Let Love Find You (2 page)
T
HE BOY STOOD AT
his bedroom window, watching the falling snow. It was sticking to the street and might stay around this time. It was cold enough to. He liked snow. It made the street look so bright and clean, especially at night with the streetlamps shining down on it. His bedroom faced the street. He often stood there and watched the fancy coaches driving past during the day. Occasionally, when he couldn’t get right to sleep, or he woke up for some reason, he’d stand there at night as well. And that’s when he’d see one coach in particular stop in front of the town house he lived in with his mother, Elaine, as it did now. The coach never came during the day, only late at night.
The tall man stepped out of it, his greatcoat swirling around him as he turned to close the door and say something to the driver before the coach drove off. The man hurried inside. He had his own key. For as long as the boy could remember, this man had been coming to his home.
It had seemed like a normal London household he was growing up in. They had a few servants. His mum was always
available to him during the day. And for the longest time, he went to bed early enough not to know she wouldn’t be available to him at night.
He had just turned six, but couldn’t remember how old he’d been when he’d asked his mum who the man was. He just knew it was long ago. She’d seemed surprised that day that he even knew about the man.
“Lord Wolseley is our landlord, is all. He comes to make sure his house is in good repair.”
“So often?”
“Well, we actually became friends, good friends. He’s not a happy man and I’ve got a good shoulder to cry on.” She patted her shoulder with a grin. “You know it well, you’ve done all your crying on it, haven’t you?”
He remembered that he’d felt embarrassed that day. She was talking about all his hurts and bruises that he
wouldn’t
have cried over if she didn’t always gather him into her arms to coddle him. He tried to picture that tall man crying on her shoulder but couldn’t.
He’d been told his own father was dead, had died when he was still a baby, though his mother refused to say much more than that. “It makes me cry, those memories,” she would say. “Someday I’ll tell you all about him, just not now.”
But she’d never told him more. The only time he could remember his mum being sharp with him was when he persisted with questions about his father. And the last time he asked, she did get tears in her eyes. He never asked again.
But the landlord continued to visit late at night, and the boy would hear the door to his mother’s room quietly open and close. Sometimes he’d go out in the corridor and could hear her laughter on the other side of her bedroom door. If the man
made her happy, why didn’t they marry so he could share in that happiness, too?
Earlier this year, his curiosity took a new turn and he asked his mother, “Is he going to be my father?”
She’d gathered him close and said, “Whatever can you be thinking, darling? Lawrence has his own family, a wife and children. He’s just a friend. I get lonely, you know. It’s nice to have someone like him to talk to.”
Soon thereafter the boy began to think Lord Lawrence Wolseley was his real father. Once the notion took hold, it wouldn’t let go. He was afraid to ask his mother, though. She didn’t want to talk about this landlord of theirs and didn’t want to talk about his “dead father.” It hurt to think she’d lied to him. He hoped he was wrong, but he had to find out for sure.
So tonight he went out in the corridor. His mother’s bedroom door was closed as usual. He didn’t knock. He heard the laughter, then voices talking so quietly he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He didn’t put his ear to the door, he just sat down in the corridor, crossed his legs, and waited.
It was a long wait. He almost fell asleep there. But finally the door opened. He jumped up immediately before he got stepped on. He’d never seen this man up close before. He was taller than the boy had thought, handsome, well dressed, with hair as dark as his own. His greatcoat was draped over his arm, and a jewel-crested ring on his finger flashed in the light.
The boy asked his question before he lost his nerve. “Are you my father?”
The man, who hadn’t yet noticed him, glanced down at him now. A scowl formed on the man’s face. “You should be abed. Go!”
Frightened by the man’s harsh tone, the boy couldn’t move,
but the man walked off briskly down the corridor. The door to his mother’s room was still open. The boy peeked inside to make sure his mother was all right. She was sitting at her vanity across the room admiring a necklace he’d never seen her wear before.
The boy hurried back to his room, confused and scared, hoping the man wouldn’t tell her about the question he’d asked—which hadn’t been answered.
Later that week, his mother summoned him downstairs to the foyer. Just inside the door stood a man he’d never before seen. Hat in hand, big, he had blond hair and blue eyes like the boy’s mother. And she appeared angry. With him? Or with the stranger she was glaring at?
She looked down at him and said, “This is your uncle Donald, my brother. We haven’t talked for a good number of years, but Donald would like you to stay with him for a while on his horse farm in the country. You’ll love it there.”
The boy’s eyes widened. He didn’t know his mother had a brother! More afraid than ever before in his life, he turned and wrapped his arms tightly around her waist. He was being sent away? He didn’t understand!
“No, please!” he cried. “I’ll never ask questions again, I promise!”
She hugged him tightly to her. “Hush, darling, I’ll visit you soon. You’re going to have so much fun in the country, you won’t even miss me.”
“No! I want to stay here with you!”
She pushed him toward his uncle. “Now, before I cry!” she shouted at Donald.
The boy was dragged screaming out of the only home he’d
ever known. He tried to get out of the waiting coach. When his uncle prevented that, he hung out the window instead, calling to his mother, tears streaming down his cheeks. He could still see his mother standing on the stoop, waving at him.
But his mum had been right. Although he missed her terribly, as the months passed, he found himself enjoying living with his aunt and uncle in Lancashire on their large country estate. Because of the puppy his aunt gave him for his very own, and so many others always underfoot in the big house. Because he made his first real friend, one of the workers’ sons, and they became inseparable. Because there was so much more to do there than in the city. But mainly, because of the horses. There were so many of them! He was allowed to help care for them. Soon he excelled at grooming and feeding them and progressed to training the newborns.
He never saw his mother again. Not alive. The day his aunt and uncle came to tell him that she’d died of pneumonia, all the pain of her abandoning him returned. He was going to turn eight that year, and he was still too young to know how to hold back the tears that streamed down his face.
“She wanted you to have this.”
He looked down at the porcelain horse Donald placed in his hand. His mother had taken her love from him, abandoned him, never even visited him once since she had sent him away. He wanted
nothing
from her now, and in a burst of heartbroken rage, he raised his arm to throw the figurine against the wall to smash it as she’d smashed his hopes that they would be together again someday. She’d died instead, making sure that would never happen.
But Donald stopped him. “Don’t, lad. She wanted you to
keep it. She said that one day you’d understand and realize how much she loved you.”
Lies! She was gone! He’d never see her again, never feel her arms around him again. And the tears wouldn’t stop that day, or the next, or the next when his mother’s body was brought home to Lancashire to be buried where she’d grown up. The pain he felt was overwhelming as he watched her being lowered into the ground. It hurt so much he dropped to his knees. His aunt knelt beside him and held him.
Late that night, he snuck out of the house and ran to the small graveyard. He’d brought the porcelain horse with him. He would have buried it today with his mother if he didn’t think his uncle would have stopped him. He buried it now beside her grave, but the pain was somehow worse now, he could barely see through his tears. He wouldn’t keep the stupid horse! He wanted nothing of hers, nothing to remind him that his own mother didn’t want him.
He swore to himself that night that he’d never cry again . . . or love anyone again. It hurt too much.
L
ADY AMANDA LOCKE SIGHED
as she gazed at her reflection in the oval mirror. Sitting at the vanity in the comfortable room she’d been given at her cousin Rupert’s house in London, she imagined she saw a wrinkle at the corner of one eye. She gasped. Did she? She leaned closer. No, just her imagination and the light, but it wouldn’t be long before it wasn’t. She had just turned twenty! The
ton
would be calling her an old maid soon—if they weren’t already.
She sighed again. Her maid, Alice, pretended not to notice as she pinned the last blond lock of Amanda’s coiffure into place. That wouldn’t have stopped Amanda if she felt like being vocal about her melancholy tonight, but she didn’t. Alice had heard it all and heard it often. Amanda’s whole family had heard it all, and she had a large family. But she
was
tired of complaining about such a sorry state of affairs, she just couldn’t help it sometimes.
Her first London Season shouldn’t have been such a disaster. It was supposed to be a roaring success. She had expected no
less. Her family had expected no less. She was a beauty, after all, even quite fashionable with her blond hair and powder-blue eyes, and she also had the aristocratic bones that ran in her family. She was
also
the only daughter of Preston Locke, the 10th Duke of Norford. That alone should have had the proposals streaming in. And no one had doubted that she would outshine all the other debutantes that Season two years ago, herself included. But then no one had been prepared for the infamous Ophelia Reid, who had debuted that same year, and no one, not even Amanda, could compare to Ophelia’s dazzling beauty.
It was almost funny, Amanda thought as she looked back on it, how jealous she’d been of Ophelia, so jealous that she’d spent most of that first Season stewing about it and thus ignoring the young men who had tried to get to know her. So really, she could blame that disaster on herself. But of course her emotions got out of hand, especially when she found out her own brother, Raphael, was also falling under the ice queen’s spell.
Ophelia hadn’t even been likable back then! Amanda recalled wondering how her brother could be so dense just because Ophelia was a raving beauty! Ophelia was manipulative, a liar, and spiteful to boot. Anyone with two eyes could see it, which meant every man in London that year wasn’t utilizing both of his eyes, Amanda’s brother included!
Rafe did fall in love with Ophelia, he did marry her, and he did tame the shrew. There was nothing
not
to like about the Ophelia her brother had married.
That had all been part of Amanda’s first disastrous Season in London. Last year she’d tried to take her brother’s advice to heart and just let love find her. She’d had fun doing so, maybe too much fun. Relaxing, just enjoying herself and the many entertainments, she’d found that she actually liked some of her
beaus, could even call them friends now, but not one had ever pulled at her heartstrings. So before she knew it, her second London Season was over and she still hadn’t found a husband.
Now, at the beginning of her third Season in London, she was quite desperate.
Something
needed to change this year because she obviously wasn’t going about husband hunting the right way. She wasn’t as silly and flighty as people thought, but even she knew that she gave that impression sometimes.