To Kiss a Thief (18 page)

H
e had not anticipated having to face a welcoming party when they arrived at Lynscombe Manor. Heavy with exhaustion, he wanted nothing more than to disappear into his rooms until he had had a chance to take stock of his situation and his surroundings.

But that, it seemed, was not to be.

“Fairfax!” His stepmother's girlish voice rang out against the lofty ceiling and marble-tiled floors of the entry hall. “Really, my dear, it's taken an age for you to arrive.”

He had written to tell her of his plan to go on to Hampshire from Devonshire, but he had no notion she would take it for an invitation to join him. “It was not at all necessary for you to come, ma'am,” he replied as he handed his coat and hat to Jarrell, the butler. “I know how you feel about the country.”

“But your father simply insisted.”

St. John rocked back on his heels, his flight to the stairway arrested. “Father is here?”

“Oh yes.” Her eager nod set the lace on her cap aflutter. “When I told him of your letter, he was determined to meet you here.”

He did not want to be fussed at by his stepmother.

And he most assuredly did not want to speak to his father.

Before he could escape, however, his father came striding from the back of the house, sporting hunting boots and a long drab duster. “Here at last, are you, Fairfax?” When his pale eyes fell on Sarah and Clarissa, they betrayed no surprise. St. John wondered how much his stepmother had revealed—and how near it came to the truth.

“Welcome to Lynscombe, Lady Fairfax,” he said, stepping toward her and stretching out his hands for hers. “And this must be . . .”

“Clarissa,” Sarah supplied. Her lips were pressed into a tight line, as if to seal off words that demanded to be spoken, but really, what more could be said?

His father dropped to one knee to inspect the child, his eyes scanning the tiny face in the same desperate search for some familiar feature that St. John had already undertaken. Followed, no doubt, by the same disappointment.

But at the sight of Clarissa's curly locks and violet eyes, his father seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “Welcome to you, too, my dear.”

Clarissa made a shy curtsy while still clutching Emily Dawlish's hand.

“Jarrell,” his stepmother ordered the butler, “have the child and her things taken to the nursery.”

“Yes, milady,” the white-haired retainer said with a bow. Apparently deciding that Sarah and Emily were among Clarissa's “things,” Jarrell ushered them all toward the servants' stairs in the rear.

St. John opened his mouth to correct the error, but his stepmother prevented him. “I'm so glad you're here, Fairfax,” she said, threading her arm through his. “You know I dread ennui above all things, and Estley has some silly notion of staying for weeks—”

“Thought it might be nice to shoot my own birds for a change,” his father interjected.

“And he insisted I come, too. Really, what could be duller? But thankfully Miss Harrington offered to accompany me,” she added, with a rather uncertain-looking smile.

“Eliza is here?”

“At Wyldewood,” she explained. “But I'm sure she'll be here every chance she has.”

He nodded. Lord Harrington's estate was only a few miles away.

When the departing footsteps of Sarah, Emily, and Clarissa had faded, his father cut short their conversation. “We need to talk. My study, Fairfax.”

The old resistance to his father's control flared sharply in St. John's chest. But it was a conversation that could not be avoided. After a moment's hesitation, he followed his father down the corridor, although he certainly had not forgotten the way, despite the time that had elapsed.

The Marquess of Estley's study was a purely masculine preserve of heavy furniture and dark wainscot. A shaft of fading afternoon sunlight sliced through a crystal decanter on the desktop but had otherwise little success in piercing the gloom.

He associated the place most with the punishments he had sometimes had to face, when Jarrell could not cover up his misdeeds or his mother's indulgence could not prevail. Stepping over the threshold, he felt as if he were stepping back in time, as if Father's summons had the power to transform him into a lonely, powerless boy once again.

They stood with the desk between them while his father lit a lamp, the flame flaring up from below to cast shadows beneath his eyes that made him look suddenly older, sadder. To his shock, his father lifted the decanter and sloshed a measure of brandy into two glasses. He handed one to his son as he motioned him into a chair and then perched on the edge of his desk, raising his own glass in a sort of salute.

“Welcome home, Fairfax,” he said and drank.

Coming from his father, the words bordered on effusive. But then Lynscombe was the only place where St. John had ever felt any sense of closeness to the man. Over the years, the distance between them had grown insurmountable—so wide that even the breadth of the Atlantic had mattered very little.

When he said nothing in reply, his father asked, “Well?”

St. John hesitated, contemplating how best to approach his father's question, wondering what traps lay hidden beneath its treacherous breadth. “I hardly know where to begin, sir,” he said at last.

“At the beginning, if you please.”

Although he was sorely tempted to begin with his father's insistence that he marry a fortune—or perhaps even further back, with his father's decision to marry a spendthrift, he thought better of it. “Your wife has, I hope, told you where I have been, and perhaps even why.”

“The story about how she was blackmailed into helping Lady Fairfax escape to some fishing village in Devonshire, you mean? Yes, she did.” He cleared his throat gruffly. “With some, ah, encouragement. And did you find the Sutliffe sapphires there?”

“No, Father,” he confessed with a shake of his head, pushing away the unwelcome memory of Sarah's sad, searching eyes as she passed him the key to her nearly empty trunk. “I did not. In fact, I have begun to doubt they were ever in her possession.”

“I can't say as I'm surprised,” his father interjected. “I always suspected that soldier chap, myself. But Amelia would have it that Sarah was the guilty party.” He paused to take another swallow of brandy. “Well, blackmail or no, what matters now is that you've found your wife, and the damage done by these little . . . adventures can be repaired.”

St. John swirled the liquid in his glass but did not taste it. “I shall do my best. Despite the uncertainty surrounding Clarissa,” he ventured, “I have determined to accept her as my own.”

A momentary frown of surprise creased the space between his father's brows. “Uncertainty?”

“About her parentage. No man could feel certain after seeing what I had seen—what we all saw—that night.” He shook his head, trying to dispel the memory of Sarah in another man's arms. “And you must agree that the decision to keep the child's birth a secret bodes ill for my wife's fidelity.”

“My God,” his father whispered, almost to himself. “Can it be that you don't remember? I forget that your dear mother must be little more than a shadow to you now.”

His
dear
mother? The woman his father had replaced in a matter of months? St. John thumped his glass onto the corner of the desk. “I assure you
I
have not forgotten her.”

His father rose and walked toward a tapestry that adorned the wall opposite the desk. “I did not mean you had forgotten
her
. But from what you've said, you cannot, I think, remember
this
,” he explained, pushing aside the tapestry with a surprisingly unsteady hand.

Behind the curtain hung a small portrait he could not recall ever having seen. Although the occasion for the painting no doubt had been to celebrate the birth of the child, the heir, the new mother clearly had captivated the artist's attention. She was seated in the center, the hems of her gown puddled at her feet, her slender arms wrapped lovingly around her infant son.

Around him.

The image of his mother he carried in his heart and in his head had faded and blurred with the passing of time. In the years since her death, he had seen no other picture, had imagined them all destroyed by a man determined to erase her memory from his life.

Her smile was demure but her cheeks were rosy, the perfect complement to the riot of brownish-blond curls piled high on her head. He could swear his mother's tinkling laugh and gentle touch flooded over him, along with a wave of guilt that anything about her could ever have been forgotten.

Especially, of course, the mischievous sparkle in her remarkable violet eyes.

Clarissa's eyes.

It was all the proof of her parentage Society would require. And as for his own need for certainty? Well, a part of him had known the truth all along. But if the revelation did not shock, it did not precisely bring comfort, either.

“That beautiful little girl of yours will have you wrapped around her finger soon enough,” his father cautioned, an unaccustomed sentimentality warming his voice. “Love of a child makes a man do foolish things, my boy.”

St. John bristled. “What would you know about loving a child, Father?” He felt little compunction at flinging those sharp words at last, and less satisfaction in seeing them hit their mark.

A stony silence followed, broken only when his father asked, “Why did you come here?”

“I might just as easily enquire what kept you away,” St. John snapped back. “It seemed to me a suitable place to raise a—
my
child.”

“You mean to stay, then.”

“No. I cannot.” Taking up his glass again, he traced the faceted edges with his fingertip. “My wife may be innocent of the particular crimes of which she was accused three years ago, but I find that we are still quite—incompatible. It will be best for all parties if we continue to live separately. Sarah will stay here with Clarissa. I shall return to town.”

“Unthinkable,” his father said, washing down the assertion with the remaining contents of his glass, sounding once more like the man St. John remembered.

“That is not for you to say.”

“Tell me, Fairfax,” he asked after a long silent moment, his pale eyes focused on the empty glass in his hand, “how much of the village did you see on your arrival?”

St. John started at the abrupt change of subject. “None at all. I came on horseback, through the western meadow.”

“Well, in the morning, go for an early ride—around the estate, through the town.” He lifted the decanter, gesturing with it. “Then tell me again how you intend to dispose of Lady Fairfax.”

“What has she to do with this?” St. John demanded.

His father gave a bitter laugh. “Everything.”

“May I have your assurance that my wife's dowry has not all been squandered?” The words squeezed their way past his clenched jaw.

The heavy crystal decanter met the polished desktop with a
thud
. “You, my dear boy, are about to reap what you sowed. In your arrogance—your
disobedience
—you left me to negotiate the marriage settlements. Pevensey was a shrewd bird. Wanted to make sure his daughter was well taken care of. Arranged to portion out her dowry over a period of years.”

The sudden sweat on St. John's palms nearly caused the glass to slip from his grasp. “Does she know?”

“Pevensey refused to tell her. Seems she had some silly notion of a love match.” He let out a breath and shook his head, as if in despair of such foolishness. “This was his way of letting her think she'd got what she wanted. A fortune, to be delivered on condition of her happiness.”

“Happiness?” The tightness in St. John's chest grew to an ache. “And how was such a thing to be measured?”

“He seemed to believe it would be ensured if you lived under the same roof. I tried to persuade him that, in my experience, such an arrangement was rather more likely to have the opposite effect, but he would have his way. And since the world thought Lady Fairfax dead and gone—and her happiness in such a state being impossible to determine,” his father added snidely, “not one penny has been received.”

At last St. John took a gulp of brandy, which burned its way down his throat with none of the comforting warmth of Mad Martha's ill-gotten cognac.

“But now,” his father continued, “all can be set right, my boy, if you keep your wife right by your side. Closer, in fact,” he said, leaning toward his son. “For there's a bonus for an heir. Pevensey liked to imagine himself the grandfather of a future marquess.”

St. John dropped his eyes to the floor, refusing to meet his father's gaze.

“I've already written to the man. He'll be eager to see his daughter again—why, he's probably on his way here now,” his father spoke over his shoulder as he moved to leave the room. “Let's hope he brings his purse.”

When the door latch clicked into place and he was at last alone, St. John allowed his whole body to sag, wishing he could trust his trembling hand to lift the glass to his lips again.

* * *

He did not know how long he sat in his father's study, only that the lamp was low and the room otherwise dark by the time he rose to his feet and left the half-empty glass on the desktop.

In the corridor, he found Jarrell. “Ah, there you are, my lord,” the man said. “Lady Estley asked me to tell you that dinner will be served in the family parlor in half an hour. I've taken the liberty of having your things put in the rose room.”