“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 the Grechen 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 her 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 cheeks now cool to the touch. 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 about her. 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 was 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 of 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.
Was she back for good? Was 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 was 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 eighteen, 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 April midday. Just about to bolt into his carriage, Alex’s gloved hand stilled on the cool metal sides of the phaeton. 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 passenger seat of his phaeton 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 blonde 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 married? Have you a husband waiting out in the carriage?”
Charlotte drew in 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 husband, but a—”
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 doorway between the entryway 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 the way Nicholas’s introduction was supposed to occur. Like the only player on stage without a script or direction, 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?”