Chapter 2 #2
Either way, for reasons Hart did not know, maybe because one addressed one when speaking, he spoke the child’s name. “Jeremy,” the exotic, romantic name the duchess saddled the child with.
That was it.
And just like that, the babe stopped its blubbering. His scrunched-up monster’s face unfurled to reveal glassy blue-grey eyes. And Hart discovered that, for all the things that were different between the slight bundle in his arms and himself, they had a like curiosity in one another.
The babe, like a blind man who had just had his sight restored, roved his sightless stare over Hart’s face. With the fascinated way the child looked at him, Hart had wanted to look around, find a mirror, and see if he was, in fact, the faceless one.
But he had been too fascinated to glance away. More fascinated than he had ever been when his favorite botany instructor revealed the Rosa chinensis ‘Viridiflora’ during one of his lessons.
The longer Hart and the babe examined one another, the more the thing Hart held came to feel like someone.
Hart had not wanted to take a chance that the child would resume its squawking, so he had said it again, this time quieter and gentler. “Jeremy.”
And this time, the babe’s mouth did another strange thing—it had formed a smile from which little bubbles spilled. Hart had been equally repulsed and intrigued. Well, more intrigued, but he would continue to deny it were he ever to share the story.
Of which he had no intention of doing.
Hart and the babe might have stared at one another for hours or minutes. Eventually, the babe’s—Jeremy’s—unfocused eyes became heavy, closed, and he slept.
At that instant, Hart discovered the most important lesson in his then edification: in being the one to stop the babe from crying, he was stronger, more capable, and more responsible than the duchess, who was unable to properly care for her own child, the only child she wanted.
But it wasn’t just Hart’s mother who was weak.
His sire was too. With all the duke’s blathering about his “whore wife,” and rage-induced fits whenever anyone mentioned the lady—him, it was always the duke mentioning her—he possessed the same overly passionate spirit.
The late duke had gotten himself stuck. He couldn’t send the duchess away. Nor could he reject the child. Not without being labeled a cuckhold.
Yes, Hart was stronger than both people who had given him life.
The babe had slept in Hart’s arms the entire night.
Only when the sun started to rise, and the duchess stirred, did Hart (reluctantly) return him to his crib.
If the duke had regard for his horses and hounds, then surely there wasn’t too much harm in Hart having some regard for a human who didn’t have all, but some, of his blood?
As of that day, Lord Jeremy Tremaine belonged to neither parent. Hart’s bastard-born half-brother became his full brother in every way. They even became friends.
Through the years, Jeremy remained sensitive. Pityingly so. He had been sensitive to the duke’s outbursts, tempers, and unveiled hate.
Everything in Hart knew he was supposed to scorn such weakness. Alas, the damage had been done that quiet night in the nursery while their mother slept. Jeremy was Hart’s pitiful brother.
It was why he had sent the lad away, to protect him from what would have eventually broken him—the duke.
He had convinced the duke that the boy was better off at Eton. Then Oxford. Then, even better, voyaging the high seas. The late duke favored that decision most. The duke’s logic had been clear. The bastard-born was sure to die, either by tempest or battle.
Hart knew better. Jeremy couldn’t be killed. After all, Hart, through gentler delivered lessons and eventually schooling, gave his brother every skill needed to survive. Jeremy became Lord Tremaine and then Captain Tremaine.
For Tremaine—and only for Tremaine—Hart had broken one of the duke’s hard and fast rules; Hart loved his brother.
His love for Jeremy and a desire to expand their power over the seas led him to believe that marriage to Miss Meghan McQuoid-Smith, of inferior origins, would bring more benefits than not.
In the end, Hartwell had escaped a disastrous union with the empty-headed tart—but in a public way.
One he could not forgive. Nor forget. On the way to the altar, she had run off with the Earl of Culross, jilted Hart, and worse, made a bloody fool of him.
It could have been worse—he could have actually married into the shameful lot.
What he could not escape, however, was the Church Bell seated at his right.
“Hartwell?”
He kept his gaze forward.
“Hartwell?” she whispered more loudly this time.
He scowled Lady Fleur to silence.
She proved impervious. Or stupid.
“If you did not love Meghan, then why can’t our families be at peace?”
Even her cousin, whom he had been slated to wed, had known better than to speak when given that look.
“Odd, you speak about peace,” he said, speaking through tight lips. “Something tells me you wouldn’t recognize quiet if I placed it in your palm and folded your fingers around it.”
That managed to silence her.
For a moment.
“There’s a difference between peace and quiet, Hartwell.”
“They are naturally paired.”
“Not this time.”
Certainly not.
He loathed the McQuoids. They were a loathsome lot, given to scandals, displays of emotion, and loud laughter.
And yet, he found himself diverted by the lady’s fearlessness.
Horrified—but also diverted.
And it was not simply the single golden coil Lady Fleur’s maid had left dangling at her mistress’s cream white shoulder, though that worked to highlight the lady’s gentle curves.
Curves that had gone unnoticed by him—until now.
Now, he took in the soft swell of her bosom.
Peaches on a plate were how the decolletage was known.
It was a bloody silly name to ascribe to a woman’s bust or the silly fripperies they donned.
But in this case, with the pink blush over Lady Fleur’s warm olive tones, he understood the descriptor and appreciated it on this blasted woman.
“Why are you looking at me, Hartwell?” she said in a whisper. “Do I have something in my teeth?”
If Hart lied, she’d pick those pearly white rows. He knew it.
If he told her he’d indeed been staring, and a great deal lower, she’d run. For that reason, he briefly considered the truth.
“Do you know what I am thinking about, Fleur?”
Wide-eyed, she shook her head; that curl slipped in the crevice of her breasts, between her low, square-cut, but lace-trimmed neckline.
“You’ve done an impressive job in collecting the names of those who would be in attendance.”
“And?”
“I suspect you’re not here for any actual book. That you were sent by your family to try and smooth relations between our—”
Lady Fleur’s shoulders shook, and she kept her laughter buried with her fingertips. That didn’t stop amusement from sending a spray of pink along cheekbones that climbed for days and causing the gold and green specks in her eyes to sparkle.
A fuse lit in him. He thought it was fury. But knew it was also something more.
He simultaneously wanted to dress her down and undress her.
He glared her into oblivion.
Or he tried.
“You are…serious, Hartwell?”
She asked at the exact same moment the gavel landed, and a buzz rolled over the crowd, in anticipation of the next item.
Another man would trust her guilelessness. Hart didn’t trust a woman of any birthright, name, or station. They were each exacting in their own way.
“Next item for bid,” Mr. Winterly announced.
“Very well,” Fleur said in a low voice, and he shot a glance to the top of her artfully arranged blonde-gold locks. “Let us say I did infiltrate your household—”
“Lot 25A, a first edition of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer”
“—Of which I did not,” she continued through the description.
“…It is a novel genius in its prose…”
“But let us say I did, Hartwell…”
She had his full attention.
The coy curve to her heart-shaped lips said she knew it too.
The saucy chit.
He didn’t know whether to laugh, turn her over his knee, or take her to task for such insolence.
“Get on with it, Lady Fleur. You’re stringing me along so long, it’s a wonder you can even remember the point you’re trying to make.”
“Very well. It begs the question if I somehow gathered you were attending, who in your family, or on your staff and household, would be so careless?”
Hart thinned his eyes on the auctioneer’s podium.
She wanted to get under his skin. She had already succeeded. She was on his very last nerve. If he were the beast his peers professed him to be, he’d throw her over his shoulder and dump her outside Chilton’s.
“…Baron Chilton is confident the title will eventually be greeted with…”
Lady Fleur stretched up and cupped her hand about the side of her mouth. “Even worse, do you have frequent instances of disloyal staff, because if that’s the case, then you should most definitely consider—”
“I do not have disloyal staff, you saucy minx,” he said, perfectly calm, but betrayed by the deep rumble of his baritone.
Mr. Winterly paused in his infernal description of a Gothic novel not worth the parchment it had been printed on and briefly glanced to the back, where Hart sat.
As Hart, for the first time in his life, had done the unthinkable—he’d caused a bloody scene.