“Put the brush down for a bloody second,” he growled. “It’s important.”
A delicate blonde with hazel eyes that widened imperceptibly at her brother’s tone, Brynne obediently stopped painting and swiveled in her chair to face him. “My goodness,” she gasped. “Weston, you’re…you’re sweating.”
He yanked his handkerchief out of his waistcoat pocket and mopped his temple. “Your point?”
“You never sweat. Are you…are you feeling ill?” she asked hesitantly.
No one ever questioned how Weston was feeling.
Especially his own family.
They all knew better.
“She’s here,” he bit out, flicking a glance at his sister’s canvas. A shy woman, Brynne had always preferred painting to people, even as a small child. She never traveled anywhere without her extensive array of art supplies, and when the siblings had traveled to London together to attend the Countess of Beresford’s ball, her brushes and paints and canvases had filled half the trunks.
“Who is here?” Brynne said, visibly confused. “Lady Martha? I was under the impression you invited her. Or have you changed your mind about proposing?”
“This isn’t about Martha.” At that moment, Weston couldn’t have cared less about his bride-to-be. Not when there were more pressing matters to attend to. “This is about her.”
“And by her, you mean…”
Birds hiding in the shrubbery took flight when he threw his hands towards the heavens. “Our sister!”
Brynne blinked. “We don’t have a sister.”
“The American.”
“Oh, you mean that sister.” Brynne turned back to her painting and picked up her brush. “How nice. Do you think we should invite her over for tea?”
Weston raked both hands through his hair. As dark as Brynne’s was light, it fell to his shoulders in a wave of black. “No, I don’t think we should invite her over for tea.”
If he allowed it, Brynne would have had every injured animal and orphan in London living under their roof.
But Joanna Thorncroft wasn’t injured.
And she damned sure wasn’t an orphan.
He had spoken to her father—their father—just this morning. They’d discussed the weather. Weston’s new string of thoroughbreds. The gambling hell opening on Third and Chesterfield. One topic noticeably absent from their conversation?
The Marquess of Dorchester’s bastard daughter.
It was eighteen months to the day that Weston had discovered The Letter in his father’s study. Cursed with insomnia and unable to sleep, he’d gone searching for a book to read to pass the hours until sunrise. A slim volume of poetry had caught his eye; Leaves of Grass by the American poet Walt Whitman.
The letter fell out as soon as he pulled the book off the shelf. Folded thrice over and yellowed with age, it had crackled when he picked it up and carefully laid it flat on his father’s desk to read the delicate handwriting.
My Dear Jason it had begun, and Weston had almost stopped there. Some days, he wished that he had, as the letter had brought him nothing but trouble. But then, he had seen the date in the upper hand corner, and realized it had been written the year his mother passed, and he naively thought that it was from her. A voice from the past he still secretly yearned to hear, even all these years later. So he brought his candle closer, and as light from the orange flame licked across the old parchment, he started reading and didn’t stop until he reached the end.
My Dear Jason,
First I should like to apologize for leaving as I did. I should have told you, but if I had done that I fear I never would have had the courage to return to Boston. And this is where I belong. Where I have always belonged. I shall treasure our time together, and hope you are able to do the same. I ask that you not follow me, or try to bring me back to you. I am happy and content where I am, and my greatest hope is that you can find the same happiness and contentment where you are. There may be an ocean between us, but you will forever be in my heart and a piece of you will always be with me.
I was not certain when I left, but I am now. I am going to be a mother. Our love for each other has gifted us with a child. Again, I should have told you of my suspicions, but I know if I did, you’d have asked me to stay and I would have said yes. But in my heart, I’ve no wish to be a countess. That life is not for me, and I wouldn’t have it for this child.
Jacob has agreed to marry me and raise the babe as our own. He is a good man. He will provide us with a good life. When the child comes of age, perhaps they can visit England as I did. And please know your invitation here is forever open. I wouldn’t keep you from your own child, if that is your wish. But neither would I have them raised in an environment that I found so intolerable. I pray you can understand my decision and, some day, find it in yourself to forgive me.
All of my care,
Anne
Once, twice, a dozen times, Weston read the letter.
He kept waiting for it to change. For the words to magically rearrange themselves into something that made sense. But they never did.
What he’d hoped was a hidden letter from his mother had actually been a love note from his father’s mistress. A mistress the Marquess of Dorchester had taken almost immediately after his wife died giving birth to Weston and Brynne. A mistress that had born him a child!
For five months, Weston kept what he’d learned to himself.
He hadn’t even told Brynne the truth.
There was no reason to dig up old skeletons. No reason to burden his ailing grandfather, the Duke of Caldwell, with a decades-old scandal. No reason to drag the family name through the gossip pages.
But then he had met Lady Martha Smethwick and, finding her a suitable prospect for a wife (if a bit dull), had made the decision to propose. But when he went to ask his father for the family ring, a ring that had been passed down via the eldest son through five generations of carefully planned (if generally unhappy) Weston marriages, he was informed, in no uncertain terms, that it was…
“Gone,” said Jason Weston, Marquess of Dorchester, without glancing up from his accounting ledger.
“What the hell do you mean, it’s gone?” Weston had said in disbelief.
Jason tapped his pen on the edge of his desk. “I gave it away.”
“To whom?” Weston had demanded, although the sinking pit in his stomach told him he already knew the answer. “You gave it to her, didn’t you? Your mistress. Anne.”
His father’s head snapped up. “How do you know that name?”
“Does it matter?”
Jason was quiet for a long while. Then he slumped in his chair, and shook his head. “I suppose not. Except Anne was never my mistress. She was…she was the love of my life.”
Weston snorted. “You’ve never loved anyone.”
“That’s not true. I love you, and your sister.”
“Then you’ve a damned interesting way of showing it,” said Weston, thinking of all the years he’d spent at boarding school. All the times he’d reached out for affection, or acknowledgement, or anything, really, other than indifference. Only to be shoved aside, time and time again. Until, at long last, he stopped reaching out.
There was a reason Weston was cold. A reason he was described as heartless.
And that reason was sitting right in front of him.
The marquess stood up. “If I’ve been demanding of you over the years, it’s because—”
“This isn’t about me,” Weston said curtly. “It’s about the ring. And what you did with it.”
A muscle tensed in Jason’s jaw. A tall man, like his son, he still cut an intimidating figure at seven and fifty. “Purchase another. As I said, the ring is gone.”
Weston met his father’s gaze without flinching. “It wasn’t yours to give away.”
“Are you questioning my decision?”
“You mean your decision to give a two-hundred-year-old family heirloom away to your American mistress? Yes, I bloody well am.�
� Unable to look his father in the eyes for all of the disgust bubbling up inside of him, Weston turned and strode to the window. Dorchester Park was a magnificent estate of over three thousand acres with the study overlooking a large, manmade pond. Focusing on a pair of swans swimming in lazy circles, he said tersely, “Did you ever bother to meet your bastard child?”
“Don’t call her that,” Jason said.
Her.
His father’s mistress had born a girl.
“You’ve another daughter, then,” he said dispassionately. “Congratulations.”
“Her name is Joanna. And it was better that I never went to see her. She was raised to believe that another man was her father. I never wanted to dissuade her of that notion.”
Of course not.
Why would the marquess care for a third child when he couldn’t be bothered with his first two?
“Does Anne still have the ring?” Weston asked.
A long pause, and then…“I don’t know.”
Incredulous, he whirled to face his father. “You don’t know?”
“Anne…Anne passed away when Joanna was still a young girl. Scarlet fever,” Jason said heavily. “I don’t know what became of the ring after that.”
“And you never thought to find out?”
The marquess glared at his son. “Should I have arrived on their doorstep while they were still in mourning and order them to return it to me?”
“No, you never should have given it away to begin with.” As a quiet rage took hold of him, the likes of which he was always exceedingly careful to control, Weston forced himself to take a step back. “Mama would have wanted my wife, the future mother of my children, to have the ring. Not some American harlot.”
His father’s face turned a deep, mottled red. “If you want it, then go find it.”
And that was what Weston did. With no leads to go on other than a name and a location, he hired the best personal investigator that his vast wealth could buy to find the ring. In a twist of incredible fate, Weston’s search coincided with the ring appearing at a jeweler’s shop in Boston. The investigator, Harrison, had already paid off every jeweler within thirty miles of the city to immediately notify him should a priceless heart-shaped ruby be brought to them, and when it did, he had one of his so-called “pocket boys” nab the ring and steal onto the first ship bound for London.
As soon as the ring was in Weston’s possession, he had paid the investigator twice his asking fee, then another hundred pounds for his discretion. He still hadn’t bothered to tell his father. As far as he was concerned, the marquess didn’t deserve to know. But he had shared all that he knew with Brynne, if only because the weight of it all was better shared between two people, and if she were to ever discover he’d kept a secret of this magnitude from her, she’d never speak another word to him again.
And that was it.
The matter was resolved.
Or at least it had been until this morning when he rode through Hyde Park…and saw his damned half-sister.
Weston wouldn’t have known who she was if not for the picture the investigator had his pocket boy draw at Weston’s request. Sheer curiosity had driven him to want to know what Joanna looked like, even though he had absolutely no intention of ever meeting his father’s bastard.
The sketch had been childish and lacking in detail, but it was accurate enough that when Weston saw the tall, red-haired, blue-eyed woman marching through the park, he knew at once who she was.
What he didn’t know was what the hell she was doing here.
“Do you think she’s come for the ring?” he asked Brynne.
His sister tapped her paintbrush against her chin. “One would assume. You did steal it from her.”
“You cannot steal what is rightfully yours,” he growled.
“But if it was left to her by her mother—”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It matters a great deal to her, I believe, if she’s traveled all the way to London.” Brynne crossed her legs at the knee. “What are you going to do, West? If our sister asks for the ring back.”
“I’ll tell her that I’ll give it to her.” He smiled grimly. “Over my cold, dead body.”
Chapter Twenty
When a knock sounded at the door early in the morning, Joanna buried her nose in her book. “If that’s Kincaid,” she said scathingly, “tell him I am not in.”
After pouring out her innermost feelings to Evie and crying a few more tears, Joanna had picked herself up, dusted herself off, and decided that a man wasn’t going to ruin what little time in London she had left.
Even a man who had stolen her heart.
She would need it back at some point. As the daughter of a doctor, she was fairly certain a person couldn’t go parading about with an empty hole in their chest where a vital organ ought to be.
But not today.
Today, she refused to think about Kincaid at all.
Except he was knocking on the door at half-past seven.
Which made him rather hard to ignore.
Pigeon-livered ratbag, indeed.
“Our room is the size of a henhouse,” Evie pointed out as she abandoned her garden of powders and creams, cinched her dressing robe, and went to the door. “I’m fairly certain he is going to see you.”
“Not. In,” Joanna repeated.
“Fine,” Evie sighed. The door creaked on its hinges as she opened the door a crack. “I am terribly sorry, but—oh. You’re not who I was expecting.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” asked a woman whose voice Joanna had never heard before. It was light, and melodious, and she could tell their visitor was smiling even though Evie was blocking the doorway.
“Who is it?” she asked, closing her book and swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
“Not Kincaid,” Evie replied. “Are you still out?”
“No, I’m in.”
“You’re not in, or you’re—”
“For heaven’s sake,” Joanna grumbled. In two steps, she was across the room—it really was the size of a henhouse—and peering over Evie’s shoulder at a curvy brunette with a heart-shaped face, twinkling eyes that couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be blue or gray, and a beaming smile that stretched ear to ear.
“Oh,” she gasped in delight, “I am so happy to finally meet you!”
Joanna grunted when the young woman flung her arms around both sisters and gave them a hug that was astonishingly strong for her petite size.
“Help me,” Evie mouthed.
“Er, it’s nice to meet you as well,” Joanna said as she carefully extracted herself from the enthusiastic embrace. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Of course.” Using her palm, the brunette gave herself a light smack in the middle of her forehead. “I always forget that part. Or rather, I never get to do it as not many people are interested in meeting me.” Her grin unwavering, she stuck out the hand she’d just used to hit herself. “Miss Rosemary Stanhope. I am your—”
“Cousin,” Joanna said, stunned. “You’re our cousin.”
Evie turned to her. “This is our cousin?”
Rosemary’s nose wrinkled. “Are you disappointed? It is all right. I am accustomed to it.”
“Disappointed?” Joanna repeated. “We’re thrilled! Aren’t we Evie?”
“I could have done without the hug.”
Joanna pressed her lips together.
“Yes, yes.” Immediately putting on her most charming smile, Evie shook Rosemary’s hand. “Absolutely thrilled.”
“Come inside, come inside. I apologize for the mess,” Joanna said with a pointed glance at the dressing table which was all but hidden beneath Evie’s various creams and pots and potions, “but we were not expecting company.”
“I’d hoped to surprise you,” Rosemary confessed. “Or else I would have sent word.”
“This is a wonderful surprise, and please do not take this unkindly, but…what are you doing here?” Si
tting on the bed and leaving the chairs for her cousin and sister, Joanna’s head tilted in confusion. “I was under the impression our great-aunt was not exactly…eager to make our acquaintance.”
“She’s not,” Rosemary said. “I mean, she is. Well, she will be. Eventually. But my grandmother can be quite…set in her ways.”
“We know the feeling,” Evie said dryly.
“How did you find us?” Joanna asked.
Color bloomed in Rosemary’s cheeks as she sat down. “I, er…that is to say, I followed the detective yesterday after he left our house,” she confessed, smoothing a wrinkle on her skirt. “He led me straight here. I would have come in, except I lost my nerve. But I found it again this morning. Try and try again, as my grandmother always says! Usually, she’s referring to my failed attempts at landing a suitor, but I thought it could apply to this, as well.”
“We’re glad that you are here.” Refusing to acknowledge the tightening in her throat at the mention of Kincaid, Joanna forced a smile onto her face. It wasn’t exceedingly difficult. She was happy to meet her cousin. Elated, really. But over all that elation was a dark, heavy raincloud.
A raincloud made all by the heavier by the knowledge that she should have been ecstatic.
After weeks of uncertainty, she had everything she could have ever possibly asked for. The location of her mother’s ring. The identity of her birth father. And other family, besides! That was everything she’d come to England to find. But in seeking those answers, she’d found something else. Something even more valuable.
Love.
True love.
Or so she’d allowed herself to believe.
Now when she returned to Somerville, she’d have the ring, and the knowledge of where she came from. But she’d be leaving her heart behind in London. More than that, she’d be leaving behind the possibility of what could have been. What would have been, if not for Kincaid’s inability to give what they both desperately needed.
Did he really think she would hurt him, as that other woman had? That she would take his love and twist it into something unrecognizable? Or was he just so badly wounded from what had happened to him that he was unable to see the light of what could be through the shadows of what had been?
Bewitched by the Bluestocking Page 25
