An Heir of Deception (9 page)

His mistake had been in kissing her, touching her. His mouth tightened grimly while his pulse reacted like a fickle lover, quickening at the memory. For the last two years, he’d prided himself on his control. She hadn’t been in town for a day and he was instantly taken back to the one time in his life he’d ever gone
mad
over a woman.

One woman and his one big mistake. An ache started in his chest.

These past five years women had come and gone from his life without eliciting even a fraction of what Charlotte did with so little effort. Which made her dangerous in a way he resented deeply.

I should not have kissed her.

But there she’d sat, her fisted hands clutching her cover tight against her breasts, her mouth parted looking too rosy, her bottom lip shiny from the constant swipe of her tongue.

He’d kissed her to prove to himself she meant nothing to him. That after all these years, he
felt
nothing for her. Not even lust in its most basic form. Bloody hell, he hadn’t expected her to kiss him back. Not to open up as she’d done.

The ache in his chest drifted lower until it inconveniently settled between his thighs. Alex squelched the memory of the kiss. He couldn’t afford to dwell there.

What he’d learned tonight was that his feelings for her were complex as well as wholly unwanted and patently unfair. He did
not
like her. No, he wasn’t that addled in the brain. But there still existed a physical attraction for her that frankly shamed him. After all she’d done, he simply could not believe his body had let him down. Hadn’t God given man superior brains for precisely that purpose? Men were not animals, led about like a show horse by their cocks.

It would have been more merciful if she’d simply betrayed and abandoned him. Instead, she’d impaled his heart on the head of a very sharp pike…then wrenched it from his body because cleaving it nearly in two hadn’t wreaked quite enough damage.

The air felt colder now and the night sky was relieved of complete darkness by the light of the quarter moon. Pulling up on the reins as they neared the stables, Alex brought Shalais to a sedate walk.

He’d let his heart and body rule him when he’d courted her, made love to her, gotten on his knee and asked her to marry him. He wouldn’t ever be that naïve again. In all his future dealings with Charlotte Rutherford, they would play by his rules and currently the only thing he wanted from her was
his
son.

Chapter Five

“Did you not sleep well last night? Was the bed not to your liking?” Katie asked the following morning during breakfast. Without giving Charlotte an opportunity to respond, her sister rushed on. “Is it the mattress? We could easily purchase another.”

“No, ’tis nothing, truly. The bed was par above the ones I’ve slept on since I left.” Charlotte smiled her assurance and then commenced to eat her breakfast—or at the very least, attempted to.

“You are hiding something.”

Charlotte might have taken her sister’s statement as an accusation had she not glanced into her eyes, which seemed to plead,
Please don’t shut me out
.

“I know something has happened since we last spoke, so you may as well tell me. You know I’m nothing if not determined. I’ll discover it whether you wish it or not,” she finished teasingly, but her eyes were anxious and concerned.

“I was thinking of Nicholas.” Which was partly true. “All of this is so new to him.”

Katie bit into a piece of buttered scone, chewed it slowly and then wiped the corners of her mouth with a linen
serviette
. “Nicholas, I imagine, will do quite well here. When James and Missy return with the children, he will acquire three exuberant cousins and playmates. You see how quickly he devoured his breakfast so he could go and explore the playroom? Did he at all appear like a child whose welfare you need fret about?”

Indeed he did not. Charlotte had joined him and Jillian this morning in the nursery, certain Nicholas’s lack of familiarity with his surroundings would turn him into something akin to climbing ivy as it had for the past two weeks. She could not have been more wrong. He’d been like the proverbial child in a sweetmeat shop, awed at the vast array of toys in the adjoining playroom. Oatmeal porridge—which he’d never had a particular fondness for—and coddled eggs had been consumed in fifteen minutes flat, unlike the half hour it normally took to coax it down his throat. Bribery was always the last resort to achieve success.

After he’d finished, he’d scrambled from his chair, and with an absent smile in her direction, had hurried over to the shiny red train set spread out on the buffed wood floors. Charlotte had departed, assured he’d be occupied for the next few hours or more.

“No, I suppose not,” she conceded.

“So, if my nephew’s state of well-being is not a concern, what is it that has you looking strained and on edge?” Katie asked before taking a sip of her tea.

Charlotte added a lump of sugar to her hot chocolate and stirred it slowly. Just as slowly, she peered up at her sister. “Alex was here last night—in my bedchamber.” She didn’t speak loud enough to be overheard by the footman posted near the entrance of the breakfast room. However, the impact of her words were certainly felt if one could go by Katie’s gasp as she jerked her hand and knocked over her teacup. The stain of the tea spread quickly, blemishing the white linen cloth covering the table.

“Oh botheration,” her sister muttered as she righted the ivory cup.

At her sister’s exclamation, the footman jumped into action, coming to the table to begin sopping up what little tea hadn’t already soaked into the tablecloth. With a negligent flick of her hand, Katie waved him away. “You can do naught else. The linen must be removed but that will have to wait until we have finished eating.”

The young man—quite young in fact, for his smooth cheeks said he’d yet to reach his majority—halted. “Are you certain, Miss Catherine?”

“Yes, you can tend to it later. Although, I’ll need some more hot water.”

Placing the towel, now soiled with tea, over the sleeve of his fustian jacket, he gave a short bow and swiftly departed toward the kitchen.

The moment he was out of view and earshot, Katie swung her gaze toward Charlotte. “Alex was here? Last night? In your chamber?” The questions came fierce and hushed.

Save the kiss that had only stoked her passions and kept her tossing in her bed until dawn, Charlotte told her of the night’s events. By the time she was finished, the footman had returned and placed the piping-hot pot of tea on the table. With a nod, he resumed his post by the door, too far to hear their conversation if they kept their voices low.

“So Nicholas resembles his brother Charles?” Katie said in wonderment, her words part question, part statement.

“If I’m to believe Alex—which I have no cause not to—Nicholas is his spitting image.”

Head tipped at an angle, Katie paused in the process of adding tea to her cup. “And he gave no indication as to what he intends to do? Do you believe he intends to acknowledge Nicholas as his son? Though that would be ruinous,” she muttered, almost as an aside. “What else did he say? Have you truly told me the whole of it?”

Charlotte could barely keep up with the fury of questions being thrown at her. Questions she herself had no answer to.

“I’ve told you everything.” The kiss was too private to be shared even with her twin.

A smile touched the corners of her sister’s mouth. “I might have guessed he was Alex’s straight away had you not lied about his age.”

“That matters little. You guessed the truth in no time a’tall.”

“Humph. I cannot believe you expected me to believe that ridiculous story of falling in love with someone else while still here in England. I’d have more believed it if you’d told me you’d been abducted by pirates,” Katie scoffed. In the very next moment she grew serious, pinning her with a penetrating stare. “I wish you’d told me you were afraid to take on the role of a duchess. There was never a doubt in my mind that you would make a fine one. Better than any who ever held the role.”

Briefly, Charlotte looked away. She couldn’t help it. But came back, stolid as ever. “Sometimes I wish I had too.”

Would things have turned out different if she
had
told her? Charlotte wondered. Well it did little good now to second-guess her decision. What was done was as good as engraved in granite. As if she’d had another choice.

“Did you fear Alex would discover the truth about you—about us?” Katie approached the question with the delicacy as one might a wounded bird. There was also a starkness in her expression that spoke of an inner anguish.

“I—I don’t truly know,” Charlotte said before quickly taking a large bite of her scone heavily laden with marmalade.

Her sister didn’t resume eating. For long seconds she just watched her. “Mrs. Henley would never—” She broke off to correct herself. “What I mean to say is she never breathed a word of it to a soul.”

Charlotte had never once considered Mrs. Henley to be the problem. But Katie did not know that for sure. Could not. “How can you be so certain? Have you any idea who she speaks to and what she says?”

“Lottie, Mrs. Henley died a month after you left.” Katie added cream to her tea and then stirred it slowly as she stared fixedly into the swirling, hot liquid. When she swallowed, Charlotte could see what it was costing her to relay the information. And Katie had yet to meet her gaze.

“Oh darling, I’m so sorry.” It appeared her sister had grown fond of the woman if her death years later pained her still.

When Mrs. Henley had finally tracked them down a month before her wedding, they hadn’t precisely welcomed what she imparted to them. They’d been stunned not just to learn she had been a close friend of their mother’s but rendered speechless at who exactly their mother was.

Instinctively, they’d both felt they could trust her. Mrs. Henley had known who they were for many years and by all appearances, had told no one. She’d merely kept a watch on them, relieved when she discovered their half brother had taken them in. And then upon deciding they were old enough to know about their mother, she’d told them. It had been
she
who had cautioned them to keep the information to themselves, fearing the grave repercussions of something like that becoming public.

Your brother need not know.

She’d said nothing of Alex but that had been inferred.

No, her sister was right. Mrs. Henley would never have told a soul. Had she wanted to ruin them, she’d have done so long ago.

Katie finally looked up and flashed a tight smile. “She was a good woman. She asked about you many times before she died.”

Charlotte felt a pinch in her heart. It had been clear Mrs. Henley, seventy if she was a day, with fine, weathered skin and diminutive in stature, had formed a very strong bond with their mother.

Mrs. Henley had spoken of her in the fondest of terms, tearing up when she spoke of her death and when she’d lost track of her and Katie’s whereabouts. When she had found them after a year of searching, they were living with the nanny and nursemaid their father had hired to care for them until they could be shipped off to boarding school.

Their mother had been like a daughter to her and hence the connection she felt to them.

“I’m sorry she’s gone,” Charlotte said and truly meant it.

With a small nod, Katie commenced drinking her tea. The silence following was stark with so many questions Charlotte dare not ask, at least not yet for it would only fuel questions she herself could not answer.

“You must go and speak to Alex—today,” Katie announced after a time.

This Charlotte knew. It’s what was creating butterflies in her stomach and making her heart feel as if it were lodged in her throat. Her only response was a slow nod.

“You must tell him the truth,” Katie continued, now looking at her direct.

The truth.
Now that was a scary prospect and something Charlotte had considered only briefly after meeting Mrs. Henley. The letter had taken care of that unruly compulsion. How could she when the truth had the power to destroy lives if it fell into the wrong hands? Worse than that, should there be anything worse, the truth would make him look at her differently. It had made
her
look at
herself
differently since the day she’d learned of it. How could it not fail to do the same to Alex?

“I need to explain.”

“If you lie to him, he will know.”

That Charlotte also knew, which would only make him hate her more. Oh God, she could see she had no choice in this. She had to tell him the truth.

Days before, her sole concern had been her sister. Since the moment Lucas had told her, she’d made countless bargains with God to spare Katie’s life. She’d been so scared, heartsick with it. Now she knew an entirely different kind of fear but one she felt just as acutely.