Ashlyn Macnamara (36 page)

“How dare you threaten me?”

“I’d prefer not, if we can come to an understanding. I’d much rather spend this blunt on something worthy, such as arranging a place for Jack at Eton.”

“Eton?” Redditch laughed. “More windmills, is it? Eton does not admit bastards.”

“Harrow then. Never fear, I shall find a public school that will admit him.”

“He will never be admitted into polite society, no matter if he has the education for it. In fact, once he gets to school, the other boys will remind him of his origins daily.”

George nodded. How well he knew the machinations of English public schools. He’d survived and so would Jack. “I plan on ensuring he has the proper tutors. Both in Latin and boxing.”

A snuffle just outside the morning room set Isabelle’s senses on alert. She set aside her dusting cloth and turned toward the sound. Jack lurked in the corridor beyond. The look in his downturned eyes screamed guilt.

That boy, always wandering off. “What are you doing
here?” she asked. “You know Eastwicke won’t approve if you’re not at your post.”

“Don’t care what he thinks.” His response was hard and sullen.

“You
must
have a care for his good opinion.” How many times in the past weeks had she repeated this dictum? “It’s how you’ll retain your position so you can earn your keep like a grown man.”

“I don’t want to earn my keep here anymore.” He advanced a few steps into the room. “I want to go back and live with Biggles.”

Isabelle crossed her arms over her dark gray bodice and tapped her fingers against her elbow. Jack’s dissatisfaction with their current living arrangement was hardly a new thing, but the past few days had passed without complaint. She’d thought he was getting used to it. Finally.

“Did Eastwicke have words with you again?”

Lower lip caught between his teeth, Jack shook his head.

A glance down the corridor showed no butler or footman bearing down on them. Perhaps she had time to convince him to return to his post. She knelt and put an arm about his shoulder. He jerked beneath her touch, the movement not evasive. No, it was more of a wince. He held his right hand hidden behind his back. How odd.

“Do you have something for me?” she asked carefully.

Another shake of his head.

“What are you hiding then?” Her gut told her it wasn’t anything good.

On his refusal to reply, she reached for his arm. Stubborn to the last, he held himself stiff. When she finally managed to coax his hand into view, her breath rushed out in a gasp. Angry, red welts lined a rapidly swelling palm.

“Did Eastwicke do this?” She resorted to a whisper in order to keep her voice steady. No sense in upsetting the boy any further. She was upset enough for them both.

He nodded, and she pulled him into a full embrace. The backs of her eyes burned, and her fingers trembled against her son’s coarse hair. Blast it all to the devil. Eastwicke, that overblown oaf. She wouldn’t stand for it. Jack may have no more standing in this house than the lowest servants, but she wouldn’t step aside and allow him to be mistreated.

“We’ll see about this,” she said, the words as much a promise to herself as an affirmation to her son. “I’ll have a word with Father, and we’ll see.”

She released Jack and scrambled to her feet, pressing her palms along her skirts without thought. She’d no reason to smooth such weeds, but she still retained enough pride to face her father with her chin held high.

He tugged at her apron. “Mama?”

“What is it, dear?”

“I wasn’t at my post.”

“Yes.” She ruffled his hair. “And you’re still not.”

“But, Mama, George is here.”

“George?” What on earth? Her pulse kicked up a notch. “You mean Mr. Upperton.”

“Yes, George.” Heavens, Jack sounded so hopeful, as if George might rescue him again. “It’s why I wasn’t at my post. Eastwicke showed him in, and I had to make sure.”

Her heart leapt into her throat. She pressed her fingertips to the notch at the base of her neck, as if that might persuade it to calm its rapid beat. She could not hope for a rescue this time. What could he possibly want here? Blast it all, she shouldn’t care. She wouldn’t let herself. She’d never get over the hurt if she couldn’t control her reaction to the mere thought of his presence.

She’d do this. George or no, she’d face her father and tell him in no uncertain terms what she would not tolerate.

She sent Jack back to his post and strode down the corridor, failing to stem the barrage of memories. George stumbling from the waves with Jack in his arms. Wandering in from the garden at Shoreford to catch him at the piano. Ducking into the gamesman’s cottage to escape a sudden downpour. George laying her out on her kitchen table to prove to her the ecstasy possible between a man and woman.

The glare of cold steel he’d turned on his mistress. Yes, she must keep that image foremost in her mind. The rest was nothing but distraction.

Exceedingly pleasant distraction, but distraction nonetheless.

The sound of raised voices emanating from one of the smaller parlors brought her up short. Gracious, what could they be arguing over? Something about pamphlets and decent people and society’s opinion, but the words jumbled in her mind. Then she heard mention of her son’s name.

Of course. George knew Jack was here. They’d seen each other.

Shame billowed through her. George had seen how low she’d stooped to ensure a roof over their heads and decent food in their bellies. Jack’s belly, especially.

No more. She refused to put up with the humiliation of seeing her boy polish boots. Somehow she’d find a better way, but not here. Squaring her shoulders, she stepped into the doorway.

George stood less than a foot away from the familiar figure of her father. The two men glared at each other. George’s hand curled into a fist at his side, and his shoulders heaved with rapid breaths. Handsome as ever, he seemed to swell to fill the space of the room.

Distraction. She blinked the image away.

“What is it you want?” her father demanded.

George turned his head toward the door. He met her gaze and held it. A glimmer of longing passed through the gray depths of his eyes. How she wanted to shutter her lids against that expression, but it compelled her to bear witness, as if it had a will of its own.
This is my naked emotion, and you
shall
see it. You shall
.

Good Lord, she couldn’t imagine a man wearing such an open expression—unless he was in love. The force of his feeling speared her through the chest and arrowed deep into her gut until her knees threatened to buckle.

But then his eyes flicked down her body. Heat flooded her face. Dear God, he was staring at her serviceable rag of a dress, so out of place in this fashionable townhouse. He’d never seen her bedecked in finery, but it had never mattered until now.

He turned to her father. “What I want most is not in your power to grant me.”

Her father pivoted, following the direction of George’s gaze. “Not now, Isabelle.”

“It may as well be now.” The anger seething behind George’s words pulled their attention back to him. “I didn’t think I could possibly form a lower opinion of you. This interview is over.”

Before Isabelle could interject, before her father could react, George hauled back a fist and delivered a devastating blow to the older man’s jaw. Father’s head jerked back before he crumpled to the floor.

George pushed past her without a word of acknowledgment. His booted feet echoed down the corridor, the thuds growing fainter as he neared the foyer. Just like that, he was once again gone from her life. Only this time, she hadn’t sent him away.

Her father raised himself on his elbow and shook his head like a dog emerging from a pond.

Some deeply engrained sense of filial duty pressed her forward. “Are you all right?”

Her father probed at a reddening knot just behind his chin. “My teeth seem to be all in their proper places.” He lowered his hand and eyed her closely. “And what is he to you?”

“Nothing.” Isabelle swallowed and cast a swift glance over her shoulder, as if somehow George might reappear to put the lie to her reply. “What on earth would give you the idea I had any connection to him?”

“He said he wants to send your boy to Eton.”

She backed up a step. “What?”

“You heard me. He wants to send that boy to Eton of all places. Where would he get such a notion if he wasn’t the boy’s real father?”

“He is most certainly not Jack’s father.” If only. “I told you years ago who Jack’s father was. I didn’t lie about that.” She wasn’t sure how she managed to spit out that reply. Her throat had gone oddly tight.

Jack at Eton. She couldn’t fathom such an idea. How generous of George, but at the same time how presumptuous. As if he could blithely waltz in and take her son from her. The nerve!

“Jack. Such a common name.”

Isabelle ignored the gibe. She’d purposely chosen the name for its commonness. When her son was born, she’d wanted nothing to do with the polite society that had spurned her—that spurned her yet.

“I came to see you about Jack, as it happens. I won’t tolerate Eastwicke’s treatment of him.”

Her father pushed to his feet. “I knew it. You can’t stand by and let him learn his place. If you coddle him—”

“Eastwicke beat his hand with a stick,” Isabelle shouted over him. Manners be damned. “How do you expect him to perform his duties with a sore hand? I will
not tolerate it. In fact, I’ve come to a decision. As of this moment, Jack is no longer in your employ.”

“You shall not leave. I forbid it.”

Right. She’d expected as much. He’d only called her home to ensure she caused the family no more embarrassment. Doubtless Emily had told him where he could find his wayward daughter. “You cannot stop me. I shall pack our things, and we’ll be gone within the hour.”

As to where they would go after that, somehow she’d find the means to take Jack back to Kent. If Mrs. Weston insisted on barring her from the village, she’d appeal to Julia’s sense of fairness. But before she left Mayfair, she had a call to pay.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I
T WAS
over. George slumped in his study, fingering the brandy decanter. He might have been halfway through it by now—in celebration, naturally—but the mere thought of drink turned his stomach. In the end, he’d accomplished nothing. Redditch wasn’t about to change his ways, and Isabelle …

A discreet cough cut into his thoughts. “George, I think you’d better come to the foyer.”

He glanced up to find Henrietta standing before him. How had she entered his inner sanctum so soundlessly? “What now?”

His mood had not improved a whit since his return from Redditch’s. Seeing Jack—seeing Isabelle—treated like servants in what should have been their home. Good Christ! Although he shouldn’t be surprised. Redditch was a right bastard.

“Come.”

He lowered his brows. Henrietta seemed rather breathless, but why should she be breathless on his account?

“Quickly, before Sanders puts them off.”

“Puts who off?”

“Just come,” his sister repeated.

He heaved himself to his feet. His right hand still throbbed dully from its impact with Redditch’s jaw. The
damned idiot’s thickness of skull apparently extended as far as his mandible.

He followed his sister to the foyer, where Sanders blocked his view of the entrance. “I really must insist, Miss—”

Miss? What the devil? “I say,” George interjected, “what’s the matter here?”

Sanders turned. “I’ve tried to explain to this woman you are not at home, but she refuses—” A small figure darting past him cut him off abruptly. “Ho there.”

“Good day, George.” Yes, a small figure—small, blond, and very familiar.

Jack. He might have known. At least the lad was no longer clad in livery. And if Jack was here, Isabelle couldn’t be far behind. God, he was in no temper to face either of them. “That will be all, Sanders.”

Gait stiff and insulted, the butler took himself off, and Isabelle stepped into the foyer. “Forgive the intrusion, but—”

George swept his gaze over her. She still wore the shabby gray gown, and her bonnet wasn’t in much better condition. No wonder Sanders refused to let her in. She held a bulging satchel in one hand, a satchel that may well have contained all her worldly possessions. With a six-year-old boy in tow, she looked every inch the beggar.

But why turn up on his doorstep when she’d made it quite clear she wanted no more to do with him?

“Why have you come?” He refused to observe the niceties, not after the confrontation with her father, and not with her.

“We’re going to have a talk, you and I.” Apparently she wasn’t about to observe the niceties, either. Not if her tone was any indication. She might have addressed her son in such a manner after she’d caught him shirking his chores and sneaking off to the beach.

“You can come into the front parlor.” At least he could
do Redditch one better and show her to a proper receiving room. He led the way, aware of the slightly shabby air that hung about his family’s townhouse. The Uppertons might inhabit Mayfair, the same as the Marshalls, but the difference in their fortunes showed in the fading wallpaper, the thinner carpeting and the loosening threads on the furnishings.