O'Rourke's Heiress Read online

  She loved the days her outings included Terence. None of the other girls she knew had an escort who was tall and handsome and had a smile which Miss Spencer said could charm the birds out of the trees. And he was all hers. He’d spun the schoolroom globe a myriad times, challenging her to learn every country in the whole wide world. And she had. They practiced French on each other while Miss Spencer shook her head and tried not to laugh. Or perhaps cry. Terence had taught her to ride, to feed the pigeons in the park. He’d taught her to sail a boat on the Serpentine, bought her milk from the dairy maids in Green Park.

  And he’d taught her how to hold her head high and not squirm or gawk when he drove past Carlton House, Westminster and Parliament, or down the elegant streets around Berkeley and Grosvenor squares, past the throngs of shoppers in Bond Street, before returning to Brockman House on Cavendish Square. Other times it was the green lawns and Gothic structures of Lincoln Inn’s Fields, with a nod of respect for the Courts of Justice, or into the City of London for a peek at solid old buildings which housed the men who ruled most of the world’s finances with little competition, as yet, from the fledgling nation across the Atlantic. Though that would come, Terence had told her. Her papa was investing heavily in the New World, for he said the possibilities there were endless.

  Beth never doubted it. Papa was all-powerful, a genius, everyone said so.

  Fine buildings and Bond Street wares paled to insignificance beside the offices of Tobias Brockman and Company. Beth loved to visit Papa’s office, watch all the clerks jump up and bow as she walked by, clinging to Terence’s hand. Suddenly, right there in the aisle of Hatchards, surrounded by all the wonders books could offer, Beth heaved as romantic a sigh as a nine-year-old could manage. Papa said Terence was as smart as a whip and could outrun the devil himself. She was certain it was true. He was quite the grandest person she knew . . .not counting Papa, of course.

  A noise penetrated Beth’s fantasies. A voice rose above the soft hum of the book browsers, making no effort to speak in the dulcet tones Miss Spencer decreed were the only acceptable mode for a lady. Beth glanced at her governess, only to discover her face looked suspiciously red.

  “. . . Peace of Amiens,” the loud lady was saying to her friend. “Bought up a munitions factory just when everyone thought the war was over . . . already wealthy . . . now obscenely so. Profiting from the deaths of our sons!”

  She’d have to look up obscenely, Beth thought, yet the woman’s meaning was clear enough.

  “. . . never let her out without an escort . . . kidnapping, my dear. ’Tis said she’s the grandest heiress in all of Britain. And a Cit. Imagine! But they’ll be lining up to marry her. What’s the smell of the shop compared to a million pounds?”

  With a sharp, “Head high!” into her ear, Terence seized her hand, and they swept out of the bookshop. Beth, though head high and chin up, fought back tears. What a baby she was not to have realized why Terence or two stout footmen always accompanied her. And how childish to think no one could hate her papa, her wonderful, generous, kindly papa. To never understand that her life was so . . . different. That no man would ever love her for herself. Except Papa, of course.

  And Terence.

  October 1808

  The round face of the former coal pit boy from Wales burst into a smile as he stood and held out his hand to the startlingly handsome twenty-year-old who had just entered his office. “Good to have you back, boy!” he boomed. “How was your journey?” Though Tobias Brockman’s question sounded hearty, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know the answer.

  Terence dropped his mentor’s hand and slumped into the brown leather chair in front of the desk. “Someday, sir, I’ll be able to talk about it. But right now, no.”

  Tobias regarded the young man he had long ago come to think of as a son. “I had thought . . . feared you might not come back. ’Twas plain you’d discovered something about your family. And blood is thick, boy, I’m well aware of that.”

  Terence’s jaw firmed into the stubborn line Tobias had come to know so well. “My family is here, Sir,” he said.

  Tobias turned his face to the wall. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt a rush of tears. Perhaps when he’d first seen the wee scrap that was Beth. Before that . . . when his mother passed on. Now, his life had been doubly blessed. He hadn’t lost the boy to whatever quest had sent him chasing back to Ireland after so many years. He still had a son and a daughter to reap the benefits of all he had accomplished. To bring joy to his old age. Grandchildren. He was founding a dynasty, by God. He had enough brass to ensure his descendants lived in luxury for generations to come. As long as he had the boy.

  He couldn’t do it without the boy.

  July, 1810

  “Oh, Terence!” Beth squealed, whirling around in a circle, while holding up the elegant carriage dress she had just unwrapped. “It’s quite the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned.”

  “Hardly that, little one,” Terence demurred. “Spence ordered it, of course. But now that you’re nearly a young lady, I thought you might like to venture into Hyde Park instead of taking the air in Kensington Gardens.”

  Twelve-year-old Beth dropped the green gabardine gown straight onto the drawing room’s Aubusson carpet. “I cannot have heard you correctly,” she asserted. “I have been asking you for years and years and years. And always it’s No, Beth . . . You’re too young, Beth . . . Maybe when you’re grown, Beth.”

  “Consider yourself grown,” Terence shrugged. He lowered the long black lashes women found so devastating over the twinkle in his Irish blue eyes.

  “You’d be seen with me?” Beth demanded. “You’d actually be seen driving a twelve-year-old in Hyde Park?”

  Terence cocked his head to one side, considered the question. “Well . . . I reached my majority nearly a year since and I’ve established my reputation among my friends, including a few noble peers of the realm, so I think I can be seen with a young lady of twelve without damaging my credit.”

  “Can we go now?” Beth cried.

  “May we,” Matilda Spencer corrected firmly. “And you will wait until you have been invited, child. It’s past time you learned the proper manners with young gentleman.”

  “Terence doesn’t count!”

  “Terence does indeed count, and you should consider yourself fortunate you have an older brother to practice on.”

  “He’s not—”

  “I’m not—”

  “You are family,” Tobias Brockman interjected from the seat where he had been enjoying his daughter’s pleasure in her many birthday gifts. “You are my children, both of you.”

  “Yes, sir,” the reluctant siblings chorused in unison.

  “Tomorrow,” Terence said to Beth. “Tomorrow afternoon at four we’ll do the fashionable, if you agree to behave yourself.”

  A smile lit Beth’s oval face, the face both men were so grateful she had inherited from her mother. Only the eyes, alight with eager intelligence, were those of Tobias Brockman. “Yes, oh yes. I will be perfect, I promise!”

  “Run along, now,” Tobias ordered. “Take these things up to your room. I wish a few moments alone with the boy.”

  “Boy, sir?” Terence objected as the two women gathered Beth’s considerable stack of gifts.

  “To me, you’ll always be a boy,” Tobias countered, “even though I’m well aware you’ve grown into a man. A fine one, at that. So no sass now. I’ve still got more than a quarter century on you.”

  Terence flashed him the cheeky grin the Merchant Midas had been drawn to so long ago in Dublin. “Yes, sir,” he said, his hand sketching a military-style salute.

  Tobias followed the women with his gaze as they left the room. He shook his head. “She’s growing up, boy, turning into a woman before our very eyes.” He sat back down, waved Terence into a seat beside him. “I’ve got plans, big plans. I’ll buy a title for her as I bought this house. With all I can offer, it’ll be an earl at least. Maybe even
a marquess. The sky’s the limit, boy. What d’you think?”

  The drawing room, caught in the warmth of the city in July, suddenly turned freezing. Never, ever, had Terence doubted Tobias’s word when he’d given him the baby. Beth was his. Always had been. Always would be. Tobias was a sensible man. A brilliant man. He would never give his only child away to the grandest title. Beth, the child of his blood. The child who’d grown up with love and laughter and every bit of material wealth her loving parent could shower on her. Tobias couldn’t just trade her, like a sack of coal, for a title and a grand house in the country.

  “Well?” Tobias demanded.

  “Why don’t you try for one of the damned royal dukes?” Terence demanded. One of the seven profligate sons of poor old mad George. Most of whom eschewed marriage in favor of large families of bastards with their long-time mistresses.

  For a long moment Tobias studied his protégé whose hands were clenched into fists. He should have seen this coming, should have known. But, so help him, he’d missed it. The boy was not part of his plans for Beth, never had been, never would be. Except as the means to maintain his empire after he was gone.

  “You’ll have the running of the business, half of all I possess. I told you I pay my debts. But Beth is not for you. I’ll see my child a countess at the very least. It’s my right. I’ve earned it.”

  For the first time in the many years since he’d met Tobias Brockman, the former street urchin from Dublin forgot the obligations of gratitude, slamming the door on his way out.

  September 1810

  Tobias Brockman ran his fingers through his short tight brown curls. He hoped Beth’s hair would stay blond like her mother’s, but with those amber eyes . . . No matter, she was the apple of his eye, the light of his life. As the boy had been until he turned solemn, taciturn and, at twenty-two, was getting into more trouble than he’d managed in all the years Tobias had known him. Gone was his model successor, replaced by a youth as wayward as any of sons of the ton whose bad manners and worse attitudes Terence now imitated as if he’d been born to it. Time to occupy the boy’s mind with something challenging. Get him out of London, away from Beth. Give him the responsibility he’d managed so well in the past. And would again, when he’d learned to face reality.

  Why? Tobias asked himself. Why was the lad so foolish as to want the one thing he couldn’t have? And she only a child of twelve. Raised as his sister. Not that he’d ever treated her as anything else. Not Terence, the soul of propriety when it came to Beth. Which was why Tobias had never guessed. Hell and damnation, the situation was ugly! Ah, yes, time to get the boy out of town.

  November 1810

  Beth, her bedroom door open wide, was waiting for the sound of Terence’s footsteps on the stairs. Miss Spencer and the servants were long in bed, so she had little fear anyone was going to catch her lurking about in her white cotton nightgown and soft blue wool dressing gown. Her twelve-year-old heart lurched as she heard the snick of Terence’s key in the lock. (He never allowed Manley to wait up for him.) The thud of strong confident footsteps on the stair carpet, the click of boots on the wooden floorboards of the upstairs hall.

  Only seconds behind as he closed his door, Beth, quivering with rage and anguish, burst into Terence’s room without knocking. Her world functioned so smoothly on the well-oiled wheels of love and money that the few setbacks, like that dreadful woman at Hatchards, were easily forgotten. What she’d heard—what Terence was about to do—was so outrageous she couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t . . . he simply wouldn’t. The gossip she’d overheard between a parlor maid and a footman had to be a mistake. It just had to be.

  Hands on her hips, Beth glared at her almost brother. “Say it isn’t so,” she demanded. “You can’t be leaving.”

  Imitating her arms akimbo, Terence scowled right back. “In case Spence has not made it perfectly clear,” he drawled, “young ladies do not enter the bedrooms of young men. Or old men or any men at all. It isn’t seemly.”

  “Seemly!” Beth echoed. “Leaving home isn’t seemly. Is it true? You can’t go, you simply can’t!”

  “Can and will,” Terence declared shortly. “Now go back to bed.”

  “Why?” Beth demanded, tears threatening. “Why must you go? You belong here,” she wailed.

  Terence waved a hand toward a chair near the fireplace. “Sit.” He heaved a sigh. “You’re right. I owe you an explanation.” Tobias had given her to him, made him responsible. And now he was leaving, abdicating in favor of footman-bodyguards who likely couldn’t even read.

  Bending down, he placed another log on the fire which had faded to embers, then sat in a chair across from her. For all that he’d always planned to marry her, she was a child with legs so short she had to curl them under her when she sat, so they wouldn’t stick straight out like ungainly sticks of wood. A scrap of femininity with no chance to be statuesque, even when full grown.

  Terence tossed back his black waves of hair, then sat a few moments in silence, his chin propped in his hand. “You know I went to Lincolnshire to stop trouble in our stocking mills there?” Beth nodded. “Well . . .” He couldn’t admit to his real motives, so what to say to keep her from being hurt? Perhaps he could distract her with sympathy for Jack. God knew the story was intriguing enough. That just might work.

  “I met someone in Lincolnshire,” Terence said.

  A girl? No, it couldn’t be a girl!

  “A rabble rouser,” Terence continued, unaware of the anguish he’d caused. “Jack Harding . . . a bastard, like you and me. But his father, the Earl of Ellington, acknowledged him, educated him, made him steward of his estate at an early age. But Jack never forgot his other roots. By night, as Captain Hood, he led farmworkers into rebellion, burning hay ricks, breaking the looms farmworkers’ wives had set up in their cottages. Basically, he had a good life and chose to risk hanging or transportation to help others.”

  “Like Robin Hood,” Beth breathed, eyes shining.

  For such an intelligent chit, she was still very much a child. At least he’d managed to distract her. “And I found myself playing the Sheriff of Nottingham,” Terence said with a grimace. “Tobias cast me as the villain, and it didn’t sit well, so . . .”

  “Yes?” Beth urged.

  “When the lot of the farmworkers and their wives began to improve, Jack turned his rather unusual ah–skills toward helping the millworkers in Nottingham. Our workers.”

  “He was a hero,” Beth cried, hands clasped in front of her as if offering a fervent prayer.

  “Yes . . . well . . .,” Terence mumbled. The trouble was, he thought Harding a hero himself. Which had made the whole thing bloody awkward. “Somehow—and don’t ask for details because you won’t get them—,” he told her sharply, “I managed to end the troubles and keep Jack from the hangman.” Beth heaved a sigh of relief. “But . . .,” he added, “the price was that John Chauncey Harding would come to work for your father. He’s to be my assistant, which is rather amusing since he’s older than I am,” Terence added with a grin.

  Beth grinned right back, then sobered suddenly as she recalled why she was there. “That doesn’t explain why you’re leaving,” she accused.

  “Yes, it does. Harding and I have discovered we have much in common. We’ve rented a house close enough to walk to the office.” As Beth’s face turned red and her mouth flew open, he cut her off. “I’m a big boy now, child. I need a place of my own. Besides, I’ll be in and out of here all the time, you’ll scarcely miss me.”

  Beth flew out of her chair, threw her thin arms around his neck. “No-o-o!” she wailed. “You can’t go, I won’t let you!”

  For a moment Terence succumbed to temptation, resting his chin on top of her golden blonde head. Then he took her by the arms and stood up, setting her deftly on her feet. “I’m leaving Cavendish Square, Beth. I am not leaving my family, the company, or my job. I’ll always be there for you. Whenever you need me, I’ll be standing at your side. Your own pr
ivate Knight Errant, if you will. I promise.”

  When she clung to him, arms around his waist, tears threatening his gray silk vest, Terence simply picked her up, stalked down the hall and dumped her in her bed. From the doorway he turned and looked back at her woebegone face. “My direction is changing, Beth, not my heart. You’re my family, now and forever.” Mine, mine, mine. It was a vow he intended to keep, though he suspected it was going to be far from easy.

  When he’d gone, Beth bounded out of bed, locked the door against the cruel world and sobbed into her pillow for hours. Her world had gone dark.

  Chapter Three

  March 1816

  “Jack . . . Jack!”

  The soft hiss of his name brought Jack Harding to an abrupt halt in the hallway leading to the front foyer of Brockman House in Cavendish Square. He’d been on the way to Terence’s phaeton, leaving his friend and Tobias to discuss God knew what hadn’t already been thrashed over a hundred times or more. Jack enjoyed the sumptuous elegance of his employer’s hospitality, particularly the quality of his chef, but after more than five years he was firmly convinced he wasn’t cut out for business. Action was fine—and there was surely plenty of that in Tobias Brockman’s far-flung empire—but he was a country man at heart. Someday—if he ever felt he’d paid his debt to the men who had saved him from the hangman’s noose—it would be back to the country for John Chauncey Harding.

  Jack turned toward the soft whisper, the repetition of his name now taking on a note of urgency. Minx! What was she up to this time? The crack in the music room door widened as he approached, then quietly swung shut behind him.