To Claim the Long-Lost Lover

by Jude Knight

  Nate wasn’t sure whether to pity Libby or to be glad she could enjoy the evening without the censorious presence of her lord and master. “You look lovely this evening,” he told her, as she joined him in the foyer.

  His father’s wife glowed with pleasure. “And you look very fine yourself, Bentham,” she replied.

  He bowed and offered his elbow. “Madam, your carriage awaits.”

  “I am so looking forward to this evening, Nate. Perhaps tonight you might meet the young lady who will be your wife!”

  Nate smiled and nodded, keeping his reservations to himself. Not unless my Sarah is present. But she is not yet in town, so it won’t be tonight. And even if she was in town, she would surely not be visiting the Hamners. Lady Hamner had been a ward of the Duchess of Haverford, and—according to Libby—the Dukes of Haverford and Winshire had been feuding since Winshire arrived back in the country with a whole quiverful of foreign-born children.

  He allowed daydreams about their next meeting to while away the carriage ride and the wait in the street for other carriages to move out of the way. Libby continued to chatter, but she seldom required a response beyond ‘Is that right’ and ‘If you say so’.

  It must have been a good thirty minutes before they were announced by Lord and Lady Hamner’s butler. Libby led him over to the Hamners to be introduced, and Nate looked around as he crossed the room.

  A profile caught his eye. He shrugged it off. He had seen Sarah wherever he went for the past seven years, and a closer look always disclosed a stranger. This stranger turned towards him, and he stopped in his tracks, cataloguing changes. The fair hair was slightly darker. The heart-shaped face he remembered had matured into a perfect oval. The slender body of the long-remembered girl had ripened to fulfil its promise. But, beyond any doubt, Lady Sarah Winderfield stood on the other side of the drawing room, a smile on her lips as she talked with her friends.

  Her gaze turned towards him just as Libby tugged on his arm. “Bentham! Are you well?” He let her pull him along, and Sarah’s gaze drifted away. He wanted to cross the room to her; accost her; demand that she recognise him and all they’d once meant to one another.

  Some modicum of sense kept him stumbling after his stepmother. Men change between seventeen and twenty-four, he reminded himself. And people who have been through experiences like mine more than most.

  Still, of all the meetings he’d imagined, he’d never envisaged one in which she didn’t know him.

  3

  It was Nate. Sarah kept assuring herself she must be wrong. He had changed so much from the slim boy she had once loved. She smiled and nodded, allowed Lord Hythe to escort her around the room, and made cheerful nonconsequential comments. And all the time, she was conscious of the man, watching him out of the corner of her eye, wondering what it was about him that screamed his identity.

  He was a lot taller and broader; that was to be expected. He had been shooting up like a weed when she knew him, but had not yet reached his adult size. His face had squared off. Once, he had been a beautiful youth—a dark-haired Ganymede, her brother called him, with a smirk she didn’t understand until her aunt explained that the Trojan prince had been stolen by Zeus who desired him because of his beauty.

  Poseidon would fit him better than Ganymede, now. Strength, barely leashed power, serious and forbidding, except when he smiled at the woman with him. Who was she? His wife? They knew one another well, staying within reach of one another as they moved around the room.

  She must have money, for she is not beautiful. Sarah scolded herself for the pettiness of the thought. The anger she felt, the pain, all of it should be aimed at Nate, not at some poor female he had charmed with his lies. If they were lies.

  He was breath-taking when stern. Then his companion made a remark that brought a curve to his lips and the smile transformed him. Even the scar that crossed one cheek in a ragged line added to his beauty, a contrast to perfection.

  The eyes were the same, she decided. The same colour and shape, at least, though the cynicism with which he regarded the company was new.

  Before they had reached the group that included Sarah, Hamner’s butler called dinner, and Lady Hamner began pairing people off to go to the dining table. Nate, Sarah noticed, was paired with another lady, and the one he had arrived with happily accepted the escort of one of the lords Sarah had on her list.

  Charlotte guided her own dinner partner over to Sarah, and asked, out of the corner of her mouth, “What is the matter?” Her twin might not know what was wrong, but she always knew how Sarah felt.

  “No time. Can we go straight home after dinner?” Sarah whispered back. The line passed through the doorway, and the sisters had to peel off in different directions, but Charlotte would make their excuses when the time came. Sarah couldn’t face Nate until she had time to absorb the fact of his return.

  * * *

  In the half-light just before dawn, the last of the club’s patrons stumbled out of the front door, those employees who did not reside in their place of work left through the back door, and the building slipped into its usual early morning slumber.

  The club comprised two houses thrown into one in a street of four-story terraced houses. Behind, the areas that serviced the public rooms and accommodated the owners and their employees had spread to include the building’s neighbours in the parallel street, but that was not obvious from the front. There, apart from its double width, little set the building apart from its neighbours. Perhaps it was a little tidier; its window-sills and doors newly painted, its bricks scrubbed and firmly set in newly pointed mortar. Only the discreet brass sign beside the door identified it as very different from the family homes and boarding houses that surrounded it.

  Heaven and Hell, the sign whispered, engraved into the brass in discrete italics, only an inch tall. To read it at all, even in the light of the lamp that had hung just above it all night, one needed to climb the steps from the street. No one came to the building without a personal referral, but occasionally, first-time visitors needed reassurance that they were in the right place before they were emboldened to knock on the door.

  A glimpse through the open door as the porter allowed entry would leave a passer-by with an impression of light and gilt. Members, or those referred by members, were surrounded by opulence as soon as they stepped inside. Opulence and decadence. In Heaven and Hell, nothing was forbidden. Everything was available for a price.

  The woman known as La Reine, the ruler of the brothel Heaven that occupied the two upper floors of the main house, retired to her personal sitting room in a penthouse suite above the mean street behind the club. It had been a profitable night in her realm. Supper was laid ready in the dining room she shared with her business partner. When he joined her, she would find out how things went in Hell, the gambling establishment on the lower two floors.

  “Are you coming to bed, my Queen?” The youth lounged in the doorway to her bedchamber, one bare leg splitting the silk robe that was knotted at his waist with a deliberate negligence that left most of his chest bare.

  La Reine scanned him with her eyes, lingering on the groin where her favourite attribute was swelling at her attention, tenting the silk. He half lowered his eyelids and pursed his lips in a kiss. La Reine smiled. She had auditioned several of the lads who served those with an appetite for such things, but had chosen to keep this one after the first time she took him to her bed, for his enthusiastic application to her pleasure and his own.

  “Not yet, kitten. I have business to attend to, first.” The reluctance in her voice was genuine. Observing others at their pleasure always left her wet and ready for her own.

  Kit pouted. “Do you have to see him?”

  His jealousy was probably feigned, but he did it well, and it pleased her to pretend that he resented the time she spent with The Beast, her business partner. Still, he had no right to question her, or to comment on her decisions.

  “Go to bed, Kitten. I will wake you if you are asle
ep when I join you.” With a final pout, a flounce, and a wiggle of his rather fine buttocks, he obeyed, closing the door behind him.

  She could set him at ease with a word, but no one knew that The Beast was her brother, nor would they. Those who knew her from her previous life as Countess of Ashbury saw only the costume she wore as La Reine; those who might remember her brother would never see the Duke of Devil’s Kitchen or that runaway felon Stanley Wharton in the golden goat’s mask of The Beast and the red locks she dyed in the privacy of his chambers every Sunday afternoon.

  * * *

  In the carriage with Drew, Charlotte kept up a light chatter to distract their cousin from Sarah’s pallor and silence. It didn’t work, but he accepted the excuse of a megrim, and wished the sisters a good night’s sleep before leaving them at the Winshire mansion, and heading out to find entertainment elsewhere.

  In their rooms, Charlotte sent the waiting maids away. “My sister and I will look after ourselves this evening.” She waited until the door closed, leaving them alone.

  “He is Viscount Bentham, heir to the Earl of Lechton. The lady he escorted tonight is Lady Lechton, his father’s wife,” she reported, as she began to undo the fastenings on the side of Sarah’s gown. “Apparently, Mr Beauclair inherited about five years ago, after the deaths of those in direct line. I was sitting next to Lord Farnham tonight, and he was on the Committee of Privileges when he was confirmed.”

  “I don’t know Lady Lechton,” Sarah commented, “though she looked to be our age or a little older. She wasn’t out in London when we were.”

  “She’s from a wealthy merchant family. Turn around, dearest, and let me loosen your waist string.” Charlotte busied her fingers in the ribbon, which had become knotted. “Birmingham, Farnham thinks. She had a very large dowry, and traded it for a title. Poor thing.”

  Sarah almost didn’t want to ask. Had Nate been in England all this time? She had grieved to think him dead, raged at the idea he might have taken her father’s money and run away overseas. But she had never imagined that the man she had once loved lived within a few days’ ride of her.

  As usual, Charlotte understood what she was thinking, and answered without waiting for the question. “Farnham says that the Privileges Committee was told that Lechton’s son was dead. Then, two months ago, Lechton wrote to say it had all been a mistake. The young man had been found and was back with his family.”

  “If even his family thought he was dead…” Sarah was finally able to slide her gown off her shoulders and let it slip to the floor.

  Charlotte grimaced. “Who knows? Farnham also pointed out that Lady Lechton has three daughters, and rumour has it she is not able to have another child.”

  Sarah stepped out of her gown, picked it up, and folded it over the back of a chair. “Turn around, Charlotte,” she commanded, and began the task of unhooking her sister. “How did your part of the table react to your interest in the Lechtons?”

  Charlotte shrugged. “I did not have to ask a single question. Apparently, Bentham is the topic du jour. Some of the men have met him out making calls with his stepmother. He has apparently been in the navy, most recently as a student physician at the university in Edinburgh.”

  Sarah raised her brows. The navy? He had never mentioned any interest in becoming a sailor. “Ready,” she said to her sister, and helped her lift her gown over her head.

  “Sit down, sweetheart, and I shall brush your hair,” Charlotte offered.

  Sarah watched her sister’s face in the mirror. She knew that look. “Out with it, Charlotte. What are you not telling me?”

  “Lechton has told the men at his club that he has brought Bentham to London to choose a bride.”

  Charlotte’s hands stilled for a moment, then she resumed the soothing motion of the brush until Sarah spun on the chair to face her. “Shouldn’t you tell him, Sarah? Doesn’t he have a right to know?”

  Sarah shook her head. “He wasn’t there, Charlotte. He left, with never a word. I’ve not heard from him from that day to this.” She rose and stepped away.

  Charlotte followed her, and wrapped her arms around her. “I know,” she murmured. “I know.”

  Sarah held herself stiff for a moment, then relaxed into her sister’s embrace. “I can’t face him, Charlotte. Not yet.”

  “When you are ready,” Charlotte agreed. “You need to know what really happened, Sarah, or you’ll always wonder.”

  Charlotte had the right of it. She was a bubbling stew of anger, longing and old sorrow. But underneath lurked the need to know for certain whether Nate had lied to get her into his bed; whether he had seduced and abandoned her, and if so, whether he had meant to do so all along.

  Underneath the ferment, the thread of hope she’d never quite surrendered whispered that perhaps he had intended to be true. Perhaps he had been coerced in some way. Unlikely. If so, why had he not written? Why had he not returned to her when he came back to Great Britain?

  Still, she would give him his chance. “After the house party,” she told Charlotte. “Time enough to arrange to meet him when I return. I will leave for Lady de Witt’s tomorrow morning, a day early, before he has a chance to call. If he intends to call. If Drew cannot escort me, he can wait and come with you. I can make the trip before dark and will be safe with the outriders.”

  And she would take Elias with her. Lady de Witt would not mind, and Elias would enjoy being in the company of other children. The risk that Nate would hear about her ward was low, and even if he did, he’d hear the manufactured story that Elias was the by-blow of one of the deceased Winderfield men, either Sarah’s brother or her father. It was unlikely in the extreme that he’d guess the carefully hidden truth.

  Still, Sarah would feel safer if Elias was within reach of her arms.

  4

  Nate waited impatiently for the hour past noon, the earliest he could possibly make a call to the Winderfield household. Libby planned to begin her courtesy calls at three of the clock. “Even that is early, Nate.”

  “I will arrive in time to escort you, Libby,” he promised.

  However, the formidable butler at the Winshire mansion shook his head at Nate’s request to have his card taken to Lady Sarah. “I regret, sir, that Lady Sarah is not in residence.”

  Nate fought the inclination to point out he had seen the lady only the previous evening. If she had told the Winshire butler to deny him entry, any arguments he might make would be met with a blandly polite wall of repudiation.

  The butler, though, did not leave it at that. He unbent enough to say, “Lady Sarah left for the country this morning, my lord.”

  Nate knew it was no use, but he asked anyway, where she had gone and how long she would be away.

  As expected, the butler refused to answer. “It is not my place to say, sir.”

  Nate was turning away when he had another thought. The butler had said Lady Sarah had left. “Perhaps you could take my card up to Lady Charlotte? Tell her I would be grateful if she could spare me a moment of her time.”

  He more than half expected the butler to explain that Lady Charlotte was also out of town. However, the man merely bowed, and asked him to wait. He ushered Nate into a small parlour, and carried off the card.

  Nate tried to remember what Lady Charlotte was like. He had barely noticed her yesterday evening, his attention all on not embarrassing Lady Sarah or, for that matter, Libby, by staring at his long-lost love like a gawky youth. He had a vague impression she was much of a size with her sister, but brown-haired where Sarah was fair.

  In that golden summer when he and Sarah had become friends and then more, Charlotte had been ill with some embarrassing childhood illness; mumps, he thought. Sarah—at a loose end without her twin—had wandered the estate and come across the vicar’s son in the woods, rescuing a rabbit from a trap.

  Nate had met Charlotte once. She insisted on a meeting before she agreed to cover for her sister while Nate and Sarah eloped. He must have passed muster, but he had
few memories of the encounter. At the time, thoughts of Sarah had filled his every waking moment and fuelled his dreams. When he was with her, he was blind to everything else.

  He knew Charlotte the girl through Sarah’s descriptions. Loving, loyal, the best friend a sister could have. Those would still be true after seven years, surely? If she would talk to him, he could, perhaps, find out what he most needed to know.

  “Lord Bentham. Have we met, sir?”

  Nate spun round to face the lady who had just entered the room. A maid crept in behind her and took station in the corner, but Nate’s full attention was for Lady Charlotte. She was similar in size and build to Sarah, but on the surface, little else was the same. Except that, as she tilted her head to the side to study him as he was examining her, the gesture and her thoughtful expression brought powerful memories rushing back.

  “She used to look at me like that when she was irritated with me,” he blurted.

  Some of the tension went out of Lady Charlotte’s shoulders, and one corner of her mouth twitched as if she suppressed a smile. “She, so our old governess used to say, is the cat’s mother.”

  Nate felt his cheeks heat. “Lady Sarah, I mean. I beg your pardon. And yes, we have met, though it was many years ago.”

  Lady Charlotte considered him a moment longer, then waved to a group of chairs set around a low table. “Sit down, Lord Bentham. Tell me what brings you here.”

  The answer was the same two words. “Lady Sarah.” Nate had so many questions he wanted to ask that he couldn’t think what to say first.