Every Breath You Take (3 page)

Cecil always kept people waiting; it proved his superiority over them. Normally it annoyed Olivia when he did it to her, but now she hoped he’d keep them waiting here for an hour. A few moments later, Mitchell paused to study another portrait, and Olivia hurried to join him; then she gaped at the picture he’d singled out. It was a portrait of a girl seated demurely on a garden swing, with pink rosebuds twined in her long hair and silk ones embroidered on the skirt of her white dress. Mitchell slanted Olivia a sidewise look. “You?” he asked.

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “How did you figure that out? I was barely fifteen at the time.”

Instead of answering, he nodded toward another portrait. “And that’s you as well?”

“Yes, I was twenty, and I’d just become engaged to Mr. Hebert. That’s him, right there. Our portraits were made the same day.”

“You don’t look quite as happy about the engagement as he does.”

“I wasn’t,” Olivia confided, forgetting that she had intended to draw Mitchell out and not the reverse. “I thought he and his family were a little … stuffy.”

That brought a fascinated smile from him. “Why did you think they were ‘stuffy’?” he asked, turning the full force of his undivided attention on her.

“It—it seems silly now, but one of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and another ancestor was a general in the Civil War, and I felt his family made too much of that—you know, boasted about it in an unseemly way.”

“Appalling behavior,” he agreed with amused gravity.

Basking in the glow of bantering with him, Olivia endeavored to do more of it. “Yes, it was. I mean, it wasn’t as if they came over on the
Mayflower!”

“I’m sure they tried,” Mitchell joked, “but it was a small ship, and they probably couldn’t get reservations.”

“Well, if they couldn’t,” Olivia confided, leaning closer to him, “it’s because
we
were already on it!”

He laughed, and Olivia lost her head and blurted out her thought: “The Wyatt men are a handsome lot, but in my day,
we
would have called
you
a dreamboat, young man.”

His expression chilled the instant she implied that he was one of the Wyatt men, and Olivia was so desperate to recover the ground she’d lost that she pointed out a feature his forebears did not possess. “They all have brown eyes, too, but your eyes are blue.”

“I wonder how that happened,” he said in a bored drawl.

“Your moth—” Olivia cut the sentence off; then she changed her mind and decided he had a right to know. Might even want to know. “I remember that your mother had beautiful, deep blue eyes. I’d never seen eyes as blue as hers before or since—until now.”

She waited for him to ask for more information about
his mother, but instead, he folded his arms across his chest and stared down at her, looking coldly impatient and very bored. Olivia pulled her gaze from his and pointed to a small portrait just beyond the one of George Hebert. “What do you think of him?” she asked, drawing Mitchell’s attention to a portly gentleman wearing a starched shirt with a tie striped in shades of pink, blue, and yellow.

“I think he had appalling taste in neckties,” Mitchell replied curtly, and walked away.

Olivia glanced at Caroline, who slowly shook her head, silently stating the obvious: Olivia had made a mistake by mentioning his mother and another mistake by trying to make Mitchell acknowledge his relationship to the men in the portraits.

Olivia watched him move from one painting to the next—a tall, broad-shouldered man who was looking at portraits of men who frequently resembled him so strongly that he had to feel as if he were looking in a mirror, a slightly blurry one at times, but a mirror nonetheless. Pride was causing him to deny the resemblance as well as his heritage, but as she studied him from across the room, she marveled at the futility of his effort. His forebears were tall, like he was, their bearing proud, their intellects extraordinary, their temperaments—uncertain. Just like his.

She thought of his criticism of the striped necktie her father-in-law had worn, and as she looked at Mitchell’s profile, amusement lifted her spirits a little. From the toes of Mitchell’s gleaming black Italian loafers to his custom-tailored charcoal suit and snowy white shirt to the impeccable cut of his thick black hair, Mitchell was—as all Wyatt men were—tastefully conservative and immaculately groomed.

However, three things she’d discovered about him while they looked at the portraits set him distinctly apart
from his forebears: his dry sense of humor, his smooth urbane charm, and that smile of his. The combination was positively lethal—lethal enough to make even an old woman like her feel a little giddy. The Wyatt men were forceful and dynamic, but generally had little humor and even less charm. If they were Humphrey Bogarts, then Mitchell was Cary Grant, but with a hard jaw and chilly blue eyes.

“This will not take long,” Cecil said in an abrupt voice as he stalked into the room.

Olivia stiffened inwardly and watched her brother walk to his desk. It irritated her that Cecil was two years older than she but arthritis hadn’t bent his spine. “Sit down,” he ordered.

Mitchell walked over to Olivia and pulled a chair out for her; then he walked over to the corner of Cecil’s desk, shoved his hands into his pants pockets, and lifted his brows. “I said sit,” Cecil warned him.

An expression of icy amusement flicked across Mitchell’s face, and he looked around behind him.

“What are you looking for?” asked Cecil.

“Your dog,” Mitchell replied.

Olivia stiffened and Caroline drew in a sharp breath. Cecil stared hard at him, his expression resentful … and then, almost respectful. “As you wish,” he said; then he switched his gaze to Olivia and Caroline. “I wanted the two of you present because I feel that I owe it to Mitchell to say this in front of the entire family, and as fate would have it, we are the only adults left in this family.”

Returning his gaze to Mitchell, he said, “Many years ago, pride and anger prompted me to do you a grave injustice, and I want to admit that now, in front of your aunt and your sister-in-law. My anger had nothing to do with you; it had to do with your father and the woman who was your mother. My son, Edward, was a womanizer, and I detested that in him. While his young wife was
dying of cancer, he got another woman pregnant—your mother—and I could not forgive him for that. Nor could I overlook your mother’s total lack of scruples. She consorted with my faithless son, knowing full well his wife was dying, and she was so utterly lacking in common decency that it was beyond her to understand the insult it would have been to Edward’s dead wife had he married her and produced a child with her six months after his first wife’s death.”

Cecil stopped, and Olivia worriedly scrutinized Mitchell’s face, wondering how he felt hearing these ugly truths about both his parents, but he looked detached—as if he were listening to a slightly distasteful story that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. If Olivia hadn’t noticed the imperceptible tightening of his jaw, she’d have believed he was thoroughly bored.

Oblivious to such nuances of expression, Cecil said, “May I continue being blunt?”

“Please, by all means,” Mitchell replied with mocking civility.

“I was disgusted—no—revolted by your parents’ behavior, but when your mother hired a sleazy lawyer to try to extort money from me and compel me to raise her bastard child as a Wyatt, my revulsion for her became loathing, and I would have done anything within my power to thwart her. Anything. Can you understand my feeling in this regard?”

“Perfectly.”

“If your mother had simply wanted money in order to raise her son and have a decent life, I could have understood that,” Cecil added, and for the first time, Olivia thought she saw surprise or some other emotion flicker across Mitchell’s enigmatic face. “But she hadn’t a grain of maternal feeling in her body. Money and ‘being around rich people’ were all that counted to her, and she figured that should be enough for her child, too.”

Cecil stood up. Olivia noticed he had to brace his hands on his desk, as if he felt weaker than he wanted to show. “You were the child of a spineless man without character or decency and a scheming, mercenary little slut. It never occurred to me that you could turn out well in view of all that, but I was wrong, Mitchell. Your Wyatt heritage came through strong and untainted. I loved your brother William, and he was a good father and husband, but he was soft and he had Edward’s lack of ambition. You, Mitchell, are a throwback to your Wyatt ancestors. I tossed you out into the world with nothing except an opportunity to educate yourself and make social contacts. You turned that into an impressive little financial empire in a decade. You inherited your ability to do this from your Wyatt ancestors. You may not have been raised as a Wyatt, but you are one.” Finished, Cecil looked at him expectantly.

Instead of sounding pleased, Mitchell sounded entertained. “Am I supposed to regard that as a compliment?”

Cecil’s brows snapped together at the amusement in Mitchell’s voice; then a satisfied smiled lifted his thin lips up at the corners. “Of course not. You’re a Wyatt, and we Wyatts do not seek, nor do we need, the approval of others.” As if he suddenly realized he had not softened the younger man up in the least, Cecil changed tactics. “Because you are a Wyatt, you will also understand how difficult it is for me to admit that my anger and pride caused me to make a disastrous error in judgment many years ago—an error for which you have paid your whole life. I don’t expect you to forgive me, because Wyatts do not settle for mere apologies for what is unforgivable, and I am already eighty years old, so there aren’t enough years left to me to atone. I, too, am a Wyatt, so I cannot ask for forgiveness I am not entitled to. I can only ask you for this—” The old man held out his hand, and it trembled slightly. “Will you shake my hand?”

Olivia was moved almost to tears, and Caroline’s soft lower lip was quivering with an encouraging smile, but Mitchell ignored Cecil’s gesture. “Not until I understand what we’re shaking hands on.”

“It is my eightieth birthday,” Cecil said tiredly, letting his hand drop to his side. “I am responsible for Olivia, Caroline, and young Billy; but when I’m gone, there’s no one left to look after them. I know that Olivia has developed an affection for you. No doubt she thinks of you as an ally, since you’ve both seen fit to ignore my request to park your cars on the street.”

Mitchell flicked a surprised glance at Olivia, and she thought she saw a glint of amusement in his eyes before he returned his attention to Cecil.

“I know that William felt a bond with you from the moment he met you, and our William was an excellent judge of character. Caroline and young Billy tell me you’ve been spending time with them now that William is go—has disappeared, and I assume you share their affectionate familial regard.” He paused, but Mitchell neither confirmed nor denied it, so Cecil put out his hand again and forged ahead. “Like it or not, you are my grandson. I need to know—and so do
they
—” he emphasized, “that you now accept that role, and that you agree to look after them should anything happen to me. Will you shake hands on that?”

Olivia marveled at how cleverly Cecil had rephrased his request, as if he were making it on behalf of Caroline and herself, and she was inordinately pleased that, this time, Mitchell hesitated only a second before reaching across the desk for his grandfather’s handshake.

“That’s settled then,” Cecil said abruptly, casting off his mantle of helpless frailty as if it were an ill-fitting garment. “Olivia, Caroline, take Mitchell into the living room and make sure he meets the right people out there.”

Olivia frowned. “Are you going to make some sort of announcement about who he is or where he’s been all this time?”

“Certainly not! A formal announcement would open the door for additional questions that I have no desire to answer. I’ve already mentioned to a few people that Mitchell has been kind enough to ignore his business affairs in Europe so that he can spend a few weeks with us. When you bring Mitchell into the living room, I want you to behave as if you assume they already know who he is and, in fact, may already have met him here in the past.” Satisfied that the matter was settled, Cecil started for the door.

“How in heaven’s name am I going to do that?” Olivia asked.

He turned, and irritably demonstrated how to do it: “You walk up to a group of people, Olivia, and you say to them, ‘You’ve all met Mitchell, haven’t you?’ And when they say they haven’t, you act surprised. They’ll spend the rest of the evening wondering how and when they offended me enough to be left out of the loop.” He turned away again, took two steps, then turned back, a sly smile curving his mouth. “Better yet, now and then, when you take Mitchell up to someone, you should begin by saying, ‘Mitchell, you remember so-and-so, don’t you?’ They won’t remember meeting him, of course, but they’ll be even more shocked that
he
doesn’t remember meeting
them
. That will give Mitchell the upper hand.” With that, he walked out.

Olivia looked at Mitchell to gauge his reaction to all this, but he was staring hard at Cecil’s back; so she said, “Cecil is full of subtle but devious little tricks.”

“Cecil is full of—” Mitchell jerked his gaze to Olivia’s horrified face and bit back the rest of his sentence. Caroline’s announcement diverted them both.

“I’m really not up to making small talk tonight or
being barraged with questions about William for which there are no new answers. I’d rather wait here.”

“I’ll take you home,” Mitchell said quickly, but she shook her head and smiled up at him. “Cecil is right—it’s best to present you to everyone tonight, when so many of Cecil’s friends are already here.”

“I am not a debutante,” he pointed out sardonically.

“No one’s going to mistake you for a debutante,” Caroline said wryly, “but some of these women are going to look at you like you’re a divinely dark and handsome bonbon.”

He reached for her arm to draw her out of the chair. “Some other time.”