Chapter 20
Life would be much easier if there were no such thing as duty. No drumroll that calls a man to take the field in defense of king, country, and brothers-in-arms. No pressing need to honor one’s commitments. No sense of oughtness that drives a man to give up what he loves most.
Easier? Yes, perhaps, but were I to live that life, I’d not be able to look myself in the eye.
—Lawrence Sinclair, who knew full well what he should do but must drag his soul toward it kicking and screaming.
He was kissing Lady Caroline. His goddess. His love.
The kiss went on and on. It was a merging of breaths, a joining of souls. Lawrence’s whole world spiraled down to heat and raging need. Kissing Caroline was earth-shattering, but it would never be enough.
There had to be more. His body demanded it. Judging from the way she pressed herself against him, hers did, too.
But then the door burst open behind them and Lord Ware stormed into the smoking room. He and Caroline sprang apart from each other like a pair of cats who’d been doused with a bucket of water.
Lawrence stepped in front of her to hide her from his uncle’s view. He hadn’t shamed her. Not yet. But she might feel as if he had, now that they’d been caught in a compromising situation.
Trust Lord Ware to ruin everything.
“There you are, Nephew. Trying to debauch your betters, just as Lord Rowley said.” Ware gave a gruff nod to Caroline, who, against Lawrence’s hopes, was peeking around from behind him. “My lady, you may leave at once. You have my promise of complete discretion. I would never allow my cur of a nephew to entrap the daughter of Lord Chatham into such a disastrous mésalliance.”
Caroline stepped from behind Lawrence, smoothing the front of her gown and lifting her chin. “That is not at all what is happening here, Lord Ware.”
“No, Caroline,” Lawrence said softly. The last thing he wanted was for her to defend him. Besides, his uncle was right. “You should go. Your friends are probably already concerned that you haven’t joined them and—”
“But—”
“My uncle and I have some things to settle that do not concern you.”
Caroline opened her mouth as if she were about to object, but then closed it quickly. Then she dipped in the shallowest of curtsies to his uncle and glided softly from the room, closing the door behind her, but not so completely that the latch clicked. Lawrence was grateful beyond words that she had done his bidding.
It surely wouldn’t happen often.
He didn’t need her to witness the tangled wreckage that was his relationship with his uncle. She wouldn’t understand it. Caroline’s family was a boisterous bunch, but she and her brothers held each other in obvious warmth. And while she might not be taking the path Lord and Lady Chatham would choose for her, she loved her parents and they her. The house of Lovell was united in loyalty and affection.
His whole life, Lawrence had wondered what that must feel like. But wondering wouldn’t change his situation, and even Caroline’s touch of lightness, as full of grace as it was, couldn’t mend everything.
Sometimes, not even the truth would set one free.
“So, you lived through the war.” His uncle’s lip curled.
“Against all your hopes, sir.”
Lord Ware snorted. “Well, whatever deficiencies you might have had in book learning, at least you read people well enough. Do you want me to admit it? Very well. Yes, I wished a battle death for you, Nephew. After all, it was the best you could ever hope to achieve.”
Once his uncle’s vicious tongue would have made Lawrence feel low as a worm. Now he straightened his spine.
“I expect to prove you wrong again. It’s been my experience that a man can accomplish anything if he’s willing to throw his whole heart into it,” Lawrence said. “But your heart is too shriveled to be whole any longer. All I read in you now, sir, is pain and bitterness and the desperate need for your woe to be someone else’s fault.”
“By God, you insolent pup.” His uncle’s eyes bugged a bit, and the large vein in his forehead grew more pronounced. “I’m a peer of the realm. You will not speak to me so.”
“Yes, I will. I should have done it long ago.” Lawrence squared his shoulders as he faced his uncle. “You’ve blamed me for years, but I accept it no longer. I am not responsible for Ralph’s death.”
Lord Ware swore so vehemently, it was a wonder a lightning bolt didn’t cut through the roof and incinerate him on the spot.
The anger that used to terrify Lawrence now struck him as merely sad. And it didn’t change the facts.
“When I was a boy, I accepted every word you said as gospel, even when I knew better,” Lawrence said. He might have been only a boy, but he would never have encouraged his cousin to saddle that untested Thoroughbred. He’d been aware, far more than his uncle had, of Ralph’s limitations as a rider. “You repeated the charge so often, I came to believe my cousin’s death was my fault.”
“It was your fault. You always had to show him up. That’s what made him try the impossible.”
“No, sir. It was you who goaded Ralph into that jump.”
“The devil you say.”
“Your son excelled in the classroom, but you never gave him a word of praise. He’d have licked the sole of your boot for a single ‘Well done.’ Then, the night before his accident, you berated him for being a third-class rider.”
In fact, over a particularly contentious supper, Lord Ware had belittled Ralph incessantly for letting Lawrence, “the shiftless know-nothing,” outdo him on horseback. Taking that new stallion over the highest fence in the meadow was the only way Ralph felt he could gain his father’s favor.
“He’d have dared anything to prove you wrong,” Lawrence said.
“That’s a lie. I never said any such thing.”
“You did, sir.” That and so many other hurtful, poisonous words over the years.
Caroline was right. Bruises faded. Harsh words sank into a person’s heart and twisted themselves into the soul until they became part of who they were. They sucked the life right out of a body.
“You forced him to take that jump,” Ware said, pounding a fist into his open palm.
Lawrence clasped his hands behind his back to keep from answering his uncle’s threatening gestures with one of his own.
“It’s true Ralph rode double with me over many jumps, but I was nowhere near the stables when Ralph had that stallion saddled. If I had been, I’d have stopped him.”
The more calmly Lawrence spoke, the more agitated his uncle became. He paced like a caged lynx.
“If it’s any comfort to you at all, please know that I still grieve for Ralph. He was more than a brother to me.”
“As if the likes of you could be a comfort to anyone.” His back stiff, his brow low, Lord Ware made a rude, dismissive gesture. “I suppose now that you’ve altered the past in your head, you think you’re good enough to marry Lady Caroline.”
“I know better than that. No one’s good enough for her,” Lawrence said. “But if she’ll have me, yes, I want to marry her.”
Lawrence thought he heard a small gasp behind him but allowed it might just have been the wind in the fireplace flue.
His uncle stopped pacing and turned to glare at him. “And you expect Lord Chatham will agree to the match because you’re supposedly my heir.”
“I hope that will not be his sole consideration. The love I bear his daughter must count for something.”
Lord Ware cursed again. “Love counts for spit. And don’t harbor any hope of succeeding me, boy. No indeed. You may have robbed me of my first heir, but you won’t take the next one.”
“Sir?”
His uncle folded his hands over his protruding belly. “I’m wedding Miss Penelope Braithwaite by special license on the morrow.”
“That’s…sudden.” Even by London’s marriage mart standards. All Lawrence had heard was that he was paying court to the young lady.
“It’s necessary,” Lord Ware said with an unpleasant smile, “if you take my meaning.”
Lawrence must have cast him a puzzled look.
“She’s breeding, you bird wit.” Ware shook his head at his nephew’s denseness. “You don’t have to wonder if the old man can sire an heir to supplant you, Lawrence. I already have.”
Of course the child would have to be a son. But the limbs of Miss Braithwaite’s family tree drooped heavily with male children. She was the only girl amid a gaggle of boys. Lawrence could already see the odds in White’s ledger book. Ware would have his son in less than nine months.
“So you see,” Lord Ware went on, “you’ve dropped from heir presumptive to wastrel nephew cut off without a cent. Best you stop dangling that carrot before the ton.”
Lawrence had never made much of his position of inheritance. He’d known somehow that nothing would ever come of it.
But sometimes it’s deucedly bad to be right.
“As soon as decently possible after the wedding, I’ll make sure Lord Chatham and the rest of the ton knows of the impending birth.” His uncle chuckled. “If I were you and set on taking a wife, I’d set my sights far lower than the daughter of an earl.”
“I’ve never hidden the fact that I likely wouldn’t inherit.”
“Really? Then what were you doing trying to seduce Lady Caroline? Did you think to entrap her?”
“Never. My intentions toward her are noble.” If more than a little lustful, he admitted to himself. “I intend to marry the lady honestly.”
“Really? Lady Caroline is used to fine things—houses, carriage rides, ‘rings on her fingers and bells on her toes’ and all that. Tell me, only because I need a spot of humor, mind, how do you intend to support a lady such as she?”
How indeed?
Colonel Boyle’s offer to lead the newly formed native cavalry came back to tempt him. When his old commander had mentioned it earlier, Lawrence had thought he’d have to leave Caroline behind to answer the call of the drum.
But officers were allowed to marry with their commander’s permission. And if he and Caroline tied the knot before he purchased the commission, he wouldn’t even need Boyle’s consent. He wouldn’t have to be separated from her.
Now that Lawrence knew Caroline longed to travel, he could take her with him to India. Each regiment had its own brand of society. It wouldn’t be as grand as a London Season, but she’d not want for balls and teas and friendships with the other military wives wherever they were stationed. As Lord Chatham’s daughter, she’d always be entitled to be known as the Lady Caroline, but Lawrence could bring her a certain regimental status as the wife of a major as well.
Perhaps we could even stop at Zanzibar along the way.
Making just one of her wishes come true would make him feel like a minor god.
“Well, boy? I asked you a question,” the earl thundered, his demand dragging Lawrence out of his daydreams. “Are you just going to stand there wool-gathering?”
“No, sir.” Lawrence started toward the door. “I’m going to propose to Lady Caroline.”
Before he reached it, he heard the quick patter of footsteps skittering on the hardwood on the other side of the portal. They faded away quickly as whoever it had been put some distance between themselves and the smoking room.
“Wait!” Ware bellowed. “Perhaps you’ll want to talk to your lady mother before you make that decision.”
Hand on the doorknob, Lawrence’s conscience stung him. In his haste to confront his uncle about Ralph’s death, he hadn’t even asked after his mother’s welfare. He held no hardness in his heart toward her for not answering any of his letters. Knowing his uncle, she might not even have received them.
“Of course you’d have to catch her on a good day,” the earl went on.
“What do you mean?”
“She has consumption. Last stages, I fear,” his uncle said. “It’s hard for her to breathe, so her mind is a bit muddled from time to time. You’ve been gone so long, I doubt she’d even know you.”
The wind spilling from his sails, Lawrence sank into one of the wing chairs. Granted, his mother had never been openly demonstrative toward him. The earl had been too controlling for that sort of maudlin display in his house.
But there had been snatches of kindness. Small smiles when Lord Ware wasn’t looking. A cold tray sent up when the earl had banished him to his room without supper. The morning he left for Harrow for the first time, she had touched his cheek and mouthed I love you softly. No one had ever told him that before.
Sometimes, he wondered if he’d imagined it.
Still, she was his mother. He couldn’t run off to India with Caroline without first seeing to the welfare of the woman who’d given him birth.
“I shall travel to Ware as soon as possible.”
“Good,” his uncle said gruffly. “While you’re there, see to your mother’s removal to the dower house. When I bring home my new countess, I don’t want a sick woman cluttering up the manor.”
The dower house on the Ware estate had been an unused structure falling into disrepair when Lawrence was a boy. The derelict cottage had a sagging roof, clogged chimneys, and uneven floors back then. He dreaded to imagine the damp and dry rot it must have suffered since.
It was no place for an invalid, unless one wanted to ensure the sick person wouldn’t linger. Lawrence couldn’t allow his mother to be shuffled off to such a place.
Lord Ware’s face lit with a mirthless grin. He’d thrown yet another obstacle into Lawrence’s life, and it gave him obvious satisfaction. He seemed to soak up the misery of others as if it were the finest of wines.
But Lawrence wouldn’t feed that particular thirst. He schooled his features into something resembling calm.
“By the time you bring your new bride to Ware Hall, neither my mother nor I will be in residence.”
“Your absence,” Lord Ware said with a grimace, “is the best wedding gift you could offer.”
“Then good-bye, Uncle,” Lawrence said. “I do not think we shall meet again.”
“Not if there’s a God in heaven,” Ware agreed with a snort.
“Oh, there is. Never doubt it.” Lawrence strode from the room. He trusted the One who weighs hearts to settle matters between him and his uncle.
He just didn’t think the good Lord would get around to it soon enough to suit him.