But that hand of hers! God in heaven, she’d touched him as an innocent would, unsure of herself but curious, and he wished nothing more than to satisfy her curiosity. A pity that he couldn’t.Mustn’t, especially now.
The last thing he needed was to encounter his brothers and Yates with a cock-stand in his trousers. Holy hell, that would ruin everything.
To keep it at bay he thought over all she’d told him about her parents. That had an instant dampening effect. He couldn’t imagine finding out at eighteen that his father wasn’t really his father, and his uncle meant to marry him off to someone he despised. But that never happened to men, did it? They didn’t have the same things to worry about as women, and nobody knew that better than he did, given his past.
“I did not expect to find it so deserted on Rotten Row,” Giselle said. “I thought Society came here to see and be seen.”
“They do … during the Season. But we’re well out of the Seasonnow, and everyone is in the country. This time of year it gets too chilly for driving in the park anyway—the ladies have to swaddle themselves in blankets and the gentlemen need a nip or two of brandy just to stay warm. So, you don’t encounter many out here.”
“I see. I suppose it was still the Season when I last came here. The place was packed with carriages.”
“In autumn, you see more walkers than carriages, the local populace that doesn’t mind a brisk walk in the cold. But from autumn until nearly Easter, most of the fashionable crowd are at their estates or their friends’ estates. The ones in town will come out, but on horseback for a quick ride in the morning or late afternoon.”
“Like that gentleman with his children just now coming around the turn?”
His gaze shot ahead to where four horses were approaching. His heart hammered in his chest.Finally.
It was Yates, looking as cold and unapproachable as usual, his unfashionably long gray hair sticking out from underneath his top hat. And riding on either side of him at a slow walk, obviously at the end of exercising their mounts, were Evan, Kit, and Zachary.
Heathbrook had to assume the smallest fellow, with the straight chestnut hair, was Zachary, since the boy had been born after Heathbrook and his father had left England. Zachary was eleven or so. Evan was easy to pick out, too, since, at nearly nineteen years old, he was the tallest of the boys and had always shared Heathbrook’s dark hair, even as a lad of nearly seven. Kit, now seventeen, was no longer a chubby child of five. He’d thinned out and practically grown into a man, his once-golden curls more of a medium brown hue these days.
With his heart in his throat, Heathbrook halted his phaeton and waited for the others to draw near, drinking in the sight of them looking so hale and hearty. Yates had not noticed him yet, busy explaining something to Evan who rode to the left of him while Zachary rode to the right, with Kit beside him.
“This is who you wanted me to meet?” Giselle whispered.
He could only nod, so enraptured at finally seeing them in the flesh that he couldn’t speak.
Kit was the first to spot Heathbrook. When the lad reined in and cried, “Ingram!!” and jumped down from his horse, Heathbrookpractically leapt from the phaeton, leaving his tiger scurrying to secure the reins.
The boy was now running toward him and into his arms. “You came! I knew you’d come! I told Evan you’d come for us!”
Heathbrook squeezed his brother tightly, fighting tears, not wanting any of them to see him making a fool of himself. “Yes, lad, of course I came,” he whispered. “I would never abandon any of you by choice.”
“Christopher William!” Yates said sharply as he hurried his horse toward them. “Come back here at once!”
“No, I don’t want to!” Kit cried. Then he looked up at Heathbrook, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Why didn’t you come get us when you first got to England? We waited so long …”
When it dawned on him what the lad’s words meant, anger surged in Heathbrook so powerfully that he couldn’t contain it. “Damn you, Yates!” Heathbrook growled as the man rode up. “You didn’ttellthem? You … you let them think I didn’t care?”
Evan was the one to answer. “But you didn’t care, did you? You were too busy with your friends and paramours and going about town to parties to even speak to us.”
“I was too busy trying to become the guardian of you three! The Court of Chancery wouldn’t even allow me to see you, much less be with you,” Heathbrook snapped, then glowered at Yates. “You didn’t say a word to them, you arse? How could you let them think I didn’t want them?”
“You’re violating the court’s instructions merely by being here,” Yates said in his even-tempered bloody monotone.
“It was a chance meeting, you scoundrel!”
Yates looked over at Giselle, who now sat pale-faced in the phaeton. “I hope so, for your sake. Because the very fact that you are here with a mistress proves—”
“How dare you, monsieur?” Giselle cried, her French accent thickening in her anger. She jumped up in the phaeton, nearly oversetting it. “I am not that sort!”
“And a French mistress at that,” Yates added coolly.
Releasing Kit, Heathbrook hurried to the phaeton. “Come, my dear,” he said as he helped her down, “let me introduce you to my cousin and my three brothers.”
“You will not do any such thing!” Yates retorted. “Have you no shame, man? No sense of decorum?”
Tucking Giselle’s hand in the crook of his elbow, Heathbrook said, in a voice that shook with rage, “Yates, allow me to introduce Miss Giselle Bernard, granddaughter of a French count and my fiancée. Giselle, this is Frederick Yates, my mother’s rude cousin.”