “Oh Lottie, you mustn’t look so cast down.” Catherine nudged Charlotte’s chin up with her fingertip. “So much has happened since you’ve been gone. Alex hasn’t been the same since you left. You must be patient with him.”

  A blink sent a stream of tears down her cheeks. They landed on her sister’s palm. “He despises me.”

  “Believe me, my dear, he does not despise you. Isn’t it obvious he’s still hurt by the whole affair? That itself says a great deal about how much he loved you.”

  Loved her. The past not the present. He didn’t love her anymore. And would he still have loved her if he knew the truth? Who she really was?

  “Come now, you look positively fatigued. First we must get some food in you and then you can rest. I’ll have to put off my interrogation until later.”

  Her sister’s words had her stomach clenching in apprehension. There was one secret she had no choice but to reveal now, for it would become known soon enough.

  “Katie, I didn’t come back to England alone. There is someone I’m most desperate for you to meet.”

  She is back.

  Alex descended the front steps toward his carriage, his pulse pounding a staccato beat. After two years of sobriety, he wanted—no needed—a drink. He needed enough to wipe her image clean from his mind. Which meant he’d have to consume the whole damn bottle. But thankfully not a drop of alcohol existed at his residence. Today he was safe, temptation of that sort well out of reach.

  Though not impossible to acquire should his resolve crumble, a voice inside him taunted. Alex ruthlessly quashed it. He’d come too far and worked too hard to be dragged down by that particular vice. By her.

  Why the blazes had she come back? A damned eternity would have been soon enough to have to see her again.

  Is she back for good? Is she married?

  The questions crept insidiously into his thoughts, catching him unaware. Once, years ago, he would have sold his soul—and at times thought he had—for any news of her. How often had he lain in his bed and prayed she’d come back to him or wished he would wake up to discover his wedding day had just been a dream? A nightmare. Today the thought that only a few miles separated them made his blood run cold.

  She is so damn beautiful.

  Though unwanted, the observation was in no way a compliment to her. It was simply a statement of fact. And if he dared flirt with facts, he would have to concede she was even more beautiful than before. At nineteen, she’d been a flower on the brink of bloom. Well, she had bloomed and was certain to be a danger to the gentlemen in Society. No doubt she was a danger to men everywhere. Lord how he wished those four years, ten months and three weeks hadn’t been so kind to her.

  Suddenly, the plaintive cry of a child rent the quiet of the March midday. Just about to bolt into his carriage, Alex stilled, his gloved hand resting on the cold metal door of the barouche. Angling his head in the direction of the sound, he noted for the first time a hackney coach parked a fair distance behind his in the circular drive. No doubt her transport. And it appeared she hadn’t come alone.

  Without stopping to consider the injudiciousness of his actions, but compelled by a force beyond his control, Alex tossed the envelope onto the seat of his barouche and started toward the carriage, unsure of his purpose or what he hoped to learn.

  He passed the idling driver without a glance, his mind preoccupied.

  Whose child was it? Not that any of this mattered to him. It did not.

  Despite his denials, he found himself peering into the dark green interior. Ensconced in the back was a woman, and tucked at her side sat a young boy, whom she spoke to in quiet, soothing tones.

  “Is there something wrong with the child?” He was fully cognizant that he had no business asking the question and that the answer was none of his concern. None of that seemed to matter.

  The woman’s head snapped up at his voice, revealing a breathtakingly beautiful face belonging to a young woman of no more than seventeen or eighteen years. With brown spiraling curls peeping from beneath her bonnet and a complexion that resembled his own tanned several hours in the sun, it was apparent she was of mixed blood. A mulatto.

  “No sir, we is—are waiting for his mama,” she replied in an accent that proclaimed her American origins.

  She had a child.

  Although Alex had prepared himself for such an answer, upon actually hearing it, he stiffened, his breath escaping between his lips in an audible rush.

  Swallowing hard, he stared at the boy who sat crowded against the girl, a fisted hand rubbing his eyes as if he’d just awakened. Then the boy tipped his head back to gaze up at him. Alex staggered back a step, his stomach feeling as if it had plunged clear down to his toes.

  When he was five, his mother had commissioned a portrait of him and his older brother, Charles. Vivid in his recollection were the three lashes he’d received that day from his father for some small infraction. It had never taken much for him to raise his father’s ire—it still did not. The portrait borne of that unhappy incident in his young life hung in the gallery at Windsor Place, the duke’s seat and country estate. The child who peered up at him now, his blue eyes still drowsy with sleep, his hair a mop of blond, looping curls, could have been the six-year-old boy in the portrait.

  The child peering up at him could have been his brother Charles.

  Chapter Two

  “Who do you want me to meet?” Katie asked, her voice lowered to a whisper, ripe with curiosity. Then she gasped as if a scandalous thought had just occurred to her. Her blue eyes rounded as did her mouth. “Are you engaged? Have you a fiancé waiting out in the carriage?”

  Charlotte drew a deep breath, bracing herself. Her sister wouldn’t be happy. Above all else, this would be yet further evidence of how much of her life she’d kept hidden from her. “No, not a fiancé, but a—”

  With the sort of timing only seen in a melodrama heavy with suspense undertones, voices at the front entrance halted her revelation. Charlotte turned and watched in shocked disbelief as Alex, her maid Jillian, and Nicholas appeared in the archway between the entrance hall and the vestibule, Reeves currently nowhere in sight.

  “I’ve found a child in need of his mother,” Alex announced, his gaze never wavering from hers as he approached.

  Ever since Charlotte had made the decision to return to England, she’d anticipated and prepared for this moment. Well as much as a green soldier could prepare himself for the realities of war. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the fear threatening to consume her whole. This was not how she’d imagined Nicholas’s introduction. She’d had a speech prepared and had run through it a hundred times in her mind. But like the only player on stage who’d lost their script and forgotten the directions, she fell silent as her mind raced, searching for the proper response. But search as she might, no words would come.

  “Mama.” Her son’s exclamation was accompanied by the sound of tiny booted feet charging across the floor until he reached her side in a fever of breathlessness, his face stained with dried tears.

  “Mama?” The same two-syllable word, yet her twin uttered it in an entirely different manner. “You have a son?”

  Alex strode toward her with staggering nonchalance given he hadn’t deigned to address her only minutes before. But his expression hadn’t lost its cold inscrutability. His gaze darted to Nicholas, before set
tling on her.

  Behind her, Katie sounded like an asthmatic trying to catch her breath but Charlotte could deal with only one calamity at a time. Alex had to come first.

  Alex had always come first, a voice inside her whispered.

  Settling her hands protectively on her son’s shoulders, she met Alex’s stare as air inched its way into her lungs.

  I can do this. I must do this.

  “When I heard him crying, I thought it best if I brought him inside,” he said, halting in front of her. She could hear the condemnation in his tone and feel it emanating from his pores.

  He spoke to her, yet still he did not greet her. Charlotte swallowed a lump of despair.

  I cannot do this.

  Nicholas tipped his head back and stared up at Alex, who at six-foot-two inches tall loomed above him like a dark angel.

  “You have a son?” This time her sister’s voice held more than a trace of pique and hurt. Briefly, Charlotte regarded Jillian, who appeared oblivious to the enfolding drama, her hazel eyes soaking in the grandeur of her surroundings with awe.

  Angling her head over her shoulder, Charlotte met her sister’s gaze. “Katie, I’m sorry.” Explanations—as much as she could offer—would have to wait.

  Truly, this was not how she had envisioned—had planned—the introduction of aunt to nephew.

  “He’s a handsome boy. I expect he looks like his father.”

  Turning back to him, Charlotte swallowed hard and felt the burn of a guilty blush suffuse her face, not exactly certain how she should respond to Alex’s remark. It was plainly spoken and lacking in artifice, some of which she might have expected given their history. But most people thought Nicholas resembled her with his dark blond locks and blue eyes. Most never bothered to look beyond those obvious similarities.

  Alex was unlike anyone she had ever met, a fact she would be wise to remember.

  “Yes, he does. Unfortunately, his father is no longer with us.” There, she’d done it, the first lie, the seedling of a multitude more. But then it wasn’t as if this was chaste, uncharted grounds. One would assume she’d be quite accomplished at it by now. She was unquestionably a connoisseur should lying be raised to an art form—if indeed it was not.

  While her sister’s indrawn breath scalded Charlotte’s ears, Alex continued to stare at her, his thickly fringed eyes devoid of emotion, his expression positively deadpan. “So you married?”

  Only the faintest inflection in his tone indicated it was a question, and nothing in his voice hinted that asking had caused his heart to contract in anguish, as hers had done. He sounded politely inquiring, expressing no great necessity to actually know.

  But to utter that particular lie aloud—to Alex—was more than her conscience or heart could bear. There did exist a limit to her duplicity. Charlotte inclined her head in a jerky nod, unable to hold his gaze. But if she thought he might challenge her; that somehow he’d seen through the veil of her deception, she couldn’t tell by his expression.

  Alex glanced down at Nicholas and only then did she see an infinitesimal warming in his silver gray eyes. In a surprising move, he lowered to his haunches and extended his right hand to her son. Nicholas inched back against her skirts, shooting a quick look up at her as if to seek assurance that this strange man was indeed safe. Too bewildered by Alex’s unexpected show of kindness to do anything else, Charlotte responded with another jerky nod.

  Nicholas slowly lifted his hand to find it quickly enveloped in Alex’s much larger one. “And your name, young man?”

  Charlotte opened her mouth to answer, but it seemed her son had had the response primed and ready on the tip of his tongue.

  “Nicholas.”

  A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Nicholas,” Alex said solemnly, giving her son’s hand a firm yet gentle shake.

  Who would have thought such an innocuous gesture could break a heart clean in two. Charlotte experienced the truth of it for herself.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And how old are you?”

  Charlotte’s heartbeat thundered in her ears and her hand tightened on her son’s slender shoulders. Before he could respond, she replied, “He will be four in July.” Lie number two.

  Releasing Nicholas’s hand, Alex rose smoothly to his feet. “He’s tall for three.”

  Her son was tall for four. He’d be tall like his father. A short silence followed his statement, as Charlotte could not bring herself to agree.

  His gaze met hers. Guilt and a swell of wholly inappropriate emotions caused another wave of heat to flood her face in a mad rush.

  Alex pulled out a gold fob and gave it a quick glance before returning it to his coat pocket. Inclining his head in a nod toward her son, he said, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Nicholas.” He then directed his attention to Katie who had long gone silent behind her. “Good day, ladies.”

  The use of the term ladies should have signified her inclusion, but something in the fleeting look he gave her did not leave her with the feeling he wished her well at all. In fact, behind his impenetrable stare, she was certain he wished her a trip to hell and back—or perhaps he’d rather she not return.

  For the second time in the span of a quarter hour, Alex took his leave of her and something inside her told her he’d do his utmost to avoid all future contact. She wanted to weep the same way she’d done when she had been the one to walk away all those years ago.

  It was only at the distant click of the front door closing that Katie came to her side. “You were married and didn’t say a word of it to me? Not in one of the twenty letters you’ve written over the years might you have mentioned a husband…and a son?” From her tone, it was difficult for Charlotte to discern whether her sister was more angry than hurt, but she estimated—or rather hoped—it was the former as that emotion was easier to deal with.

  Nicholas turned and looked up to view his aunt. He became wide-eyed and began frantically tugging on the hand Charlotte had rested on his shoulder. “Mama, she looks like you,” he exclaimed in a high voice.

  With her eyes, Charlotte pleaded for her sister’s understanding and cooperation. The last thing she wanted was to have this particular conversation in front of her son, her maid, and anyone else whose interest was piqued by a salacious bit of gossip.

  Katie acknowledged her silent request with a terse nod before doing just as Alex had done by going down on her haunches in front of her nephew.

  “Do you remember when mama told you that I had a sister who looked like me? Well, this is your Aunt Katie. Now be a good boy and say hello,” Charlotte urged gently.

  Tears gathered in her sister’s eyes as she stared at Nicholas in wonder, completely enraptured.

  “Hullo, Aunt Katie,” he whispered, staring at her with the same sort of fixation.

  Her sister’s fingers skimmed his pink cheeks and chin in feather light brushes. “Hello, Nicholas,” she said in a choked voice. “Would you mind terribly if I gave you a hug?”

  Perhaps it was the familiarity of the face that eased Nicholas’s usual reticence with strangers, for he gave a shy nod of assent without seeking the assurance he’d sought from her when Alex had offered him his hand. Quickly he was enfolded in her sister’s arms, his own trapped at his sides like a toy soldier. Nonetheless, he permitted her to hug him for a very long time.

  The next hour passed in a blur of activity. Katie enthused over her nephew as if he were the greatest archeological find of all time. She hugged and petted him as much as Nicholas would permit, which was considerable given her son too seemed enthralled at the living and breathing creature whose face was the mirror image of his mother’s.

  Charlotte introduced Jillian to her sister. Relieved of her bonnet, the full glory of her maid’s beauty caused Katie to halt and stare. A discernible blush appeared beneath Jillian’s café au lait complexion. And Charlotte knew precisely what her sister was thinking; a servant that uncommonly pretty would be trouble in deuces and spades. But they would cope.
They’d had to cope before.

  Two footmen clad in liveries of the family colors, gold and green, were dispatched to collect their bags and trunks from the hackney. It was quickly determined that Nicholas would sleep in the nursery, and Jillian would sleep in the adjoining room until the children and their nanny returned. Charlotte would take her former bedchamber.

  After they’d all eaten, Jillian insisted on putting a sleepy Nicholas down for his midafternoon nap. Charlotte dearly wished she could follow, but the look on her sister’s face told her an explanation would not wait. The moment of reckoning had arrived.

  Jillian and Nicholas had barely departed the small salon before Katie marched her down the hall and into the morning room. She steered her past the piano and harp, and dragged her down onto the chintz settee to take a seat beside her.

  “You left because of what we learned about our mother, did you not?” No preambles. Her sister gave a whole new meaning to tackling difficulties head on.

  Charlotte took a deep, fortifying breath, for she had to be convincing above all else. “That may have played some part in my decision to leave, but it wasn’t the whole of it. I met someone two months prior to the wedding. We fell in love.” In order to accurately affect the look of a woman in love, she thought of Alex.

  Katie’s jaw came unhinged, but soon shock gave way to disbelief. In the narrowing of her eyes, suspicion dawned clear and blue.

  “I know it sounds extraordinary, does it not? I mean Alex had been the love of my life. But I realized what I felt for him was a blind devotion. A case of mad passion. Perhaps even the want of something I believed I could never have. I mean truly, Alex interested in me? I was not at all the kind of woman who could hold the attentions of a man like him for long. Peter—that was his name—was more…suited to me. ”

  The disbelief faded from her sister’s eyes and the puzzlement returned.