A Gentleman Never Tells (5 page)

Hopefulness etched its way back into her sister’s features again as she asked, “Do you really think that?”

“Of course she does, and so do I and your father, too,” Auntie Bethie said. “Now come give me a proper hug and a kiss before I start thinking you no longer care about me.”

Rosabelle ran over and hugged her aunt and kissed her cheek. She then, unexpectedly, rushed over and threw her arms around Gabrielle and said, “Oh, Gabby, what will you do?”

Gabrielle’s heart softened even more as her sister’s arms circled her, holding her tightly. Rosabelle’s body trembled. Gabrielle knew they would eventually have a heart-to-heart talk about what happened, but she wasn’t ready for that yet, and she felt Rosabelle wasn’t either.

Her father looked at Gabrielle from over Rosabelle’s shoulder and said, “She’ll marry someone else, of course.”

Gabrielle patted her sister’s back, knowing she had argued with her father all she could for one day, but there was always tomorrow and the next day. Whatever had come over her in Hyde Park had changed her. She was a different person, and she wouldn’t be so easily led by her father’s wishes again.

But putting those new and different feelings aside for the time being, Gabrielle said calmly and without emotion, “Don’t worry about me, Rosa, I know exactly what I will do.”

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it.

—Samuel Johnson

Hell and damnation! Brent had called her name until he was hoarse. He couldn’t find the dog.

And to top that off, he’d come home to find a tersely scribbled note from the duke, ordering him to appear at the man’s house before dark. He would have liked to have responded with a terse note of his own, by saying, “When hell freezes over,” but he knew better than to be that disrespectful to a powerful duke.

When Brent woke that morning, there was no way he could have imagined the hellish day he’d have. He wiped the last traces of shaving soap off his face and neck with a cloth and looked at himself in the small mirror on his shaving bureau. No doubt the Duke of Windergreen would smile when he saw the angry-looking scratch beneath Brent’s eye, and his swollen bottom lip. Thankfully, the scratch didn’t look deep enough to leave a bad scar.

He dried beads of water from his chest, then walked over and grabbed his trousers off the bed, where Raymond had neatly laid out his clothing, and stepped into them.

Brent had spent all morning and half the afternoon scouring that damn park, looking for Prissy, after the duke, his daughter, and his henchmen had left him standing in the middle of the park with a torn coat, a smashed and ruined hat, and a body that was bruised and scraped. Not to mention he had been on foot for the entire search.

He’d decided against wasting time by going to his house to get a carriage or a horse to ride. But, if at the time he’d known how long he would be out there, he would have certainly gotten some kind of transportation. It was well into the afternoon before he realized he might have to leave the park without the aggravating little dog.

And it was all because of an enchanting lady who walked out of the mist and into his arms. He would dearly love to put his hands around the slender neck of the beautiful and very tempting Lady Gabrielle and scare the devil out of her cheating little heart. At just the thought of her, his lower body stirred reflexively, and Brent grunted a rueful laugh.

His brain could not fool his body. If he ever got close enough to her again to put his hands around her lovely neck, he was much more likely to slowly caress the hollow of her throat where the beat of her pulse raced, or draw lazy circular patterns with his fingertips on that exquisitely soft skin behind her ear, than he was to try to strangle her.

Over the years and through his many travels, Brent had had many women seek his attention, but he was quite sure this morning was the first time he’d ever had such an intriguing young lady walk up to him and kiss him as Lady Gabrielle had. She had been soft, exhilarating, and heavenly. She’d smelled like spring’s first rose, and she had been utterly enchanting by first taking him to task over his tone with Prissy and then by surprising the hell out of him with her seduction.

But what was she thinking? She was a duke’s daughter! She must know that set her apart from most young ladies. Or perhaps, because she was a duke’s daughter, she felt free to behave as she wished with no thoughts of consequences, knowing her father would make everything right for her.

Even without her being engaged to another man, what she did was sheer madness, and he’d allowed it, even welcomed it. But he never would have touched her—well, he liked to tell himself that anyway—if he’d known she was promised to another. Years ago, when Brent found out about his mother’s affair with Sir Randolph Gibson, the man who had fathered her twin sons, he vowed never to touch a married or betrothed lady. He had firsthand knowledge of the havoc that kind of affair could bring. And he had kept that vow until this morning, when Lady Gabrielle seduced him with her seemingly innocent and extremely tempting undertaking.

That he hadn’t immediately caught on to what she was up to irritated the devil out of him. At the time, he had been far more interested in her sweet kisses and the way she felt in his arms than he was about the reason she was so free with her affections. Young ladies out to snare him into matrimony weren’t unfamiliar terrain for him. More than one had tried a number of tactics, tricks, and offers to lure him into marriage; but so far, he’d managed to elude them all. One thing was sure, if he made it out of this misfortune with his freedom intact, he’d make damn sure he never got caught unawares by another scheming lady ever again.

But Lady Gabrielle’s antics were second to a more important worry at the moment. He couldn’t do anything about that situation until he met with the duke. The disappearance of his mother’s cherished pet was a bigger concern, because Prissy could be hurt.

Brent never realized how big that damn park was until he started walking it, looking around trees, under bushes, and along the shoreline of the Serpentine for Prissy. Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, he’d stopped everyone he passed and asked if they had seen a small, long-haired, ivory-colored dog with a red braided collar and leash.

No one had seen her.

It was as if she’d disappeared into thin air.

He wouldn’t allow himself to consider the possibility that Prissy had met her demise by a wild animal of some kind. His hope was that, because the park was so big, they were continuously missing each other’s paths, or that, perhaps, her leash had caught on a rock or become entangled in some bushes and bound her, and she was still waiting to be found, freed, and fed.

Brent walked to his bedchamber window and looked out over the small garden at the back of his rented town house. Most members of the peerage owned their own homes in London, but Brent’s father had sold their home in Mayfair years ago. Though he didn’t like the idea, Brent would have to consider the idea of buying a place if his brothers’ business venture worked out and they settled in London. He supposed he could understand their wanting to move back to England, because he certainly didn’t want to entertain the idea of living in any other country. And his brothers now understood why their father wanted them to make their home across the seas.

With any luck, by the time he made it to the duke’s house, he would discover that all had been worked out with Lady Gabrielle’s fiancé, and the wedding would take place next week as planned. He would happily swear to the duke he would never breathe a word about what happened in the park and, of course, he wouldn’t anyway. However, the earl’s son might want to keep a close watch on his new bride. She obviously liked to slip out of her bed in the early hours of morning and prowl.

One of the reasons Brent had come to London was to find a wife. His intentions had been to look over a bevy of different young ladies before deciding which one should bear his name and his children. He certainly didn’t like the idea of being deceptively snared by one, no matter how tempting she was.

Suddenly, Brent remembered soft, willing lips pressed gently on his, luxuriously silky hair threading between his fingers, and an enticing breast flattened beneath his palm. When she was kissing him, he would have bet a hundred shillings she was an innocent, but now he wasn’t so sure. She had a fiancé, and if she had kissed Brent so wantonly, having just met him, there was always the possibility she’d gone much further with her fiancé. Not that it mattered to Brent what she’d done or with whom. He didn’t even know what the devil he was doing thinking about her again.

All he wanted to do was get this meeting with the duke behind him so he could go back to the park and concentrate on the more important matter of searching for Prissy while there was still a chance she was alive. He had vowed to keep the dog safe, and he was miffed at himself because he’d let the sweet lips of a tempting lady make him forget all about Prissy.

“But what man could have resisted her seduction?” he mumbled to himself.

Brent headed toward his bed but stopped when he heard the heavy stomp of booted feet running up the stairs. He knew what all that noise meant and, quite frankly, he wasn’t up to it.

The door swung open, hitting the wall with a bang. Brent’s identical twin brothers strode into his bedchamber as if they owned it, just the way they always had since they were two years old. Matson, the firstborn twin, plopped onto the middle of Brent’s bed and made himself comfortable by leaning against the headboard. The heels of his riding boots landed on Brent’s pressed white shirt. Iverson sauntered over to the brocade slipper chair, turned it around, and straddled the seat.

Raymond, Brent’s ever stiff and proper valet, walked calmly into the bedchamber behind them. “Excuse me, my lord. I explained to your brothers that you were preparing to leave for an appointment, but they insisted on seeing you immediately, and I couldn’t stop them.”

“No reason for you to try, Raymond. When they want to see me, they don’t let anything stand in their way. Thank you; that will be all.”

With all the correctness of a well-paid man, Raymond nodded once, turned around, and walked out, gently closing the door behind him. Brent would have had the fellow out looking for Prissy, too, but the man was so stiff and proper about everything he said and did, he would be completely useless combing the park.

Brent turned his attention to his brothers. They were tall, powerfully built men who wore their business success and breeding well. Even though he’d grown up with them, the only thing that made it possible for him to tell the two apart was the fact that, whether intentional or not, Iverson always wore his hair longer at the nape. And even though they were the spitting image of each other as far as looks, they couldn’t be more different in personalities. Iverson had always been the one to jump to conclusions, a ready to do battle hothead, and Matson a slow-to-action reasonable thinker.

It hadn’t been easy, but Brent had kept his mother’s secret for ten years. At the back of his mind, he knew the time would come when the twins would want to come to London. And before that happened, he had to tell them the man they had always thought to be their father wasn’t. And the man who had fathered them was very much alive and living in London.

As Brent looked at his brothers making themselves quite comfortable in his bedchamber, his mind drifted back to that stormy evening more than a month ago at his Brentwood estate.

Rain beat against the window panes, and the fire crackled and roared as Brent, Matson, and Iverson drank brandy in the drawing room, catching up on old times. It was the first time he’d seen them in the two years since their mother had died. They had come home to tell him they would be moving their shipping business from across the sea in Baltimore, Maryland, to London. Brent was getting nowhere in trying to talk them out of it.

“But why?” Brent asked for probably the twentieth time. “If your shipbuilding business is successful in Baltimore, why do you want to move it to London?”

“Damnation, Brent, why not?” Iverson said. “Only where we live will change, not the business itself.”

“Besides, England is our homeland,” Matson added. “We stayed in Baltimore only because our father started the business there and, for whatever reason, insisted we keep it there. Out of respect to Mama, we stayed there after he died. But she’s gone now, and we’re coming home. We never planned to live there a lifetime.”

“And quite frankly, Brent,” Iverson said, “we should have moved the company right after she passed.”

Brent drained his glass and put it on the table in front of the settee. “So your minds are made up? There’s no talking you out of it?”

“Not a chance in hell. We’re going to London tomorrow to find places to live and to start the process of moving the entire operations of Brentwood’s Sea Coast Ship Building.”

“Since you both insist on settling in London, there’s something I must tell you before you go. Something our parents never wanted you to know.”

Matson laughed and set his glass beside Brent’s. “Why are you sounding so somber, Brent? It’s like you don’t want us to move back.”

“Yes, why are you trying so hard to talk us out of it?” Iverson said. “We’d think you’d be glad to have us nearby. We’re not children anymore, you know. Out with whatever it is you want to tell us.”

“All right, there’s really no other way to tell you than directly, anyway. The man you always thought of as your father is not.”

“What did you say?” Matson asked.

“There is a man in London, and the two of you look just like him.”

“So?” Iverson said, swirling the last of his brandy in his glass, looking as if he couldn’t be less interested in what Brent was saying.

“What exactly are you saying, Brent?” Matson asked, seeming a little more intrigued than Iverson.

“When I say you look like him, I’m telling you the man is your birth father—not Judson Henry Brentwood, sixth Viscount Brentwood.”

Matson leaned forward and froze his gaze on Brent. “What the hell do you mean?”

“And it better not be what I’m thinking right now,” Iverson added in a cold voice and then drained his glass.

“I’m afraid it is. This isn’t some slight favoring with the same color of eyes and hair. It’s your build, the structure of your faces, the way you carry yourselves. You look just like the man, because he is your father. Mama admitted it to me ten years ago.”

“You lie.” Iverson rose and glared at him.

Brent remained calm. “No. And why would I?”

“If this is true,” Matson said, “Why did she tell you and not us?”

“Isn’t it obvious? She didn’t want you to ever know. That one son had found out about her indiscretion was enough of a blow to her. She wanted to spare herself the shame and you two the shock of finding out, as well.”

“Sit down, Iverson,” Matson said. “This needs an explanation and, obviously, Brent’s the only one who can give it.”

Brent sucked in a deep breath. It wasn’t natural for a son to talk with his mother about her affair, and he’d hated every moment of it, but so had she. And it wasn’t any easier telling his brothers about it.