The following afternoon, Hawk was en route to pore over his ledgers in search of a miracle, as he had done every day for the past several years. In his distracted state, he nearly walked directly into one of their few remaining servants.

The young girl held a heavy silver tray in her arms and bore dark circles under her eyes, but she somehow managed to smile and bob at her master as if she couldn’t be more delighted to deliver her heavy load.

Perhaps she was. After all, she had survived the latest round of heart-wrenching sackings when Hawk realized even their pared down staff was more extravagant than they could afford to keep on.

“Let me take that,” he said impulsively.

There could be no doubt the laden tray was headed to his mother. The dowager refused to rise from her bed each day until she consumed a pot of fresh-brewed tea and broke her fast. It had been a ritual for as long as Hawk could remember.

“’Tis no bother at all,” protested the maid, but she gratefully allowed him to relieve her of her burden. “Thank you. I shall return to the kitchen to work on supper.”

Hawk’s jaw tightened as he realized this maid also pulled shifts as cook and housekeeper.

He nodded to dismiss her and headed toward his mother’s chambers. Only when he glimpsed the golden glow of particles sparkling between the slender cracks in the curtains did he realize how late the hour had become. Mother had never been one to rise before noon at the earliest, but surely four in the afternoon bordered on excessive, given the Hawkridge family no longer attended evening soirées.

His mother lay in repose amongst a heap of silk-covered feather pillows in the center of her bed. Her eyes were closed as if she had not heard him enter the room or set the tray on the sideboard within arm’s reach of the mattress.

Birds chirped outside the shuttered windows, but the air inside the room seemed oddly suffocating. Dust. Stale perfume. Mother’s once brown hair was now mostly gray, her papery skin like dry powder.

She looked old, he realized suddenly. A sinking feeling twisted in his gut.

His mother had been the only family he had left for so many years that the thought of losing her had never crossed his mind. He pulled a chair next to the bed and lifted her frail hand in his. Hawk was glad he had not gone straight to the ledgers. A man must not forget to take advantage of the time he had been granted with his remaining parent.

“I don’t suppose you resolved that silly issue with my credit at the modistes,” she said without opening her eyes.

How quickly tender moments could turn bittersweet.

Hawk patted her hand and refused to feel bitter. “Not yet, Mother. I shall let you know the moment you can once again spend indiscriminately.”

“I should not have had to stop,” she said petulantly. She opened her eyes. “Where’s my tea?”

“I’ll pour.” He rose to his feet.

Her too-bright eyes scanned the room. “Where’s the maid? You should sack her if she’s too busy to serve a dowager marchioness her morning tea. You should not be performing manual labor. I’m certain I taught you better values than that.”

“The maid is following my orders,” he said calmly as he filled an antique cup with steaming tea. “And it is not morning but late afternoon. Why are you still abed?”

Her chin lifted. “Should I not be? Am I not in charge of my own schedule?”

“Of course,” Hawk demurred.

What neither he nor his mother mentioned aloud was that being in charge of her own schedule was a fairly new occurrence in her life.

Hawk’s father had held very firm ideas on how his marchioness should look, behave, be treated. When the accident claimed him, the new guardian had been even worse. Neither of them had escaped tyranny until Hawk had finally become old enough to take control of the title.

Yet those dark shadows persisted. Everything Hawk had thought he was inheriting was either in shockingly poor condition or nonexistent. But the thing he hadn’t seen coming, the saving grace bestowed upon him despite all the strife, was the freedom not only to be his own man at long last but also to grant that same freedom to his mother.

With him, her tone was always sharp, but Hawk was determined to allow her to speak her mind. They both knew he held the title and thus could do as he pleased. But Hawk had no interest in becoming a tyrant.

Instead, he handed his mother her tea and retook his seat at her side. Their financial straits weren’t her fault. They had his father and his uncle to thank for that. As soon as he’d secured enough investors to open his port, he would finally be able to spoil his mother as a dowager marchioness deserved.

Until then, he would do what he could to keep her safe and happy.

“Did you stay up late reading again?” he asked.

“I tossed and turned worrying about my son’s utter lack of heirs.” She cupped both pale hands about the warm teacup. “You should have everything a man with your title deserves. A wife. Heirs. And servants,” she added pointedly. “If you tried a little harder I’m sure you could find an heiress with more fortune than we could spend in our lifetimes.”

Hawk gritted his teeth. He had tried. For years, every night had been spent hunting an heiress. Now, every moment of every day was spent trying to build the new port on a waterfront section of desolate entailed land.

When the port’s obvious ties to trade barred him from Almack’s assembly rooms, Hawk had lost more than easy access to the Marriage Mart’s famous balls. He’d finally realized he wasn’t going to find an heiress.

Perhaps once his port was profitable, he could sell it for a small fortune and once again be an attractive catch to the daughter of a peer. Combine the right bloodlines, beget “an heir and a spare” for the title. Everything a lord was duty-bound to do. No matter where his true interest lay.

But all that was someday in the future. Until then, financing the estate was up to Hawk.

“Have you given more thought to the dowager cottage in the country?” he asked.

Mother still hadn’t forgiven him for letting out the primary country estate, and thus far had refused to consider the idea of doing the same with the unused cottage designated for her use.

Yet until his port was in operation, rents from entailed properties were the only income keeping them afloat.

“It is beneath us,” Mother snapped, her eyes wild. “I refuse to be talked about worse than we already are. If my countenance appears in a caricature, I’ll lock myself in that dowager cottage and never leave.”

Hawk leaned back in his chair.

This was not the first time she had threatened such a thing. Mother was still furious at him for moving them to an even smaller London townhouse. There was barely room for the two of them, and he wouldn’t even have spared the coin for that much, were he not obliged to attend the House of Lords during the Parliamentary sessions.

And of course, he could not forbid his mother from being in town for the Season, when all her friends were out spending their fortunes and attending exciting events. Even if not being able to join them was its own special hell. While her friends were out shopping and dancing, the dowager marchioness could only afford activities that did not require ball gowns or jewels. More often, jealousy kept her from leaving the house at all.

But it was temporary.

It had to be.

As soon as the Season was over, however, Hawk would cease paying this rent. He would move his mother to the country and live in a shabby, unrentable property he could neither repair nor sell until the port turned a tidy enough profit to finally give them their lives back. Which it could do in less than a year, if he could just lock in a few more investors before quitting Town.

The prospect of living so far from London was less enticing than ever. He yearned to find room for himself in the lives of the two people he had thought lost forever: Faith Digby and Simon Spaulding.

“I took dinner with my brother the other day,” Hawk said without thinking.

“He’s no son of mine and no brother of yours,” Mother snapped, slamming her teacup back into its saucer with enough force to crack the porcelain. His mother struggled to sit up straight amidst her sea of silk-covered pillows. “You owe no allegiance to a bastard. We are Hawkridges. Never forget what that means.”

Hawk winced. For a moment, he had forgotten that his relationship with his brother was a part of himself that he could not share with his mother. The thought of having to keep separate versions of himself, to never be able to truly and completely share his life, was as sad now as it had always been.

But he would not upset his mother with his contrarian ideals. Not when he was just starting to realize how old she was becoming. How little time they might have left. Very soon, Simon could well be Hawk’s only remaining family. He would not waste what time remained with his mother.

“It’s a beautiful day, Mother.” He leapt up from his chair to throw back a curtain to let her see. “We could take a stroll along the—”

A wracking cough from the center of the bed interrupted his train of thought. Hawk turned in shock to see his mother convulsing with each violent round of choking coughs.

He ran to her side and leaned her into his arm in order to lightly pound her back to open her airways.

She felt like nothing in his arms. The bones of a bird, and not much more weight than one. The light from the open curtain illuminated the gauntness of her cheekbones. Her skin was no longer porcelain, but ghostly. Her body was no stronger than that of a child.

“What is happening?” he demanded as soon as her coughing fit ceased. “Are you ill? Shall I fetch a doctor?”

“I’m fine,” she snapped, jerking her frail shoulders from his loose grip. “If we don’t have enough money to pay for my modiste then we certainly don’t need to waste a coin on some quack surgeon.”

“It was just a cough. Haven’t you ever coughed? And I don’t feel like taking a walk. I feel like being alone.” She waved a thin hand in the direction of her chamber door. “Go about your business, Hawkridge. I order you to leave. I am perfectly fine.”

Hawk rose to his feet out of respect for his mother, but with the disheartening suspicion her sudden attack was not as meaningless as she would like for him to believe.