The Heir

Four

“I NEVER DID ASK IF YOU SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED your errands this morning.” Westhaven put aside his copy of The Times as Anna set his lunch tray before him.

“I did. Will there be anything else, my lord?”

He regarded her standing with her hands folded, her expression neutral amid the flowers and walks of his back garden.

“Anna,” he began, but he saw his use of her name made her bristle. “Please sit, and I do mean will you please.”

She sat, perched like an errant schoolgirl on the very edge of her chair, back straight, eyes front.

“You are scolding me without saying a word,” the earl said on a sigh. “It was just a kiss, Anna, and I had the impression you rather enjoyed it, too.”

She looked down, while a blush crept up the side of her neck.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” he said with sudden, happy insight. “You could accept my apology and treat me with cheerful condescension, but you enjoyed our kiss.”

“My lord,” she said, addressing the hands she fisted in her lap, “can you not accept that were I to encourage your… mischief, I would be courting my own ruin?”

“Ruin?” He said with a snort. “Elise will be enjoying an entire estate for the rest of her days as a token of ruin at my hands—among others—if ruin you believe it to be. I did not take her virginity, either, Mrs. Seaton, and I am not a man who casually discards others.”

She was silent then raised her eyes, a mulish expression on her face.

“I will not seek another position as a function of what has gone between us so far, but you must stop.”

“Stop what, Anna?”

“You should not use my name, my lord,” she said, rising. “I have not given you leave to do so.”

He rose, as well, as if she were a lady deserving of his manners. “May I ask your permission to use your given name, at least when we are private?”

He’d shocked her, he saw with some satisfaction. She’d thought him too autocratic to ask, and he was again reminded of his father’s ways. But she was looking at him now, really looking, and he pressed his advantage.

“I find it impossible to think of you as Mrs. Seaton. In this house, there is no other who treats me as you do, Anna. You are kind but honest, and sympathetic without being patronizing. You are the closest thing I have here to an ally, and I would ask this small boon of you.”

He watched as she closed her eyes and waged some internal struggle, but in the anguish on her face, he suspected victory in this skirmish was to be his. She’d grant him his request, precisely because he had made it a request, putting a small measure of power exclusively into her hands.

She nodded assent but looked miserable over it.

“And you,” he said, letting concern—not guilt, surely—show in his gaze, “you must consider me an ally, as well, Anna.”

She speared him with a stormy look. “An ally who would compromise my reputation, knowing without it I am but a pauper or worse.”

“I do not seek to bring you ruin,” he corrected her. “And I would never force my will on you.”

Anna stood, and he thought her eyes were suspiciously bright. “Perhaps, my lord, you just did.”

He stared after her for long moments, wrestling with her final accusation but coming to no tidy answers. He could offer Anna Seaton an option, a choice other than decades of stepping and fetching and serving. He desired her and enjoyed her company out of bed, a peculiar realization though not unwelcome. But his seduction would be complicated by her reticence, her infernal notions of decency.

For now, he could steal some delectable kisses—and perhaps more than kisses—while she found the resolve to refuse him altogether and send him packing.

He was lingering over his lemonade when Val wandered out looking sleepy and rumpled, shirt open at the throat and cuffs turned back.

“Ye gods, it is too hot to sleep.” He reached over and drained the last of his brother’s drink. “You do like it sweet.”

“Helps with my disposition. And as I did indeed have to deal with His Grace this morning, I feel entitled.”

“How bad was he?” Val asked as he sat and crossed his long legs at the ankle.

“Bad enough. Wanted to chat about the scene at Fairly’s but left yelling about grandchildren and disrespect.”

“Sounds about like your usual with him,” Val said as John Footman brought out a second tray, this one bearing something closer to breakfast.

“Mrs. S said to tell you this one is sweetened, my lord.” John set one glass before the earl. “And this one, less so,” he said as he placed the other before Val.

“I think she puts mint in it,” Val said after a long swallow.

“Mrs. Seaton?” the earl asked, sipping at his own drink. “Probably. She delights in all matters domestic.”

“And she did not appear to be delighting in you, when she was out here earlier.”

“Valentine.” The earl stared hard at his brother. “Were you spying on me?”

Val pointed straight up, to where the balcony of his bedroom overlooked the terrace. “I sleep on that balcony most nights,” he explained, “and you were not whispering. I, however, was sleeping and caught the tail end of an interesting exchange.”

The earl had the grace to study his drink at some silent length.

“Well?” He met his younger brother’s eyes, awaiting castigation.

“She is a decent woman, Westhaven, and if you trifle with her, she won’t be decent any longer, ever again. What is a fleeting pleasure for you changes her life irrevocably, and you can never, ever change it back. I am not sure you want that on your appallingly overactive conscience, as much as I applaud your improvement in taste.”

The earl swirled his drink and realized with a sinking feeling Val had gotten his graceful, talented hands on a truth.

“Maybe,” Val went on, “you should just marry the woman, hmm? You get on with her, you respect her, and if you marry her, she becomes a duchess. She could do worse, and it would appease Their Graces.”

“She would not like the duchess part.”

“You could make it worth her while,” Val said, his tone full of studied nonchalance.

“Listen to you. You would encourage me into the arms of a pox-ridden gin whore if it would result in His Grace getting a few grandsons.”

“No, I would not, or you wouldn’t have gotten that little postscript from me regarding Elise’s summer recreation, would you?”

The earl rose and regarded his brother. “You are a pestilential irritant of biblical proportions. If I do not turn out to be an exact replica of His Grace, it will be in part due to your aggravating influence.”

Val was grinning around a mouthful of muffin, but he nonetheless managed to reply intelligibly to his brother’s retreating back. “Love you, too.”

Anna wasn’t fooled. Since their confrontation over the lunch table earlier in the week, the earl had kept a distance, but it was a thoughtful distance. She’d caught him eyeing her as she watered the bouquets in his library, or rising to his feet when she entered a room. It was unnerving, like being stalked by a hungry tiger.

And as the week wore on, the heat became worse, with violent displays of lightning and thunder at night but no cooling rains to bring relief. The entire household was drinking cold tea, lemonade, and cold cider by the gallon, and livery was worn only at the front door. Everybody’s cuffs were turned back, collars were loosened, and petticoats were discarded.

Anna heard the front door slam and knew the earl had returned after a long afternoon in the City, transacting business of some sort. She assembled a tray and waited to hear which door above would slam next. She had to cock her head, because Valentine was playing his pianoforte. The music wasn’t loud, but rather dense with feeling, and not happy feeling at that.

“He misses our brothers,” the earl said from the kitchen doorway. “More than I realized, as, perhaps, do I.”

The music shifted and became dark, despairing, all the more convincingly so for being quiet. This wasn’t the passionate, bewildered grief of first loss; it was the grinding, desolate ache that followed. Anna’s own losses and grief rose up and threatened to swamp her, even as the earl moved into the kitchen and eyed the tray on the counter.

His eyes shifted back up just in time for Anna to be caught wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Come.” He took her hand and led her to the table, sitting her down, passing her his handkerchief, fetching the tray, then taking the place beside her, hip to hip.

They listened for long moments, the cool of the kitchen cocooning them both in the beauty and pain of the music, and then Val’s playing shifted again, still sad but with a piercingly sweet lift of acceptance and peace to it. Death, his music seemed to say, was not the end, not when there was love.

“Your brother is a genius.”

The earl leaned back to rest his shoulder blades along the wall behind them. “A genius who likely only plays like this late at night among whores and strangers. He’s still a little lost with it.” He slipped his fingers through Anna’s and gently closed his hand. “As, I suppose, am I.”

“It has been less than a year?”

“It has. Victor asked that we observe only six months of full mourning, but my mother is still grieving deeply. I should have offered Valentine a bunk months ago.”

“He probably would not have come,” Anna said, turning their hands over to study his brown knuckles. “I think your brother needs a certain amount of solitude.”

“In that, he and I and Devlin are all alike.”

“Devlin is your half brother?” Ducal bastards were apparently an accepted reality, at least in the Windham family.

“He is.” Westhaven nodded, giving her back her hand. “Tea or cider or lemonade?”

“Any will do,” Anna said, noting that Val’s music was lighter now, still tender but sweetly wistful, the grief nowhere evident.

“Lemonade, then.” The earl sugared his, added a spoonful to Anna’s, and set it down before her. “You might as well drink it here with me, and I’ll tell you of my illustrious family.” He sat again, but more than their hips touched this time, as his whole side lay along hers, and Anna felt heat and weariness in his long frame. One by one, the earl described his siblings, both deceased and extant, legitimate and not.

“You speak of each of them with such affection,” Anna said. “It isn’t always so with siblings.”

“If I credit my parents with one thing,” the earl said, running his finger around the rim of his glass, “it is with making our family a real family. They didn’t send us boys off to school until we were fourteen or so, and then just so we could meet our form before we went to university. We were frightfully well educated, too, so there was no feeling inadequate before our peers. We did things all together, though it took a parade of coaches to move us hither and thither, but Dev and Maggie often went with us, particularly in the summer.”

“They are received, then?”

“Everywhere. Her Grace made it obvious that a virile young lord’s premarital indiscretions were not to be censored, and the die was cast. It helps that Devlin is charming, handsome, and independently wealthy, and Maggie is as pretty and well mannered as her sisters.”

“That would tend to encourage a few doors to open.”

“And what of you, Anna Seaton?” The earl cocked his head to regard her. “You have a brother and a sister, and you had a grandpapa. Did you all get along?”

“We did not,” Anna said, rising and taking her glass to the sink. “My parents died when I was young. My brother grew up with a lack of parental supervision, though my grandfather tried to provide guidance. My parents, I’m told, loved each other sincerely. Grandpapa took us into his home immediately when they died, but as my brother is ten years my senior, he was considerably less malleable. There was a lot of shouting.”

“As there is between my father and me.” The earl smiled at her when she sat back down across from him.

“Your mother doesn’t shout at him, does she?”

“No.” The earl looked intrigued with that observation. “She just gets this pained, disappointed look and calls him Percival or Your Grace instead of Percy.”

“My grandfather had that look polished to a shine.” Anna grimaced. “It crushed me the few times I merited it.”

“So you were a good girl, Anna Seaton?” The earl was smiling at her with a particular light in his eyes, one Anna didn’t understand, though it wasn’t especially threatening.

“Headstrong, but yes, I was a good girl.” She rose again, and this time took his glass with her. “And I am.”

“Are you busy Tuesday next?” he asked, rising to lean against the wall, arms crossed over his chest as he watched her rinse out their glasses.

“Not especially,” Anna replied. “We do our big market on Wednesday, which is also half-day for the men.”

“Then can I requisition your time, if it’s decent weather?”

“For?” She eyed him warily, unable to sense his mood.

“I have recently committed into another’s keeping a Windham property known as Monk’s Crossing,” he explained. “My father and I agree each of my sisters ought to be dowered with some modestly profitable, pleasant property, preferably close to London. Having transferred ownership of one, I am looking at procuring another. The girls socialized little this year, due to Victor’s death, but at least two of them have possibilities that might come to something in the next year. I’d like to have their dower properties in presentable condition.”

“So what are we doing, Tuesday next?” Anna asked, folding her arms across her chest.

“I am going to inspect a potential dower property out in Surrey, a couple hours from Town, and for sale at a suspiciously reasonable price. I would like you to accompany me to assess its appeal to feminine sensibilities.”

“Whatever does that mean?”

The earl pushed off the wall and waved a hand. “There are things about a house I just don’t take in, being male. You women understand subtleties, like where windows will give effective ventilation, what rooms will be cold in winter, or which fireplaces are unfortunately situated. You can assess the functionality of a kitchen at a glance, whereas I can barely find the bread box.”

He moved to stand before her, looking down at her. “I can assess if a property is priced properly in relation to its size, location, and appointments, but you can assess if a house can be made into a home.”

“I will go then.” Anna nodded. It was a task to which she was suited, and probably only a morning’s work. “But you must consider which sister will end up with this property and think about her, so you can tell me her likes and dislikes.”

“Fair enough. We can discuss those particulars on the way there.”

He left, moving in the direction of the music room, where Val was once again between pieces, or moods. Anna watched him go, unable to help but appreciate the lean play of muscle along his flanks.

One had to wonder how the ladies of polite society had ever managed, when all the Windham brothers had assembled in one place, particularly in evening finery or riding attire or shirt sleeves…