Temptation Has Green Eyes (26 page)

John Hayes meant nothing to her any more. Only this man, folding his hands together tightly, preparing to tell her an unpalatable truth, meant anything to her.

“Whoever fathered you, that doesn’t make Thomas Russell any less your true parent.”

“I know that.” She did. Her father had brought her up to believe in truth and honesty in business dealings. He’d told her to hold her head up and believe in herself. Except for that one last betrayal when he’d thought John had ruined her. Even then, he’d done what he considered best, removed her from John’s influence and found a husband quickly. Yes, the man who’d reared her was her father. But the other could claim her. “So who was my father?”

Max met her gaze. She wouldn’t be deterred.

“Do you wish me to make enquiries of my own?”

“No.” Again the hasty answer. He took her hand, turning his back on the window to face her. “We believe your father might be the Duke of Northwich.”

She gasped and clapped her free hand over her mouth, as if to trap the knowledge in there. Her husband continued to steadily deliver the news. “The evidence is pointing that way. We don’t have absolute proof, but we’re hunting for it.” His clasp on her hand tightened. “Sophia, I didn’t want to tell you until we had more evidence.”

“So the Duke of Northwich paid for my mother to marry my father? And he was my father?”

“Yes. That’s what we’ve discovered. There could have been a scandal because your mother was very young. Seventeen.”

She nodded, wordless for the moment.

She was a duke’s daughter? An illegitimate one to be sure, and an unacknowledged one, but the change in her station dizzied her. All very well for religious men to preach that all men were the same under God, but reality was different. “Who else knows?”

He frowned. “Julius and me. And presumably Northwich.”

And perhaps her father, too.

“Before we married, in law you were Sophia Russell.” He withdrew his hand.

She frowned, not understanding his retreat. Didn’t he want to touch her? He certainly hadn’t had that problem at Devereaux House. She longed to return. Trouble lay ahead, not behind them.

“Now you’re my wife. Never Northwich’s daughter.”

“Do I resemble him?” Curiosity led her to ask. She’d never met him, although she had met his son. Her brother? Did Alconbury know he was her half-brother? She had so many questions. Her father had told her he didn’t know who had begotten her. Was he telling the truth?

“Not really.”

“What does Northwich look like?”

“Like Alconbury, but older.”

He seemed determined to answer her questions, but no more. If she dropped the subject then so would he.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

He gave a careless shrug. “It doesn’t affect who you are, does it?” He fixed her with that intense gaze.

“I suppose not. But—” Strangely she wasn’t upset, not at all. Merely curious and shocked.

Perhaps because his comment was true. It didn’t affect who she was. Since learning Thomas Russell hadn’t fathered her, she’d come to terms with a lot of things. Mostly that he had cared for her despite knowing that. Her mother had never hinted, not from word or deed, that she’d ever had a lover or a scandalous past. Or even that she knew the Dankworth family.

But it affected Max. “Your family—the Emperors—they’re the enemies of the Dankworths, aren’t they?”

His mouth tightened, and little lines appeared at the corners. “You could say that. They seem determined to antagonize us. They’re Jacobites, and they dislike us because we’re loyal to the Crown.”

“It’s more than that,” she said as they lurched over a pothole in the street. But she was so used to them she hardly noticed it. “It’s bad blood.”

“It’s always more than that, Sophia. It’s never simple. Personal dislike, little acts of spite over the years, everything adds to the central argument. They’re Jacobites; we’re not.”

That sounded so rational she could almost believe it. “There’s more.”

“Perhaps. Does it matter?”

“I suppose not.” The last thing she wanted to do was upset him, because when that happened, he went silent. She’d had that painful reality thrust on her in the early days of their marriage. He refused to engage, wouldn’t discuss anything he didn’t want to, throwing up a barrier she couldn’t surmount. So she dropped that part of the discussion. “I’m just…surprised.”

“Since your maternal grandparents weren’t very wealthy when your mother married your father, we suspect the money that paid for the marriage came from the duke,” he told her.

Yes, that made sense. She hadn’t reached as far as that in her reasoning. More than how it affected her. “Is it over then? Do we let the matter rest?”

“Until we hear from him.”

Shock reverberated through her. “Do you think we will?”

“Yes, I do. The duke has planned this. Although I think that he wanted Hayes to have you. Not me.”

“But he knew of your business dealings with my father.”

He shrugged. “I hadn’t expected you to realize that part. I shouldn’t underestimate your intelligence, should I?”

She shook her head. “No. So my—Northwich could have wanted me to marry you and ordered John to…do what he did, because then he has me here. With you.”

So absorbed in the situation was she that she hadn’t realized they were so close to their house until the carriage came to a halt. She’d missed all the outposts, all the places she usually marked when she was in the city she knew so well. Everything, all her concentration on what was happening inside the coach.

* * * *

Three days later, Sophia knew for sure that her husband had removed the intimacy they’d shared at Devereaux House. Oh, he was more friendly, and he came to her bed at night. But he never stayed. She didn’t wake in the morning to see him smiling sleepily at her, and she missed it. Very much indeed, so much that her loneliness was almost unbearable. Before Max, she hadn’t realized how alone she was. She’d called it independence, had prided herself on her free spirit, but really she’d been alone. Without the one person she’d needed, wanted to call her own. Then she’d found him and lost him. All because she hadn’t told him the truth about her parentage. As he’d said in the coach, what did it matter who had fathered her?

Except that it did. She was a daughter of the hated Dankworths, and presumably Max found that hard to bear. Although she wanted to ask him, reticence filled her, because she feared his rejection. Now, after what they’d done, what they’d been to each other, if he turned his back on her she would fall apart. He said he did not care who fathered her, but he must, because he was definitely more distant. When she asked him, he pleaded pressure of work. But it was more than that.

She’d started arranging her levees, the time when she appeared in her bedroom and people visited her there. She discovered she disliked them. She preferred to spend her mornings more productively, not listening to people who wanted her patronage, not because of herself, but because she was the Marchioness of Devereaux.

She went through her days, letting routine slot into her life, but as if it were happening to someone else. A sense of distance separated her from those around her, as if she were the exalted being some insisted on treated her. She was not; she knew that, but she couldn’t get them to see, nor would they believe her if she told them. The Marchioness of Devereaux was somebody else. Not Sophia Russell of the City of London.

Then came the day they broke the news about Devereaux House to her mother-in-law. Max, who had pleaded outstanding business to absent himself too often since their return, asked her if she wanted to be present when he told his mother.

“Since I had the original idea,” she said, “I should take at least part of the blame,” and received the sweetest smile she could remember from him since their return to London.

They visited his mother at Julius’s house, where she was still in residence with Poppy. The dowager had made herself at home, although, as she explained to them, not encroachingly so.

“I will probably go to Kirkburton House when I can. Julius is interviewing suitable companions, and it can’t be long before he finds one for Helena. But the duke needs me. Or rather, the duchess does.” The slight curl of her lip told Sophia exactly what her mother-in-law thought of that. “Unfortunately, I can’t leave my brother in his current state to her tender mercies. He deserves better. A little kindness and consideration will go a long way toward his recovery.”

Sophia’s relationship with her mother-in-law had thawed since the early days of her marriage. At least the duchess didn’t repudiate her, treat her as a pariah or someone to be tolerated.

After their return to London, Max squired her to balls and routs, took her driving in the park, displaying them as a couple for all to see. If anyone had suspected their previous coldness was anything but the marriage settling down, he dispelled the notion now. As a result, people started to talk to her. Really talk, as if they liked her. Not that she fooled herself about that, but she was on her way to being accepted.

On the way to Julius’s house today, Max had told Sophia how ill the Duke of Kirkburton was. Although mildly hurt that her husband hadn’t told her before, Sophia understood that the duke didn’t want his condition bruited abroad. He was only remaining in London because his special physician refused to leave the city. Besides, taking a prominent medical man to his private house would encourage the kind of attention the duke appeared to want to avoid. “I was unhappy to hear that he is not well.”

“He will recover,” her ladyship said firmly. “He always has. It will be no different this time. Winterton isn’t ready to assume the mantle of the dukedom. It wouldn’t suit him.”

Sophia wondered about that. Already, Julius took much of the responsibility of the dukedom. But he’d done it by stealth, taking none of the credit, claiming to be a fashionable fribble who cared for nothing more than the design of his waistcoats. Sophia and anyone who bothered to look further could soon tell that wasn’t true. But people rarely looked beneath the surface, in her experience.

“I took Sophia to Devereaux House,” Max informed his mother.

“I know.”

Sophia exchanged a glance with Helena who raised one brow very slightly in the kind of droll look guaranteed to make Sophia laugh. Helena had seen the house, then, and had similar thoughts to Sophia. But had she considered the drastic action Sophia had? She was about to find out.

Her ladyship turned a dazzling smile on her daughter-in-law. “Did you like the house?”

“Yes,” she said, because she had. “It’s very elegant.” At least she’d enjoyed the memories she’d made there. Most of them. Even breaking down in that horrible way when she’d used the word she’d been avoiding for months. Because Max had been there for her, had taken care of her. That went a long way to reconciling her to what had happened. And he hadn’t rejected her—not exactly.

She exchanged a glance with Max now. Let him break the news. His mother would probably assume it was all Sophia’s fault anyway.

“We took some time to survey the newer parts,” Max said carefully. “Unfortunately, the wings aren’t built as well as the main house, and they’re already showing signs of damage. The roof leaks in part, for instance, and some of the rooms aren’t completed. It will cost a lot of money to repair.” He paused.

Here was where his mother would tell him that he had more money than Midas, and he could repair it.

She didn’t. “Then demolish those parts,” she said. Her eyes met her son’s.

Sophia had positioned herself so she could see both participants, far enough along the sofa she shared with Max that she could see him. His mother sat opposite without turning her head too much and drawing attention to herself. Her father had used her as an observer for years that way. Many businessmen disregarded her, until they learned better.

So now Sophia saw Max’s eyes widen, and his mother’s slight, satisfied smile.
Please let him have the sense to accept her suggestion as if it were hers alone,
she thought.

“But that house is your life’s work, Mama.”

The dowager’s smile faded to nothing, and she shook her head and swallowed, her eyes glistening. “It was your father’s life’s work, my son, not mine. That house killed him. He became obsessed with it, his every waking moment devoted to it.” Tears glistened at the inner corners of her eyes. One spilled over.

With a small murmur, Poppy moved closer, proffering a handkerchief, but her mother ignored it although she gave her daughter a slight smile.

“I will say this. I have kept silent too long. When you restored the fortunes of the marquisate, Max, I became so afraid you’d continue. But how did I tell you? You appeared to love the house.”

“I do,” he said. “But the original part, the part I grew up in. I grew to hate it later because of all the noise and disruption.”

The dowager sighed. “The more he built, the more he became obsessed with building more. It was like an illness.” She glanced at Poppy and then back at her son. “After his death, I couldn’t bear to live there. I turned my back on it and stayed with my family instead. Poppy, I’m sorry. I should have—”

Poppy covered her mother’s hands which were neatly folded over her fan in her lap. “No, Mama. It would have been worse, would it not, if you’d brought me up there? And Max couldn’t have worked from the country house. Could not have achieved half of what he did.” She paused and favored Sophia with a glance.

Sophia met her eyes, secrets exchanged between women.

“I thought the house was cursed,” the dowager concluded. “I never wanted to see it again because it took my husband away from me. But how could I say that to you? It’s your inheritance.”

Max closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, the green depths were bright. “You would come back if I—we—did this?”

“Yes. For a while, although I enjoy visiting my relatives. I like being useful.” Now she gave Sophia a steady look. “I will come when I’m needed.” When there were children.

“Mama, I’m so pleased. When we toured the house…I didn’t know what to do.”