Leslie Lafoy (5 page)

“I shall be back shortly, darlings,” Sera said, starting to rise. Mr. Terrell vaulted to his feet and offered his hand in gallant assistance. She accepted it, smiling bravely at the girls, and adding, “Please continue to mind your manners.”

They nodded. Aiden Terrell continued to smile. And Carden Reeves slowly, openly, measured her from hair to hem as she moved to join him at the doorway. His assessment wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as her heart-tripping, wildly hopeful reaction to it.

C
HAPTER
3

Calling herself the weakest of fools, she tamped down her emotions and followed him a short distance up the main hallway, silently nodding her thanks when he stepped aside and allowed her to precede him into what was obviously his study. The walls were darkly paneled, the windows of leaded glass and framed by dark green damask draperies. A thick, fringed carpet of Oriental design muffled her footsteps as she made her way to the chair opposite an imposing mahogany desk. Behind it was a wall of shelves containing an odd assortment of miniature structures. There were several bridges and almost a dozen of what she could only think of as tiny dollhouses. The why of it all became clear as her gaze moved to the farthest corner of the room. Propped on an easel was a detailed plan for a home. Notations had been made all around the margins and boldly sweeping arrows indicated where they applied.

Carden Reeves was an architect. She looked back to the models on the shelves behind his desk, this time better able to appreciate what they represented. The lines were clean and uncomplicated, the overall feeling of the structures stately. And while they were generally unpretentious, they were nevertheless unmistakably homes for the monied class.

“Won’t you please have a seat?”

Sera quietly situated herself in the visitor’s chair and then waited, hands folded demurely in her lap, for him to take up his place on the other side of the desk.

He went only to the corner nearest her, leaned against it, and summoned a smile that looked more painful than anything else. “I find myself in a socially awkward situation, Mrs. Treadwell.”

She’d been anticipating the rebuke. “I understand completely,” Sera hurriedly assured him. “I would have sent you word of our pending arrival had there been a reasonable chance of any correspondence arriving here before we did. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of delaying our departure from Belize and so couldn’t engage in such niceties.”

She paused to add emphasis to the politeness of her next words. “I sincerely apologize for having so surprised you. I hope that it’s not an altogether unpleasant one.”

“Actually,” he replied dryly, “it is.”

She’d lived all of her life in the backwaters of the empire, and while the limits of good manners were frequently pushed in those environs, they were never completely abandoned. To be in London, in the very heart of Great Britain … She’d expected more. In all honesty, she replied, “I truly don’t know what one is supposed to say in such a situation, Mr. Reeves.”

He snorted, a look of disgusted resignation turning down the corners of his mouth. “I think saying nothing at all would be the greatest blessing for which I could hope.”

He expected her to sit there mute and passive? To quietly wait for him to vent his displeasure on her for doing the only thing she could have reasonably done? He was indisputably handsome, but he was too arrogant by half. It wasn’t in her to bow to any man. Not ever again. And the consequences be damned. When it came down to it, pride was all that stood between a person and abject humiliation.

“Do you,” she asked icily, “like my late husband, prefer your women silent?”

“Your husband’s dead?” he asked, his gaze dropping momentarily to her left hand.

“Presumably,” Sera supplied crisply. “He was serving as Arthur and Mary’s guide when they went off on their ill-fated expedition.”

He nodded, knitted his brows, and considered the carpet for a few seconds before quietly asking, “Have the authorities formally declared any of them to be deceased?”

Seraphina sighed softly, her anger melting away. He was calmer than when she’d first delivered the disturbing news, but it was obvious that he was still willing to hope for a happy outcome. “There are no authorities in Belize, Mr. Reeves,” she explained gently. “It is a wild, ungoverned place that no empire on earth feels obliged to claim. People rarely go into the jungle. Those that do, seldom come out of it. That is a fact of life and, in this particular situation, death, in Belize.”

He raked his fingers through his hair, then stood up and began to pace as he fairly growled, “And a fact of death in England is that a seemingly healthy man of sixty years could fall face forward into his morning porridge and leave the rest of us to muddle through the mess.”

Sensing that there was much she didn’t understand about his circumstances and that she’d be better able to gauge her own responses if she could get him to explain, she rose from her chair so she could watch him. Gently, she said, “You made mention of this unfortunate porridge incident in your starkly brief letter to Arthur.”

He stopped in his tracks and met her gaze with a cocked brow. “You read my letter to Arthur?”

“In his absence, I had no choice but to open it and read it.” She decided that there was no point in detailing her reasoning for doing so. Or admitting that she’d appropriated the two hundred pounds he’d enclosed. “I believe you said the man’s name was Percival.”

It took him a long moment, but he eventually nodded and resumed his pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze riveted on the carpet passing beneath his feet. “There were three of us,” he began. “Percival and then Arthur. Both by our father—the late and very great Lord Gavin Reeves, fifth Earl of Lansdown, and his first wife. I’m the third son, the only child by his second wife.”

He stopped in front of one of the windows and, his back to her, continued, saying, “Percival and his wife, Honoria, had no children. Arthur, as it turns out, managed to produce only daughters before his departure from earthly concerns.” He sighed heavily and the notes of anger rang clearly in his words as he added, “Which means that if he’s well and truly dead, then I have to become the new earl.”

“I gather that I’m expected to feel some pity for you,” Sera retorted before she could think better of it.

“I don’t want to be an earl.”

His anger had been replaced by a bleakness that she suspected was founded on the same emotions expressed by the condemned when they said
I don’t want to be hanged.
Part of her regretted the twist of fate that had taken Carden Reeves down a road he had no wish to travel. Another part of her, the more pragmatic side, suggested that there were far worse fates that could befall a man than being elevated to the status of a peer. However unexpectedly.

“Life seldom deals us the cards we’d like to have,” she observed, hoping that she could balance her sentiments to provide him some measure of consolation. “Given that reality, it is up to each of us to do the best we can with what we have. And forgive me for being so blunt, but I fail to see how being a peer of the realm poses any great hardship on a person’s circumstances. If anything, I should think that it would give one an incredible advantage in life.”

He shook his head slowly and she couldn’t tell whether the sound he made was wry laughter or choked-back tears. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point,” he finally said, turning away from the window to face her. “The subject of my nieces is one, however, on which we will need to come to terms.”

So very businesslike; he probably exhibited greater passion about the tailoring of his suits. “Are you willing to take them in?” she asked, silently resolving to be instantly gone with the girls if he so much as hesitated in offering assurances.

“Only a heartless man would turn away children—family—in need.”

It was certainly a declaration, but hardly the enthusiastically welcoming response she wanted to hear. “Do you have a heart, my lord?”

Sera barely kept her jaw from sagging in amazement as he appeared to give the matter considerable thought. “Of a sort,” he said slowly, somewhat regretfully. “However,” he added with far greater spirit, “I am, at the core of it, a bachelor, Mrs. Treadwell. A happily and firmly ensconced-in-my-ways bachelor. My home is not a wholesome place for impressionable children. Especially little girls.”

Yes, Seraphina silently agreed, so she’d initially surmised on her own. The hope of a loving aunt and cheerful cousins had been nothing more than wishful thinking. Unless, of course, Carden Reeves was willing to change the general situation for his nieces’ benefit.

“More importantly,” he added, interrupting her speculations, “I have absolutely no desire to change the way I live. I know nothing of caring for children and I have no interest whatsoever in learning how it’s done.”

Handsome. Arrogant. And incredibly selfish. “So you intend to provide for your nieces financially, but to have them reside elsewhere?” she summarized.

“Yes. It’s the best solution,” Carden replied. The way she lifted her chin told him that she thought otherwise. If he had any good sense at all, he’d declare the matter settled and get on with the rest of the details. But, in just the few minutes they’d been alone together, he’d discovered that good sense had nothing whatsoever to do with the feelings she stirred in him. She didn’t shrink back from a contest as so many women did and he liked that. He liked that enormously. Almost as much as he liked the exotic accent of her speech—which became more pronounced when she was even the slightest bit irritated.

No, no sensible man would pretend ignorance and ask, “Don’t you agree, Mrs. Treadwell?”

“My lord, your nieces have lost the underpinnings of their world,” she replied, trying, he knew, to sound calm. She didn’t in the least; her
o
s had broadened and he knew that if she continued on, so would her
a
s. It was a fascinating thing to hear. And her eyes … Blue fire.

“Their parents have died. They’ve had to live in poverty and then abruptly leave behind the only home they’ve ever known. I think it important that they have an opportunity to regain a sense of stability. You are the only family they have left. If you were to send them away, they couldn’t help but infer that they’re unwanted. They’re very intelligent girls.”

If they were just half as intelligent as their nurse … “I’m a complete stranger to them,” Carden countered realistically. “I seriously doubt that Arthur ever uttered my name in their presence. I don’t think their little hearts will be permanently broken should I send them to live at the country house.”

“To be cared for by servants?” she protested. “Is that your idea of what makes for a sense of family and a happy childhood?”

No, that had been his childhood and it had been a miserably lonely one. He’d wish it only on his worst enemy. Nevertheless, despite his regrets over it, his past had shaped his present and destined his future; he wasn’t any sort of a family man and he knew it. His nieces would be far better off without him as a daily part of their lives. “They’d have you, Mrs. Treadwell. Wouldn’t you be able to provide them stability and see that they have happy memories of their childhoods?”

“You intend for me to remain with them?”

“You are their nurse, aren’t you?” he responded, puzzled by the unexpected twist in conversational direction. She had thought to be released from her duties?

“I’m a friend of the family, your lordship. I agreed to be responsible for the girls in what was to have been the brief absence of their parents.”

Ah, there it was. Mrs. Treadwell was no common servant and she wanted him aware of her social status. And, now that he thought about it, he could see that he’d made an assumption that couldn’t be supported by the obvious facts. This woman didn’t carry herself as servants did, didn’t speak as they did. She was, he realized, a woman of his own social class. Or rather the social class that had been comfortably his until less than an hour ago. Everything had changed since then. Not the least of which was his having acquired the responsibility for the proper upbringing of three young females, a task for which he was wholly unqualified. And if Mrs. Treadwell thought she was going to be allowed to drop them on his doorstep like unwanted kittens and then walk away … Not as long as he had breath in his body and money in his pocket.

“Have you made plans or commitments that would preclude remaining with them?” he asked with what he hoped passed for nonchalance.

“No,” she said slowly, quietly. “I have not.”

Then, if he was reading between the lines correctly, there was no man who could claim her fidelity. Carden smiled. “Is there anything that would prevent you from continuing to be responsible for my nieces’ care and education?”

“No, there is not.”

“Good. Then the matter is settled,” he happily declared. “I assure you that you’ll receive generous compensation for your services.”

Her smile was fragile and strained. Color flooded her cheeks, turning them a lusciously distracting shade of cinnamon rose. Damn the fashion mavens who thought women ought to be dressed to their necks in the daylight hours. What he wouldn’t have given in that moment to see the swells of her breasts flood with color, as well. But there would come a time and soon enough. He’d make sure of it—and that this exotic creature had a gown worthy of her beauty.

“Will we be leaving for the country residence within the hour?”

Carden thought he detected a bit of sarcasm in her words, but quickly decided that he’d been inattentive and was simply imagining it. “I suppose you have traveled a long way and would appreciate a bit of rest, wouldn’t you?”

“Our journey has made us quite resilient. We’re perfectly capable of soldiering on. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

There was no mistaking the underlying tone this time. Precisely when had her feathers gotten ruffled? Although their exchange had been taut a few times as the result of minor disagreements, they’d been doing tolerably well up to now. Hoping to ferret out some clue as to what had disturbed her, he observed, “You have a tart tongue, Mrs. Treadwell.”