Bound by Love Page 10

  Jared stopped pacing and gazed at his brother with disbelief. They were now in the guest bedchamber he’d been given when he came to Hawkstone Hall. He himself was still in a dressing robe, as was Justin, and Justin wore no wig. But he looked like the lord of the manor, even so. It was in his gentle, confident smile, Jared thought with pride and despair; it was in the way he spoke to the servants—softly, but with command, in the way he did everything—with patience, humor, and ease. Sleek and well balanced, he was exactly what he should be, and what Jared, who had clung to life by his wits and prayers, knew he could never be.

  “Why do you think I never added on to the hall?” Justin persisted.

  “And you wanted to? Not enough room for a single man here—is that what you want me to think? Cut line, brother,” Jared said with a wry smile.

  “But I was going to marry. I didn’t build, because I never felt it was my place to. That doesn’t matter; there’s no point to this argument. Believe me, there’s no way on earth I’ll keep the title now that you’ve come back. Yegods, Jared, what do you think I am? You’re the rightful heir. You must take the title and all that goes with it.”

  “But all that goes with it is yours—this house, the land—”

  “Yours, and have been since birth. But don’t think I’m that noble,” Justin said with a small smile, “I’m not exactly destitute. I have my own money, properties, a snug manor house in Shropshire, all left to me as second son—and my bride will bring a good portion to me, too. Take what’s yours, Jared. It’s only right. Besides, you have no choice. I renounce the title.”

  “Renounce away,” Jared muttered. “It makes no difference. I have a life waiting for me; I’ll go back to it. I’ll be gone before I’m missed, believe me. I only want to show Alfred and Della that I never lied to them, and then I’ll leave. It’s too late. This is your place in life now. Now—you said your lady’s coming today? Would you please leave and let me dress for her?” He reached for the belt to his robe.

  “You can’t run away from your birthright.”

  “I’m not running, I’m walking. Look, Justin,” Jared said, his hands on his belt, his face sober and sad, “I’m only talking sense. Life treated me badly—how badly, you can’t know—I hope you never do. But I survived, and returned to find what I lost can’t be mine anymore. That was another life. It’s useless to talk about it. I’m a rough, blunt man now, a merchant and a trader, and a good one. I’d be a bad earl. If I were taking the name from someone who didn’t deserve it, I’d do it gladly even if it meant making an ass of myself. But you are the earl of Alveston, to perfection. Stay that way.”

  “I’m your younger brother; you are whatever you want to be. I—” Justin stopped in midsentence as Jared muttered a curse and abruptly turned his back on him. He shrugged the robe from his shoulders and let it drop to the floor, exposing his naked backside to his brother.

  Justin started to smile at such an expression of impudence, but then he saw beyond his brother’s brazen display and gasped. It was hard to believe his eyes. The long, lean, muscled back above those firm buttocks was crisscrossed by jagged white and pink welts, from the nape of the neck all the way to the waist. Some of the scars looked like licks of flame flashing across his brother’s back, some were thick as ropes, some were fine as hairs.

  It was an abomination, especially on that cleanly tapered torso. Jared had obviously been brutally savaged.

  “By God, Jared! What happened to you?” Justin cried in horror. “A wildcat? Some accident, some animal in the New World…?” His voice tapered off as he realized that some of the deep, clawed marks were obviously from different times than others, being overlaid in places, and all were too random to have come from a single attack. As he gazed at them, he slowly began to understand that the animal that had done this to his brother was one of their own kind.

  “Yes,” Jared said as he jerked a shirt down over his head and let it drop to cover himself, “an accident—of birth. I couldn’t forget it, you see, and should have when I became a slave. I was disobedient, ‘uppity.’ My first master beat me for it, but he used only fists. My second master was a more determined man. Eventually I stopped trying to convince him of who I was. But then he got tired of my crying at night. He decided to rid me of the habit. He beat it out of me. The remedy worked. Though I’d wept for my lost life, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of crying over my wounds—which only got him angrier and started the beatings.” He shrugged. “It became a contest, after a while. I’d have won, you know, which means that if he hadn’t found a buyer for me, I don’t think I’d be here today. Still, I was lucky; my third master didn’t use a whip. He was wise enough to know a badly aching back cuts down on work. He punched and kicked, but I learned how to curl into a ball of knees and elbows. Occasionally, I was beaten for that, though, because I understood it smarts when you go to punch a lad’s face and connect with his shin instead.

  “I told you I was less than a slave. In truth, I was less than human,” Jared said with deadly coldness as he saw his brother’s ashen face. “Some bonded servants were lucky and found good homes, as I eventually did with Alfred. But by then it was too late. This is not a man who should be earl, Justin,” he said with sad conviction. “I was lucky to have survived, much less make my fortune. Do I know how to take tea with a duchess? Chat with a duke? Take my place in the House of Lords? All I know is what I managed to read piecemeal over the years.”

  “Our late lamented king couldn’t even speak English,” Justin scoffed, but his voice was shaken. “And I know English noblemen who can’t speak coherently, much less read.”

  “And how many bear scars from constant beatings, like disobedient dogs?”

  “What do your scars have to do with it?” Justin cried. “They were honorably earned.”

  “No,” Jared said with deadly calm, his eyes ice, “they were not. If I had any honor, I would have killed them or let them kill me. Sometimes I wept, so they’d stop. I can’t forget that. Still, I’m glad of my back; it reminds me of what I am, and when there’s a damp wind from the west, it reminds me of where I’ll go when I return home.”

  “You are home,” Justin said angrily. “If you don’t take the title, one of Roland’s damned exiled sons will get it after all, because I won’t take what isn’t mine—I will not. I have honor, too—or do you think I would live my brother’s life, the life of the boy who saved my own, once I knew he still lived? You think very well of me, don’t you?” he said with heavy sarcasm.

  Jared’s face flushed, and he was still. But then a wide, humorless grin showed white in his tanned face. “No, but I’ll bet your fiancée will agree with me.”

  Justin grinned wider and he relaxed. “Do you? How much? Rich as you are, I don’t think you have that much. But you’ll see. Wait until you meet my Fiona. I have some surprises for you today, brother. No more time for argument now. You have to get dressed,” he said, rising from his chair. “And so do I. We’ve got company coming. I won’t offer you the services of my valet again, but don’t worry, we don’t live high here in the countryside, and whatever you wear, you look well. Meet me downstairs. In the meanwhile, think about what we discussed long and hard, because I won’t be swayed in this.”

  Jared nodded. He would think about it; he couldn’t help it—he hadn’t been able to stop since he’d gotten here. The arguments kept turning in his mind as he put on a shirt and dark breeches, buttoned his best salmon silk vest, and then shrugged into a dark-blue long coat. He straightened his neckpiece, brushed and retied his hair neatly at the nape of his neck, and then surveyed himself in the looking glass. He looked good, he thought, but he was still sure he didn’t look like an earl. His brother looked like an earl.

  Jared left his room, but didn’t go downstairs immediately. He suddenly realized this was the first time he’d been alone in the great house since he’d come here. Justin had been with him every waking minute since then. But now—it was too good an opportunity to miss. He roamed
the corridors of the old house, nodding absently at any giggling housemaids he passed, smiling absently at any footmen, and when there was no one nearby to see, running his fingertips lightly along tabletops and mantelpieces, as though he could take it all in by touch. His mind still couldn’t take in the grandeur of his lost home—and his heart dared not.

  It was more than he’d expected. Since boyhood, his eyes had been trained on New World luxury, which was a far cry from this. In Virginia, every good piece of furniture, every expensive carpet or work of art—even silverware for the table—had to be brought from across the Atlantic to be considered beautiful. He’d seen some good pieces that were beginning to be turned out in Boston and New York, but no one in any of the Colonies considered them half so elegant as something that had come from home—and nearly everyone in the Colonies thought of some land across the sea as home. Nowhere had he seen so many wonderful things as this house had, and more than that, had in casual, everyday use.

  The fireplaces and mantelpieces, the clocks, windows, carpets, vases, and chinaware—there wasn’t a room that didn’t have something his merchant’s eye couldn’t appraise as priceless. Beyond that, he stood in a hallway and let the warmth of the house wash over him. There were centuries here—he could feel as well as sense them. He took a deep breath and smelled the wood lovingly polished over the decades, the scent of antiquity itself. He loved the aroma of fresh-cut wood, and there was nothing like knowing you were the first to tame a piece of land and build a house on it to call your own. He looked forward to it. But there was nothing like standing in a house and feeling the weight of your ancestors around you, knowing you were one in the link of a long, unbreakable chain.

  Jared was two men, and he knew it. One of them responded to this house with a love that was close to pain, and the other could only stand back, jealous and amazed.

  This was his. But it could no longer be his. It was where he’d dreamed of being, but now that he was here, he didn’t belong anymore. It was like finding a rare jewel cruelly marred. And his brother, the perfect English gentleman, noble in every way—how could he even think of dispossessing Justin, depriving him of everything he’d thought was his for most of his life? But that was what he was supposed to do, the house whispered to him, because he was the earl, and he had ancestors who had died without blinking for that honor.

  And so did I die, in a way, Jared thought sadly. I was the earl, but I can never be that boy again. So be it, he thought with resignation and despair.

  He took another deep breath. Then he made his way quickly down the great stairs, but not as quickly, he thought ruefully, as he and his brother had flown down it all those many long, lost years before. Because he was grown now, he couldn’t do that, like so many other things, again.

  “Ah, my lord,” Justin said with great pride when Jared appeared in the drawing room. “At last.”

  Jared stopped and stared at the woman at Justin’s side. She was hardly more than a girl, but she was dressed as the great lady she obviously was. She wore a white wig, with ringlets framing her lovely face. Tilted amber eyes smiled at him, and he held his breath. His reaction seemed to make her smile all the more, producing a dimple to the side of her shapely mouth. Her delicately featured face had thin, arched brows, a straight nose, and cheeks lightly blushed with peach. She wore an elaborate rose gown with panniers and a low, square-cut neckline that showed the bounty of two perfect white breasts. Her waist was tiny, but she was not, the top of her head came to the partial cleft in Justin’s chin. There was laughter in her eyes as Jared stood staring at her. It wasn’t mocking laughter. It was as if they shared a joke together.

  “Jared,” Justin said with pride, “allow me to present my fiancée, the honorable Fiona Trusham.”

  The lady curtsied and Jared bowed, woodenly, because he was dazed by the sight of her. She was every inch the elegant noblewoman he imagined belonged in this house: she fit it in just the way that she fit on Justin’s arm, gracefully, as neatly as though a master painter had placed her there.

  Justin helped her up from her low curtsy and then lifted her hand and brushed the back of it with his lips.

  “Fiona, this is my long-lost brother, to whom I cede everything: house, holdings, and title, all that is his birthright—all, in fact,” Justin said with a growing grin, looking like the boy Jared remembered in his mischievous glee, “except for one thing, of course: your own sweet self, my dear.”

  “Too kind of you, my dear,” she said teasingly, “but what if he insists?” She smiled at Jared, waiting for his reaction, but he could only frown at them both in confusion.

  She pretended to swat Justin with her lacy fan. “Fie, Justin. He doesn’t know, does he? You see, my lord,” she told Jared in a soft, sweet voice, “I am part of your birthright. By all rights, I should go with the house, the holdings, and the title. When I was born, I was promised to the earl of Alveston.”

  “So you see brother, I’m not that noble,” Justin said. “There are some things that come with the title that I am not giving up.”

  “As if you have any say in the matter,” Fiona joked, although her warm brown eyes considered Jared thoughtfully. “After all, it was specifically agreed upon by your father and mine at my birth, just months before your father’s death and the tragedy of the kidnappings: I am the promised bride of the earl of Alveston.”

  Then she laughed, and so did both men. But suddenly, neither brother was really smiling.

  *

  Her hands were shaking so much that the paper in it crackled. Della stood by the packing cases and trunks that were heaped in the hallway and reread the letter that had just been delivered. Then she raised her head and shouted.

  “Oh, this is beyond anything I ever dreamed. Father!” she cried, whirling with the letter in her hand. “Father!”

  Alfred came running from his room, his face white, a pistol in his hand.

  “What is it? Oh, by the rood, girl, I didn’t know whether to bring my pistol or a physician, you frightened me so. What is it, a letter? Oh!” he said, suddenly even whiter. “Nothing’s happened to the boy, has it?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, her eyes wide and dazzled. “Oh yes, Father, something has—something wonderful. He writes, he says, that he hoped the letter would arrive before we left, but—but why am I dithering? Oh, Father, he’s decided there’s no use denying it anymore. He’s going to take his rightful place. He’s going to be named earl of Alveston!”

  Chapter 7

  He was tall, with wonderfully wide shoulders and a slim waist, and with his lean jaw and piercing eyes, he was altogether about as handsome as a fellow could be without being objectionable about it, Della thought. Not that she thought that the first mate, Master Jack Kelly, could be objectionable to any female. He was as slick as he was handsome, and that was saying a lot. She sighed. He was used to that reaction coming from his female passengers, and a small smile began to play around the edges of his hard, handsome mouth when he heard that little stifled sound. He gazed into her eyes. His, she thought sadly, were almost bluer than her own, and his eyelashes seemed just as long as hers were, too.

  “What have I said to make you sad?” he asked in his deep, manly voice, with just the right touch of teasing in it.

  Oh, the lad was a rare handful, all right, she thought unhappily.

  “No, it’s nothing you said,” she said, turning to face the sea and not his eyes, which were bluer, since the Atlantic was gray and grouchy today. They’d been aboard the ship the Boston Boy for almost three weeks. England was supposed to heave into sight any hour now, and it seemed Master Kelly was ready to make a move now.

  “Maybe it’s something I haven’t said,” he murmured, smiling. “Mistress Della,” he went on in as quiet a voice as he could and still be heard above the snapping sails and the soughing sound of the sea washing against the keel of the great ship as it sliced through the waves. “I’ve walked with you on several evenings, although a turn or two around the deck is not my
idea of a proper walk, you understand. I’d have had the privacy of tree-shaded lanes to go with the starry skies, had I my way—but needs must do as the devil drives. Still, believe me, it has been my delight to accompany you whenever I could on this journey, for as many days or nights as I could free myself from my work. We’ve dined together, albeit at the captain’s table, under his watchful eyes. But we haven’t always had to deal with watchful eyes,” he reminded her, his voice growing lower and huskier, “for we did manage to kiss last night, if you recall. I can’t forget, nor do I ever want to. And so I have a thing I’d ask you now, if I may. Don’t worry,” he added with a satisfied smile in his voice. “I’ve spoken to your father.”

  “I know,” she said sorrowfully.

  “I live in Boston town,” he said. “While that’s not far from Virginia by ship and coastal lanes, it’s a way too far for a seafaring man to come a-courting the way he should. And you’re off on a visit to London now, and who knows how long it will be before we can meet again. I set sail back for the Colonies as soon as we unload and take on more cargo. And as I don’t think there’s more that I can possibly know about you than I do now, and as you have the most beautiful face, kissable lips, and charming disposition of any girl I’ve ever met…”

  And the richest father, don’t forget—not that I doubt you have, Della thought.

  “…I’d like to ask for your hand, my dear, since you already have my heart,” he said, and clasped her hand in his and held it against his broad chest as he waited for her answer.