Wicked Becomes You(58)

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Would be easier if I had an inkling. Something’s not right—certainly Barrington doesn’t present as a simple land baron. If he’s got the money to buy a house off the old guard on the Rue de Varenne, this entire trip may be a fool’s game. Perhaps he’s buying up English land just for the hell of it and never replied to my offer because he has no care for the profit he might make.” His mouth twisted at this idea. “What a perverse thing to collect,” he said softly.

“But how odd,” she said hesitantly. “If he’s so wealthy, it seems that one of us should have heard of his family, at least. Where did his money come from?”

“Yes, it’s damned odd,” Alex agreed. “But that still doesn’t mean it has aught to do with Gerry.” He drummed his fingers lightly atop the table, then shrugged and looked out the window. The train had begun to move again; the iron girders of the station were passing slowly by the window, and faces on the platform were lifting toward the departing train, turning after it like pale flowers toward the sun. “Either way, this is my one attempt to find out. I’ll give it two days.”

She hesitated. “May I ask why you care?”

He glanced blankly back to her. “About Gerry?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “About Heverley End. That is, I’m sure it’s lovely—but I thought you had no regard for the countryside. And it was a very minor estate, wasn’t it? Never entailed. What matter if he sold it?”

“None to me,” he said. “And yes, the estate is minor. But my sisters have taken the sale badly—so there’s that. And I can’t dismiss the idea that my brother has gotten in over his head, somehow. Not without looking into it, at least.”

She began to smile. “And you say you aren’t brotherly!”

“Oh, nothing noble to this, Gwen. I’m saddled with a passel of incompetents—a pompous bore of a brother and two shrill, complaining sisters who prefer fretting to fixing things. It’s easier this way—take care of the matter and they leave me alone. Until the next matter arises,” he added in a mutter.

Until the next matter arises. How reluctantly and matter-of-factly he acknowledged this: whenever the need arose, he would step in, with no hesitation. He would always be there to help, whether he liked it or no.

As always when anyone spoke of family affairs, she became conscious of a stir of fascination. Envy, too: she would admit it, although it spoke ill of her character. Even in their quarrels, the Ramseys belonged to each other, permanently. For all the worry and grief Alex’s roaming caused his siblings, they always welcomed him home with open arms. For all the irritation the twins felt at Lord Weston, they still convened at his house on Sunday evenings for dinner. And Alex, who held himself aloof from polite society and preferred to be away from England whenever possible, did not fail to attend those dinners when he was in town.

It was so different than the upbringing Gwen had known. For the sake of their children’s advancement, her parents had willingly fractured their family. Sometimes she wondered what life might have been like had they proved less ambitious.

She looked away from that thought, physically. She looked up into Alex’s face—blue eyes that made no pretense at generosity or optimism and glinted, always, with a cynical light. His brow rose, questioning, and without conscious direction, her fingers closed very tightly in her lap.

They wanted, she thought, a hand to hold. The right to reach out for someone, for him, any time she required his aid. Suddenly, with a physical ache in the pit of her stomach, she wanted—impossible things. Not marriage. God, not something so easily broken or betrayed. Something more than marriage—a bond as fierce and unbreakable as a physical embrace. Tight. Even suffocating. She would not struggle.

She’d hoped a wedding would guarantee such a bond. She had looked at Pennington and seen the father of her future children—four, five, six children, enough to begin to fill the bedrooms in that huge, empty, echoing estate her parents had built. Enough children to ensure that she would never be alone, and neither would they.

Instead of a hand, she closed her fingers over Richard’s ring, which she had strung on a chain around her neck.

But her eyes would not move from Alex.

She could not have him, of course. But God above, she wanted him.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that any period of extended conversation between them should turn, eventually, to Richard. They remained in the dining nook long after the dishes had been cleared away, sharing memories, swapping tales, laughing together like friends. And by the time the moon rose, round and heavy in the star-strewn sky, Gwen had regained her peace around him. All of this common ground, this love they had shared for her brother, made it very difficult to feel anxious in his presence.