I’d never wanted to return to this house. But there was one silver lining. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told Alejandro I wanted to come back for Miguel’s legacy. Something I’d been forced to leave behind that had nothing to do with the inheritance I’d lost.
As I looked up, the soft drizzle felt like cobwebs against my skin. Like memories. Like ghosts.
“What now?” Alejandro was glaring at me as if I wasn’t his favorite person. I couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t my favorite person right now, either.
Although at this moment there was one person I liked even less. I swallowed.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
He stared at me. “Of Claudie?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“You don’t need to be scared,” he said gruffly. “I’m here with you now.” Reaching out, he took the baby carrier from my trembling hands. “Come on.”
Alejandro carried our sleeping baby up the stone steps and knocked on the imposing front door.
Mr. Corgan, the longtime butler, opened the door. His jowly face was dignified as he greeted Alejandro.
“Good morning, Your Excellency.” Then he glanced at me and his eyes went wide. “Miss Lena!” He saw the sleeping baby in the carrier, and the usually unflappable Mr. Corgan’s jaw fell open. “It’s true?” He breathed, then glanced at Alejandro, and the mask slipped back into place. Holding open the door, he said sonorously, “Won’t you both please come in?”
He led us into the elegant front salon, with high ceilings and gilded furniture. Everything looked just as I remembered—vintage, French and expensive. I’d been allowed in this room only a handful of times, the last being when I’d begged Claudie for money to fly to Spain. The day my life had fallen apart.
Mr. Corgan said, “I regret that Miss Carlisle is...out...at the moment, but she has a standing order to welcome you at any time, Your Excellency, if you care to wait.”
“Sí,” Alejandro said coldly. “We will wait.”
“Of course. She will be so pleased to see you when she returns. May I offer refreshments? Tea?”
Alejandro shook his head. He sat down on the pink striped couch near the window. He seemed incongruous there, this dark, masculine Spaniard with severely tailored black clothes, in a salon that looked like a giant powder puff, with the powder made of diamond dust.
He set down the baby carrier on the white polished marble floor beside the sofa. I swiftly scooped it up, and exhaled in relief now that my sleeping baby was safely back in my possession. I followed Mr. Corgan out of the salon and into the hallway.
Once we were alone, the butler’s mask dropped and he turned to face me with a happy exclamation.
“We missed you, girl.” He hugged me warmly. I closed my eyes, smelling pipe smoke and brass polish. Then I heard a crash and pulled back to see Mrs. Morris, the housekeeper, had just broken a china plate in the hallway. But she left it there, coming forward with a cry.
A minute later, both of them, along with Hildy, the maid, were hugging me and crying and exclaiming over Miguel’s beauty, his dark hair, his fat cheeks.
“And such a good sleeper, too,” Mrs. Morris said approvingly. Then they all looked at each other. I saw the delicate pause.
Then Hildy blurted out, “Who’s his father, then?”
I glanced back at the salon, biting my lip. “Um...”
Hildy’s eyes got huge when she saw who was in the salon. Then she turned to Mr. Corgan. “You were right. I owe you a fiver.”
His cheeks went faintly pink as he cleared his throat with a harrumph. “I might have heard some of your conversation with Miss Carlisle the day you left, Miss Lena.” He shook his jowly head with a glare. “It wasn’t right what she did. Driving you from the house a year before you would have got your grandmother’s inheritance.”
I was surprised for only a second. Then I gave a wry smile. Of course they knew. Household staff knew everything, sometimes even before their employers did. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does,” Mrs. Morris said indignantly. “Miss Carlisle wanted your inheritance and the moment she convinced you to move out of the house, she got it by default. Just a year before it would have finally been yours!”
I pressed my hand against my temple as emotions I had spent the past year trying to forget churned up in me.
When I turned eighteen, I could have left for college, or gotten a real job. Instead, I’d remained living in this house, working as a sort of house manager/personal assistant for my cousin beneath her unrelenting criticism as she tried her best to drive me away. I’d had a small salary at first, but even that had disappeared when she’d lazily announced one day that she was cutting the salaries of the staff by twenty percent. “They don’t need it,” she sniffed. “They are lucky, working all day in my beautiful house. They should be paying me!”
Mr. Corgan and Mrs. Morris and the rest had become my friends, and I knew they had families to support. So I’d given up my salary rather than see them suffer. Leaving me virtually destitute for years, in spite of working eighteen-hour days.
But I hadn’t minded, not really, because I’d known all I had to do was remain in this house until I was twenty-five, just a few months from now, and I would have gotten the huge inheritance once destined for my father, before he’d been cut out of the will for the crime of marrying my mother.
Eight years ago, when my grandmother lay dying, she’d clutched his old teddy bear and dissolved in tears I’d never seen before as she remembered the youngest son she’d once loved best. She’d called for her lawyer.
If Robert’s child proves herself worthy of the Carlisle name, my grandmother’s will had read, and she still lives in the house at the age of twenty-five, she may claim the bequest that would have been his.
But now it had all reverted to Claudie. I hadn’t cared a whit about the money last year, when I’d feared my baby would be stolen from me. But now...
“The house hasn’t been the same without you, Miss Lena,” Mr. Corgan said.
“Half the staff resigned after you left,” Mrs. Morris said.
“She’s been intolerable without you to run interference.” Mr. Corgan shook his head grimly. “I’ve worked for this family for forty years, Miss Lena, but even I fear my time here is nearing an end.” Leaning closer, he confided, “Miss Carlisle still insists she’ll marry your duke.”
“He’s not my duke....”
“Well. He’s the only man rich and handsome enough for her, though she says she’d marry any rich idiot who’d make her a duchess....” Glancing back over his shoulder, he coughed, turning red.
Turning, I saw Alejandro standing in the doorway of the salon. I wondered how much he’d heard. His face was half hidden in shadow, his expression inscrutable.
“Did you change your mind about the tea, Your Excellency?” Mr. Corgan gasped, his face beet red.
Alejandro shook his head. His eyes were dark, but his lips quirked at the edges. “We rich idiots prefer coffee.”
The butler looked as if he wished the earth would swallow him up whole. “I’ll get it right away, sir....”
“Don’t bother.” He looked at me. “Did you get what you came for?”
He’d heard everything, I realized. He thought I’d come for my inheritance. He thought that was the precious thing that had brought me here. It wasn’t.
I turned to Mrs. Morris urgently. “Did she throw out my things?”
“She wanted