Then again, Heathbrook had to admit that Father’s instincts about Lily had been right. Perhaps if Heathbrook hadn’t been so bullheaded himself about things, he might have seen that. He shook his head, wondering what Father would have said to see him marrying a French woman like Giselle.
A faint memory bubbled up in his mind, of his father in Verdun, voicing his opinion of their landlady’s cousin:That Mademoiselle Bernard is a solid sort. Madame Dubois was wise to have brought her on. She brightens this dreary lodging house. She’s not as beautiful as your mother, mind you, but she will make some man very happy.
Yes. She would. As long as that man wasn’t so foolish as to let her go. Especially if that man was doing it simply because his father had actually liked her.
Heathbrook stared out the window. Perhaps it was time to stop fighting his father in his head. Because Giselle was right. Hewasafraid to love. With Lily, he had let love take over his common sense, his duty to family, and even his instincts that had told him she wasn’t as wonderful as she seemed.
So, the thought of giving up everything to that unpredictable emotion again damned near terrified him. It made him wonder if he was wrong about Giselle, too. What if she proved to be another figment of his love-soaked imagination?
Except he wasn’t wrong. He knew Giselle’s character as well as he knew his own. She was brave and good and, yes, a solid sort who was everything he wanted in a wife. What was more important, she loved with her whole heart and never wavered.
He loved her already just for that. She was the kind of woman he could easily see spending his whole life with, having children with. In fact, he couldn’t even imagine his life without her in it.Such an imprisonment would be worse than any he had suffered in France.
So, why suffer? All he had to do was throw himself off a cliff into her arms, and his suffering would be over.
He would just have to pray that she caught him.
Waiting for Heath’s return had been difficult, to say the least. Not that Giselle had not enjoyed the time she had been spending with her family. She had thoroughly liked having the chance to be around her half sister without worrying who might wonder at their closeness.
Then there was Maman, who had never really had a chance to get to know Jon and Tory. Now that Maman had heard about Tory’s pregnancy, she had been in her element, suggesting various possets and cures for morning sickness. Tory had gone along with Maman’s suggestions gamely, though she had seemed a bit taken aback by all the attention from her father’s former amour.
The boys, of course, had reveled in the attention of Giselle’s relations. Evan had talked “man to man” with the duke about a number of important matters she was not privy to, Kit was already nursing a serious infatuation with Chloe, and Zack spent his time asking Tory a million questions about what it was like to be expecting a baby. God only knew why.
Now it was the end of their second day. Everyone else had gone to bed, but Giselle could not. She was too excited about her plan to enable Heath to claim Zack as his son. Of course, it would only work if she married Heath, which meant much of it was up in the air, but she was hopeful that Heath would have had time to consider her parting words to him.
What was more, Heath’s butler had already informed her Heath was arriving soon, since he had sent a messenger ahead to say so. She paced the drawing room in her best evening gown and tried not to get her hopes up, but she desperately wanted to see him.
“What’s this I hear about Jon and Tory and Chloe visiting?” asked a voice from the door.
“Heath!” she cried, and ran to him, then stopped short as she realized how they had left matters.
He did not let her dwell on that. He lifted her in his arms andtwirled her about just as he had done that day in the study, then finished the twirl with a kiss that was far more provocative than the one they had shared then.
A long time later she broke away from him to say, “Stop that! I have so much to tell you.”
“It had better not be a litany of all the gossip Jon and his family brought from London, because I’m simply too tired to listen to it. Too tired to do anything, to be honest.”
“I do not think you will be too tired to listen tothis,” she said. “I have thought of a way you can claim Zack as your son without hurting Lily or her family.”
“What about without hurting Zack?”
“That is another matter entirely.” Swiftly, she described what had happened with Zack since Heath had left. Aside from cursing the boy soundly when he heard that Zack had gone up in the tower again—forcingherto go up in the tower, which Heath seemed to find just as terrifying to hear—he took it all in stride.
When she was done, she began to pace. “So, here is my plan for Zack. What if we let it be known that when your mother went east to Broadstairs, she was actually planning to go across to France in a few months, so she could fetch the baby thatIwas soon to have byyou? We could claim that she had to go to Broadstairs as soon as she could have been showing.”
She halted in front of him. “We can say your father refused to approve a match between you and me, so your mother took the baby and claimed it was hers by your father. She managed to escape France in time to avoid the war beginning again. But Zack, the baby she’d presented as hers and your father’s, was really mine and yours.”
He blinked and looked as if he would say something, but she continued hastily. “I was actually in Paris at the time you conceived the child. You and your father came to Paris without ever coming back here, so we can claim you werethereby the time you conceived the child. Lily’s trip with your mother could be passed off as her needing Lily to help her with the child on the trip to France and back. Jon was not in Paris yet—so he would not know one way or the other if you and I had already met. My father is dead and cannot tell anyone that we had not met. It would all work.”
“Except for one thing,” he said softly. “You would have to bear the stigma of having a child out of wedlock. Your mother would suffer from that, too.”
“I do not care!” she cried. “I daresay Maman would not care, either, since she hardly knows anyone here, and she barely speaks English. And no one here knows enough about my family to go hunting up the truth about us, anyway. Even if they did, who would remember if I had been pregnant then? It was years ago.”
She frowned. “But for it to work, we will have to tell Maman, as well as Lily and your cousin, so that they can confirm it if anyone asks. Lily would certainly agree to it because she does not want Zack. But do you think your cousin would agree?”
“I think he would, actually. After talking to him, I found out that you were right all along—he really does have the boys’ best interests at heart. And having gone through the ledgers he lent me on my way home, I can honestly say he has been a great manager of their properties.” He rubbed his unshaved chin. “Of course, if we reveal that Zack is illegitimate, Zack would never be able to inherit the title if I were not to have a son.”
“I do not think he would care, but the chance of that would be remote anyway, with two elder brothers. He just wants to be able to call you Papa.”