Polly stopped short and narrowed her eyes on her sister. “You’re bluffing, then.” There was some sense in Sara’s position—they’d bluffed their way through many a daunting circumstance—also some risk. “Did you explain this to Beckman?”

“Explain what to Beckman?” North’s rasping baritone cut through the tension in the kitchen.

“There’s a remote possibility we’ll have company,” Polly said, giving Sara time to form her answer. “Family might drop by, briefly, one hopes.”

“Family?” North’s green eyes narrowed. “I’ve known you ladies for going on three years, and now family pops out of the woodwork? I’m just the steward, so the goings-on here in the house could not possibly affect me, you understand, yet I admit to curiosity. Who is this family?”

Just the steward. Polly wanted to have at him with a rolling pin.

Sara answered with enviable composure. “His name is Tremaine St. Michael, and he’s my late husband’s half brother. He has been writing lately to inquire as to Allie’s well-being, and in his latest letter has suggested he’d like to visit. I said we appreciated his concern but intimated that a visit wouldn’t be appropriate, given our positions here.”

“You hope he won’t visit,” North countered abruptly. He regarded Sara, then Polly, then Sara again, his frown deepening. “Mind you warn the child. I was thinking to take her into the village with me this afternoon, if you ladies don’t object?”

“Of course not,” Sara replied, but she’d glanced at Polly first, and Polly had no doubt that North, being North, had seen that too.

* * *

“I cannot fathom why the earl didn’t fire that lot of vultures.” Ethan handed Beck a drink, which Beck sipped, sighed over, and set down.

“That is fine libation, Mr. Grey.” Though a cup of Polly’s stout black tea would have been finer.

Ethan shrugged. “One grows used to what comforts money can command. Did any of the terms of the will surprise you?”

“Your presence surprised me.” Beck bent forward to tug off his boots. He was staying with Ethan at his London town house, the invitation coming as another surprise in a week full of them. At Nick’s request, both Ethan and Beck had stayed in Town for the reading of the late earl’s will.

“I’ve had some chance to get to know our new sister-in-law.” Ethan’s big feet appeared beside Beck’s on the low table—this was the private lair of a man in charge of a bachelor household, after all. “I think Wee Nick has met his match, and I’m not inclined to wander too far afield until he acknowledges this.”

The new Countess of Bellefonte, Leah, was pretty, kind, smitten with Nick, and very much up to the new earl’s weight in mischief and marital machinations. That alone would have recommended her, but she’d also taken charge of the logistics of the earl’s funeral, so the Haddonfield family could more effectively manage its grief.

Beck leaned his head back against soft leather and listened to the fire crackling in the hearth. What was Sara doing on this cool and cozy evening? Had Allie taken the slop bucket to Hildegard?

“Nick still carps at me to see to the succession.”

Ethan eyed him dispassionately. “You’re a reasonably appealing fellow. A wife solves a few problems.”

“And creates others,” Beck shot back. “Or are you prepared to march back up to the altar yourself, Ethan?”

“As you no doubt know,” Ethan replied evenly, “when a man is lonely for certain pleasures, he need not assuage them with a wife.”

“That isn’t lonely, that’s merely randy, and you well know the difference.” Beck knew the difference too, much better than he had even weeks ago.

“I know the difference, but in my marriage, I was far lonelier than I’ve ever been in the unwedded state.”

Beck peered at his brandy. “I have to say I came to the same conclusion, though I was married just a few months.”

“And I, a few years, but they were long, long years. What happened to your wife?”

This was a question a brother shouldn’t have to ask, not because it was impertinent to inquire, but because a brother—any brother—ought to know these things.

“She was carrying another man’s child when we wed,” Beck said, closing his eyes. “And I did not learn of this until we’d endured our honeymoon and I’d gone up to Town in deference to my new wife’s wishes. She was not… easy in my presence. I wasn’t gone three weeks before Nick told me he’d dropped in on my household, looking for me, and she was entertaining a gentleman in a compromising manner. He didn’t get a look at the man’s face, for which we can all be grateful.”

Though it had fallen to Beck to notify the poor bastard of Devona’s passing—at his wife’s dying request.

Ethan crossed his feet at the ankle, a man apparently comfortable with secrets Beck hadn’t intended to share with anybody. “And being Nick, he went after the man with guns blazing?”

“Being Nick, he blistered my wife’s ears for all to hear. Until then, she’d thought I was the Berserker of the Bedroom’s younger brother and at no risk for siring the next earl. Nick set her straight, and things went to hell from there.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was the same damned platitude Beck had heard over and over again, but when he glanced at Ethan—a brother and a fellow widower—there was a world of understanding in his blue eyes.

“She didn’t kill herself outright.” Beck stared hard at his drink. “She took steps to make sure she lost the child, but she also lost her life as a consequence. I have not acquainted Nicholas with the specific consequences of his actions, and he has atoned for them in any case.”

And there was peace of a sort in that realization. For years, Beck had assuaged his own guilt by blaming Nick for interfering, blaming Nick for presuming and assuming and generally being Nick.

Bold Nick, stubborn Nick… protective Nick. Nick who now had his own problems and had only been trying to help.

“Atoned by retrieving you from one of your less successful journeys.” Ethan cursed softly in the direction of stubborn idiot younger brothers generally, rose, and refreshed his drink. He cocked an eyebrow at Beck, who shook his head. He’d barely touched his brandy, despite being in the midst of a discussion that might make a man very thirsty indeed.

Ethan dropped down right beside Beck on the sofa. “Did you love her?”

For reasons having to do with red-haired housekeepers and difficult partings, this question had been on Beck’s mind for much of the last week. His first inclination was to offer Ethan a shrug, a platitude, and the sort of smile that would allow the question to remain essentially unanswered. Ancient secrets were one thing; recent revelations were quite another.

“I was young. All young men are romantics in some corner of their souls. I loved her the way an ignorant young man loves a foolish young woman, but in hindsight, I can see it was more that I fancied the notion she would make me an adult and capable of giving Bellefonte his heir. I did not love her—I did not know her—but I loved the idea of her.”

Ethan nudged Beck with his shoulder. “I’ve never considered there are actual advantages to being the bastard. This business of the succession weighs heavily between you and Nick. Too heavily.”

“I told him to swive his countess.” Beck raised his glass to take another sip of his drink, then changed his mind and set it aside. “He looked so haunted, Ethan, I about wanted to cry.”

“He and Leah will sort it out,” Ethan murmured, but Beck knew damned well that was a hope on Ethan’s part, not a prediction. It was Beck’s hope, too. “What will you do about your Sara?”

“She is not my Sara.” Maybe she was Tremaine’s Sara? “I will find some project or other that requires travel on the Continent, or perhaps head north before cooler weather arrives. Scotland is beautiful in high summer.”

Scotland, for all its beauty, was also as good a place as any to be miserable, there being a liberal sprinkling of whiskey distilleries amid the glens and valleys.

“Will you be here in the morning?”

Would he? Beck did not want to return to Belle Maison, where a bevy of sisters was trying to deal with their father’s passing. He did not want to visit one of Nick’s smaller properties, there to idle about with memories and regrets. He did not want to impose further on Ethan’s hospitality now that the will had been read.

And he was bloody damned if he wanted to freeze his parts off come grouse season, tramping about on some arctic Scottish moor.

“I will not. I haven’t paid my respects to Lady Warne, and she should have a full accounting of the state of Three Springs.”

“You are being stubborn, Beckman.” Ethan tossed back his drink and went to an escritoire over by the windows. “Nita sent some correspondence for you out from Belle Maison. My baby brother has apparently become a man of parts.”

Beck did not want to deal with his factors, did not want to fashion a reply to the stewards and agents who handled his various commercial endeavors. He wanted to get blind, roaring drunk, though he knew that to be his personal version of the road to hell.

Ethan passed him a packet of letters. “You’re welcome to stay here, you know, or you could bide a while at Tydings.”

This was another load of peach trees, another attempt to close a distance that had formed without either Ethan or Beckman willing it. To give himself time to come up with a response—Beck did not want to bide at Tydings, an extraneous uncle to two little boys he’d never met—he sorted through his correspondence, coming to an abrupt halt at the third epistle in the stack.