And she was sunshine. She stood poised in the middle of the staircase, all slender grace and sable curls, a serene smile lifting her full lips ever so slightly. Yet her eyes were filled with concern as she glanced at him.
Those eyes saw too much, beckoning him into her confidence like the sirens of old. And heaven help him, just moments ago he had been prepared to gladly drown in their depths.
A dangerous thing, indeed. His future was too much in flux. He could ill afford to be tempted by anything, let alone by someone who affected him as Lady Clara did.
The momentary lull in sound, however, was short-lived. “Poppycock,” Lady Tesh scoffed. “The man has been gone far too long and would have expected such a welcome, I warrant.” She turned her sharp brown eyes on him. “I am quite put out with you for not taking Peter and Lenora up on their offer to stay here at Dane House. How else shall I relieve myself from boredom, I ask you?”
“Boredom?” Peter demanded. “Please. There has not been a moment of boredom since we arrived.”
“So says the one person in this household who has absented himself from a good portion of our time here.” She waved one heavily beringed hand in dismissal. “How often does one need to disappear into his study, I ask you?”
Quincy’s head was beginning to pound. “Peter?” he tried in an effort to gain his friend’s attention.
“What exactly do you think I’m doing in there, madam?” Peter questioned his great-aunt with a coolness that would have sent any full-grown man running.
Lady Tesh, however, was not one to be cowed. Quincy had every confidence that she could frighten off a bull elephant in full charge. Or rather, she would gladly flag it down to torment it, just as she was doing with Peter if the barely concealed mischief in her eyes was any indication. Such a thing would normally delight Quincy to no end, but not today.
“You are not spending time with your family, that’s what you’re doing,” she taunted.
Which, of course, drew Peter’s complete ire. As his friend straightened to his full, impressive height and stared the viscountess down with all the force of his Viking ancestors, Quincy’s frustration increased. It would be no easy thing getting his friend off alone. “Peter—” he tried again.
“Do you think the books balance themselves?” Peter snapped, unable to hear Quincy in his growing outrage. “That correspondence answers itself? That the estate is managed with magic from the very air?”
“Please. All the noblemen I know have people to do those things. You needn’t work yourself to the bone if you delegate.”
“I am not most noblemen,” he bit out.
Her answer was drier than day-old toast. “I’d gathered that.”
Lenora finally stepped in. “Please, you two,” she said with an exaggerated patience that told of many such fights halted in their tracks.
“I won’t stand for it, Lenora,” her husband growled. “As if I would hire someone to do what I can do in my sleep.”
“I know,” she soothed.
“Ah, I see the way of it,” Lady Tesh said with an injured air. “You are taking his side.”
“Once again, there are no sides,” Clara interjected, moving beside her aunt to lay a calming hand on her arm.
“Like hell there aren’t,” Peter muttered.
“You see?” Lady Tesh said, pointing to Peter with her cane.
Margery moved into the eye of the storm then, Lady Tesh’s small pup, Freya, cradled in her arms. “Clara is right, Gran. And besides, you are oversetting yourself.”
“And overstepping,” Peter added under his breath.
Quincy watched it all with mounting frustration and desperation. He could see no end to the domestic battle being waged gleefully before his very eyes. As the general din increased, Lady Tesh sputtering as her nieces and granddaughter jumped in to calm her, he finally snapped.
“Damn it, Peter, I just learned I’m a duke and I need your help.”
Chapter 4
Well, Quincy thought dazedly as a thick silence descended on the hall, that didn’t go quite as planned.
At least he had Peter’s undivided attention. As well as that of everyone else present.
They looked at him as if he’d just opened his mouth and bayed at the wall sconce. Even the damn dog stared in some kind of canine disbelief. All save for Lady Clara, whose expression of dawning understanding nearly undid him.
As usual, Lady Tesh was the first to react. “I knew it!” she crowed, her lined face rearranging itself into triumphant glee. She turned to her granddaughter. “You recall when he first came to the Isle, and I questioned him on his last name? You all looked at me as if I were a doddering, forgetful old fool. But I was right. Our Mr. Nesbitt is the Duke of Reigate!”
Not a soul responded. Peter’s eyes did not leave Quincy. “I don’t understand.”
As his friend looked at him in shock, Quincy remembered: Peter didn’t have a clue that Quincy was aristocracy.
He blanched. Ah, God, how had he forgotten? In all the years they had known each other, he had never once told Peter who his family was. He had told him everything else, of course, such as where he was from, about his parents and siblings, and his dreams of traveling. Yet he’d never said to Peter, his closest friend, I’m the son of a duke.
Why? What had prompted that glaring omission? In a flash he saw it, that uneasy night spent aboard The Persistence while a storm battered the merchant ship. It had been mere days after sailing from London, the first crossing for either of them. He and Peter had huddled together belowdeck, confiding in one another to keep their minds from the fear of sinking to a watery grave. It had been on the tip of Quincy’s tongue to tell Peter the truth of his birth.
But Peter had begun telling his own story, of his hate for his cousin, the duke, who he blamed for his mother’s death. Of his disgust for anything or anyone noble. And in Quincy’s fear that he might lose his first and only friend, he had conveniently left that aspect of his past out. It wasn’t imperative, he’d reasoned. Peter knew everything about him that was important, and as Quincy never intended to return to his family, he might as well cut himself off from them completely. As the years passed that omission had blended into reality until he had forgotten he was aristocracy. He was a self-made man and owner of his own destiny, and nothing else.
But the poisonous truth of what he had been born into was already erasing that life he’d built from nothing. Fourteen years of hard work undermined in a single moment.
Peter’s face was still slack with stunned incomprehension. Guilt reared up in Quincy, that he had kept something so very important from this man who had shared everything with him.
“I’m sorry,” he managed. As apologies went, it was the bare minimum, yet it was all he could think of to say.
If anything, Peter looked more confused. “It’s true then? This is not some prank on your part?” He shook his head, his heavy brows drawing down in the middle. “But how can you be a duke?”
The words formed in Quincy’s mind, excuses as to why he’d kept such a thing from his best friend. But they froze on his tongue. To his grief-numbed mind they sounded ridiculous. In the end he could only stare at him miserably.