both eyes while one’s husband carried on affairs as if he wasn’t wed?
So Henry had another heir besides his feckless nephew. That knowledge might have done much to soothe his ambition for the title. If Henry had known, he would have offered Catherine and her son residency at Kelby Hall. How he would have loved to watch a boy grow up there!
“Somehow Catherine caught wind of Uncle Henry’s death. She’s been after me for months now to move to the ancestral pile and set herself up as countess and groom young Peter as the heir. I told her it was no use yet, that you might cut me out of the earldom with the brat in your belly. Quite frankly, at this point I wouldn’t mind if you bore a son and saved me the trouble of strangling the woman. She’s not aged well at all.”
Maris bit a lip to keep from laughing. To think of suave, smooth David Kelby trapped forever in a miserable marriage. While he might be a villain, she somehow couldn’t see David’s long white fingers around his wife’s throat. It would take too much effort.
“Tell Catherine I should like to meet her. Have her bring your son. Is he at school?”
“Who has the money for school fees? I can’t send him and support my tailor, too. His grandfather has been tutoring him in that godforsaken village they live in. Catherine brags he’s bright enough. There’s nothing else for him to do, but study. No amusements to be found whatsoever. That was rather the reason I got entangled with Catherine in the first place. I was visiting my old friend Montague and there she was, fifteen, all blushes and blond ringlets. A regular Eve. A viper in my garden is what she is now.”
He had debauched a fifteen-year-old girl. Who was the snake? “Poor David,” Maris said, with just a trace of mockery.
“Oh, I’m sure you feel I’ve gotten just what I deserve for all the trouble I’ve given you. It’s a pity Uncle Henry isn’t here to laugh at me.” David’s face shifted to its usual unpleasant expression. “I warn you, though, should you try to trick me and foist off some local milkmaid’s babe as your own son, I’ll know. I’ll be watching. So, I imagine, will Catherine. Nothing is going to deprive her of seeing her child in his rightful place at last.”
“Goodness. I’m quaking.” And Maris was. With repressed laughter. The solution to her current agony was plain as the sneer on David’s face. A reprieve for her ever-present conscience. But before she made an irrevocable decision, she must meet with Mrs. Catherine Kelby and her son.
Maris wouldn’t say anything to Reyn. Not yet. But after last night, the thought of living her life without him in it was impossible. What did she care if she caused a frightful scandal? There would be a new Countess of Kelby, a new heir. At the rate David was going, he was bound to be shot soon by a jealous husband or contract one of the inevitable diseases that ran rampant throughout society for men with his proclivities. Even if he lived a long life and was an unsatisfactory earl, he had a son who might be worthy.
“What is Peter like?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.” Despite David’s blasé tone, the tips of his ears turned red.
“You don’t know your own son?” Maris asked, aghast.
“You can’t expect me to bury myself in the country to chat up a pimple-faced boy. I saw him a few years ago and he didn’t have two words to say for himself. His mother is probably lying when she says he’s intelligent. I saw no evidence of it myself.”
Poor Peter. But maybe not. No one would think David Kelby to be a good influence on a young man. Perhaps it was a mercy he lived out of the way with his mother and grandfather.
“Anyway, you can judge for yourself. Catherine should arrive at Kelby Hall any day now. I tried to stop her to no avail. She thinks your pregnancy is some sort of trick I’ve used to fob her off, but one look at you should shut her up. Unless you’ve got a pillow stuffed under your dress and got that idiot Crandall to lie for you. Do you know he had the gall to accuse me of having something to do with Uncle Henry’s death? Just because I was visiting a friend at the Hall the night he died.”
“A female