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?”
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 settling on her once again.
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.
Settling her hands protectively on her son’s shoulders, she met Alex’s stare as air inched its way into her lungs. You can do this. You 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 feel his condemnation 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 resembles 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 blonde locks and blue eyes. Most never bothered to look beyond those obvious similarities. Alex was unlike anyone she’d ever met, a fact she would be wise to remember.
“Yes, he does. Unfortunately, his father died before he was born.” 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. Indeed, 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 as to the safe worthiness of the stranger. 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. Charlotte thought her heart would simply break in two.
“Thank you, sir.”
“And how old are you?”
Charlotte�
�s heartbeat thundered in her ears and her hand tightened on his 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 couldn’t 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 that 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 fifteen minutes, Alex took his leave of her and something inside her told her he’d do his utmost to avoid all contact with her in the future. 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 after the distant click of the front door closing that Katie took those few steps to come 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 handle.
Nicholas turned and looked up to view his aunt. He became wide-eyed and began frantically tugging on Charlotte’s hand resting 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 brisk nod, before doing just as Alex had done, and going down on her haunches in front of her nephew.
“Do you remember when mama told you that I had a sister who looked exactly 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 with a focused attention.
“Hullo, Aunt Katie,” he whispered, staring at her with the same sort of fixation.
Her sister’s fingers skimmed his face in feather light brushes. “Hullo, 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 side 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. Nicholas would sleep in the nursery, and Jillian would sleep in the room next to the nursery until the children and their nanny returned. Charlotte was assigned her former bedchamber.
After they’d all eaten, Jillian volunteered to put a sleepy Nicholas down for his mid-afternoon nap. Charlotte dearly wished she could follow, but the look on her sister’s face told her an explanation would not wait until after she’d rested.
Jillian and Nicholas had barely departed the dining room 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 discovered about our mother, didn’t you?”
Charlotte took a deep fortifying breath, for she had to be convincing above all else. “That might have played some part in my decision to leave, but it wasn’t the whole of it. I met a man two months prior to the wedding. We fell in love.”
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. Neil—that was his name—was more…accessible. ”
The disbelief faded from her sister’s eyes and the puzzlement returned.
Charlotte pressed on, relieved at the progress she’d made. “In the end, although, I cared deeply for Alex, a marriage between us would have been a mistake. But I should not have waited so long to tell him and should have had the courage to tell him to his face. For that I will always be more ashamed and sorry than you can ever imagine.”
“But how could you leave me? Have you any idea what we—what I went through these past years without you, without being able to even write to you? One-sided correspondence might suit your purposes but it didn’t mine.”
Upon her return to England, Charlotte had planned to tell her sister about the letter threatening to expose the truth about who their mother was. But with the dowager gone, what good would it serve? Whose good would it serve? Katie had had a difficult enough time in society.
“If you knew how much I regret what I did but it had to be that way. I knew if I told you of my plans, you would tell James. And if James knew, it was only a matter of time before Alex discovered. That wasn’t a risk I could take.”
“But even if Alex did discover you’d fallen in love with someone else, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. You didn’t have to run away.”
Charlotte couldn’t very well tell her it would indeed have been the end of the world as they all knew it. Alex would have seen right through her lies and gently coerced the truth from her. Following would have been a Rutherford family scandal far eclipsing the revelation of two illegitimate daughters. And Alex’s titles would have been tarnished by his association with her. Everyone would have suffered. And then of course there was Nicholas…
“But why—”
“Katie darling,” Charlotte implored, taking her sister’s hand in hers, “no more questions on this subject for now. Please.”
“Forgive me if I assumed as your sister, your twin, I would receive more consideration.”
“Later, I will explain it all. Why I allowed so much time to pass. Why I didn’t tell you about Neil and Nicholas earlier. I promise I will.” Charlotte gave her twin’s hand a gentle squeeze. “But please don’t press me on it now.”
“From your maid’s accent, I gather you’ve been residing in America?”
Charlotte gave a brief nod.
“James had investigators throughout the Continent but I don’t be
lieve he ever thought to look there.” Katie spoke as if she were speaking to herself. “Have you come to stay?” she then asked, her cerulean blue eyes intent.
A heavy sigh escaped Charlotte’s lips. That was a question she had yet to answer herself. She would like nothing better than to remain. The only person she would truly miss if she left America was Lucas, and he traveled to London on business often enough for them to remain in contact.
“I’m not certain.”
Katie opened her mouth, and then quickly snapped it shut. Silence dragged for several long seconds before she spoke. “Whatever your reasons for your continued secrecy, I hope you know there is nothing you cannot tell me.”
But there were also things that would only cause her sister needless distress, and Charlotte wouldn’t inflict that pain upon her. It was enough that she knew and carried the shame of the secret.
“Katie, will you tell me about Alex?” Charlotte asked in an abrupt change of topic. The question had festered inside her for too many years. She had to know.
Her sister’s gaze sharpened just enough for Charlotte to don her mask and exclaim defensively, “What? I might not have married him, but I did care for him deeply. Naturally I care how he fared.”
After a pause, Katie’s mouth softened. “Well, to say your leaving hit him hard would be a vast understatement. He was like—well like I’d never seen him before. Frankly, he turned into a man I never care to see again.”
A needlelike sting of pain accompanied every beat of Charlotte’s heart upon hearing her sister’s words. She’d wanted to know but now she wasn’t certain. But her insatiable need to fill the gaps of those years without him urged her to delve in true masochistic fashion.
“What did he do?”
Katie swallowed, briefly looking down at their joined hands. “The truth isn’t pretty and may be difficult for you to hear. Are you sure you want to know?” she asked, looking Charlotte in the eye.
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