The Inheritance (21 page)

Nicholas spotted a rainbow and pointed it out to Daisy. “It looks like you’re right.”

He was much more aware of her than he knew he should be. He should never have unbuttoned her dress upstairs. He had seen the curve of her spine, laid his hands on her naked shoulders. Seen the plumpness of her breasts pressed upward by her corset. His fingers knew the way she felt and itched to touch her.

“The gallery sounds like a good idea,” he said. At least there would be something to look at besides Daisy.

“Follow me, Your Grace.”

He followed her, but he couldn’t resist saying “I think, since we’re going to be married in two days, it might be better if you began to think of me as Nicholas.”

She looked up at him from under her lashes. “If you wish, Nicholas.”

Nicholas gazed at her through narrowed eyes. No argument? From his Daisy? That was totally out of character. He wondered what she wanted from him, then chided himself for being so distrustful.

Nicholas thought he knew Severn Manor like the back of his hand, but he wasn’t familiar with the
upstairs room where Daisy led him. “Why haven’t I been here before?”

“Probably you weren’t allowed here as a child.”

Nicholas saw why when he entered the gallery. It was filled with beautiful brass urns and delicate ceramic vases, with ivory inlaid tables and carvings of ivory. “Where did all these things come from?”

“India, I believe.”

“How did they get here?”

“They were gifts.”

“From whom?”

“Lord Estleman, I believe.”

Nicholas froze. “What does he have to do with Severn?”

“He was a friend of the old duke’s.”

“How long have these things been here?”

“At least two generations, I would say. Tony showed them to me before we were married. He said they were here when he was a boy.”

“I can’t imagine why I was never in this room,” Nicholas said. “Or why Tony never mentioned it to me.” He paused and stared at the wall of portraits. “Is Estleman immortalized in any of these paintings?”

“I don’t imagine that he is,” Daisy replied. “As far as I know he was no relation to the Windermeres. Would you like to take a closer look at some of them?”

“Yes, I would.” Nicholas’s mind was flying in a dozen different directions, trying to figure out how Lord Estleman—he would have to be awfully elderly by now if he was the old duke’s friend—fit into his past. Especially since Blotberry had specifically named Estleman as someone he should speak with.
But the Lord Estleman Blotberry had mentioned couldn’t be the same Estleman who had given all these gifts to the old duke. Nicholas hissed in a breath. The Estleman he was seeking must be the son.

Nicholas was uncomfortable with the discovery of all these gifts. It betokened a close relationship between Severn Manor and the Estlemans, father and son. He couldn’t help wondering what either Estleman had received in exchange for all this splendor. Mere friendship? Had he bought himself the love of a young, impressionable woman? Had he cuckolded one of the old duke’s sons—Lord Philip to be precise—and repaid the insult with these fantastic gifts?

“Do you see anyone you recognize?” Daisy asked.

Nicholas forced his attention to the paintings on the wall. He quickly spotted several that looked familiar. “I recognize the old duke.” He reached out as if to touch the painting but let his hand fall.

He remembered his grandfather as a gruff, tyrannical old man with bushy brows and snowy white hair. He was bent with age and walked with a cane that made a thumping sound, like a wooden leg. He and Tony and Stephen had called him Pegleg. He had forgotten that.

His grandfather hadn’t paid much attention to him, except at Christmas. Then he would hand out candy to all the children. Nicholas had never been fond of him, had never really felt anything at all for him.

He wondered now, as an adult, how his father had become such a good father, with old Pegleg as a model. Lord Philip had been much more accessible
than his grandfather. He remembered his father coming to him every night after he was in bed to read to him. He hadn’t realized at the time how odd that was for an English gentlemen, most of whom never crossed the threshold of a nursery. But Lord Philip had tucked him in and kissed his forehead every night.

Nicholas had followed the same procedure with Colin, although he hadn’t realized until this moment that he had learned it from his father.
From Lord Philip
, he corrected himself. He didn’t know yet if the man was truly his father. Because of all those nights, because of what they had meant to him, he hoped he was.

Nicholas remembered fishing with Lord Philip and being allowed to tag along on a hunt the last year he spent at Severn Manor, when he was eight. That, he knew, was the more common way English fathers and sons communed. He had that in common with Tony and Stephen, because they had attended the hunt with their father, the duke’s elder son and heir.

“Is this your mother?”

Nicholas was startled from his recollections by Daisy’s question. He looked at the painting she indicated. “That’s her.”

He hadn’t meant to sound so curt, but he couldn’t help the sharp pain he felt at the sight of the lovely woman in the painting. What he remembered was his mother on the day she had died, wan and pale and gaunt. The woman in the picture was a vivacious beauty.

“Do I look like her?” Nicholas managed to ask through the constriction in his throat.

Daisy looked from Nicholas to the picture and back again. “It’s hard to say, really.”

“In other words, no,” Nicholas said flatly.

“I think you have her mouth, and perhaps her chin,” Daisy contradicted. “But it’s hard to say where the rest of you came from.”

Nicholas perused the picture of the old duke, and his cousins’ father, and the picture of Tony and Stephen as young boys with their mother. “Blond and blue-eyed, every last one of them. Where the hell did I get black hair and gray eyes?”

Nicholas lengthened his stride to march from one end of the gallery to the other, his eyes flicking up and down looking for someone who had his darker coloring. “Nobody. Not one of them,” he said through clenched jaws.

“There are only Windermeres pictured here,” Daisy said. “What did your maternal grandfather look like? Perhaps he’s the one you have to blame for looking different.”

“I know who to blame,” Nicholas said.

“You do?”

“Whoever cuckolded my father.”

Daisy frowned. “You don’t know your mother was unfaithful.” Which reminded her that there was someone who might actually know the truth. “I think you should speak to your aunt. She can describe her father for you. And, as your mother’s sister, she’s certainly in the best position to know whether there was another man in your mother’s life.”

“There was,” Nicholas said with certainty.

Daisy’s fists found her hips. “You keep saying that. Why?”

Nicholas thrust all ten fingers through his hair. “Just now I was remembering how much time my father spent with me as a child. He couldn’t—he wouldn’t—have abandoned me unless he had some sort of proof that my mother had betrayed him.”

“Couldn’t he have made a mistake?” Daisy said.

“If he did, it was a mistake with disastrous consequences.”

Daisy hesitated to ask, but she was curious about the fate that had befallen his mother. “What happened to you and your mother? I mean, how was she reduced to … to …”

“To selling herself?” Nicholas finished. “She was robbed on the ship. She didn’t realize most of her funds were gone until we arrived in Boston. She wrote a letter asking my father to take her back—at least, that’s what she said was in it. We waited at a fishy-smelling inn near the docks for some word. It never came.”

Daisy clasped her hands to still their trembling. “What did you do?”

“Six months after we arrived in Boston, we headed West, to the land of opportunity. My mother wasn’t a worldly woman. She relied on the Yankee gentleman who befriended her, and when we reached St. Louis, he stole the rest of my mother’s money and disappeared. We were destitute. My mother tried getting a job, but she wasn’t educated for much more than playing the pianoforte, painting, and embroidering. She ended up playing the piano on a riverboat, the
Lullabelle
, that sailed the Mississippi all the way south to New Orleans.

“Mother was still very pretty in those days, and another man offered her friendship. She thought he
wanted to marry her.” Nicholas snickered. “He wanted her, all right. For the night. He left some money beside the bed in the morning.

“I remember she cried.” He swallowed over the lump in his throat and turned his face away until he could get control of himself. “That was the first time,” he continued finally. “It got easier after that.

“We stayed in New Orleans for the winter and slowly drifted over to Texas. Mother found work there, in one saloon after another. We did a lot of traveling in those days.” His lips twisted. “Her kind of woman wasn’t welcomed by the nice folk.

“We scraped by for four years. But it was clear by the second year that she was sick. It took another three years for the disease to catch up to her. When she died, it was a blessing. You see, the syphilis had already made her a little crazy.”

Daisy gasped as he named the dreaded disease that had no cure. It was awful. Horrible. She fought back the disgust and pity she felt. Nicholas didn’t deserve to see the disgust, and he wouldn’t accept the pity. But she could offer comfort, and did. She took the several steps necessary to close the distance between them and slid her arms around his waist. She laid her head against his shoulder, where his heart beat. She felt it begin to thump erratically.

He’s afraid
, she realized.
Afraid to believe I can offer comfort with no strings attached. Afraid to accept it
.

Daisy thought for a moment Nicholas might break free. She tightened her grasp. At last his arms crossed behind her, and he clutched her tight, his face buried in her hair.

Nicholas wanted someone to understand, to absolve
him for not being grown up enough to keep his mother from the awful fate that had befallen her. Without ever revealing the depth of his failure—that he had hated his mother and wished her dead—he sought forgiveness.

Daisy felt his need and answered it.

She brushed the hair back from his forehead, murmuring words of comfort that were more sounds than substance. “How you must have suffered, Nicholas. How strong you had to be. How alone you must have been. How did you ever survive?”

She wished she hadn’t asked the question when he jerked free.

“Do you really want to know?”

She was afraid to hear what he had to say and desperate to know at the same time. She nodded.

“I emptied spittoons and swept the sawdust from the floor of the local saloon. I slept in the whorehouse where my mother had last worked.”

“Don’t tell me any more,” Daisy quickly said. “I’ve heard enough.”

“You wanted to know how the Duke of Severn survived. I’m telling you.”

“The past made you who you are.”

“A barbarian? Callous? Inconsiderate?” Nicholas taunted.

“A man of conviction. Competent. Capable,” she countered.

“You’ve changed your tune, Daisy,” he chided.

“I’m seeing facets of you I hadn’t noticed before,” she replied.

“Does this mean you don’t hate me anymore?” he said in a husky voice.

Daisy recognized the danger. It was time to leave the gallery. Past time. She hesitated an instant too long, and Nicholas reached for her.

Nicholas didn’t have seduction in mind when he slid his arm around Daisy’s waist. He only wanted to tease her a little. After all, he had sent a man to London for a special license, and they would be married in under two days. But the warmth of her, the scent of that intoxicating perfume, changed his mind.

“Come to me, Daisy,” he said. “Hold me.”

How could she refuse him? There was something more in his eyes than desire. She knew too much to blame him anymore for what he was. And she simply didn’t care anymore who he was. He was Nicholas. That was enough for now.

“How can you kiss me with all these faces looking down on us like this?” Daisy murmured against his lips.

Nicholas’s mouth curved against hers. “Close your eyes, Daisy.”

“What good will that do?”

“They’ll all disappear.”

Daisy chuckled. And closed her eyes.

It was his wedding day. Nicholas was as nervous as any other groom, and felt like a perfect idiot because of it. After all, it wasn’t as though he were marrying for love. It was strictly a marriage of convenience. But after what had happened in the gallery, in full view of all the Windermeres from days gone by, Nicholas had to admit he was looking forward to his wedding night.

His hands had roamed, finding the soft curves that made up Daisy Windermere and claiming them. To his surprise, Daisy had responded with an investigation of her own. He had recognized her shy touches for what they were. Her caresses had been so hesitant, so subdued and cautious, that he soon held himself perfectly still, so as not to frighten her. She had slowly, but surely, driven him out of his mind.