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‘You’re late,’ the woman told Heather sternly. ‘Come on. He’s waiting.’
Heather blinked twice, then followed. She got the feeling that this woman wasn’t used to being disobeyed.
‘Um...how am I late, exactly?’
Well, she was late—six weeks late at this point—but she was pretty sure the woman wasn’t talking about Heather’s period.
‘I didn’t have an appointment...’ Maybe she should have made one. Except she couldn’t imagine that Ross was going to be happy to see her again.
The woman didn’t answer—in fact, Heather wasn’t even sure if she heard her over the sound of her own heavy footsteps on the polished stone floors of the hallway. On either side the walls were painted dark shades of green, in between bare stone columns, and every now and again they’d pass a chair with tartan cushions, as if there to give people a chance to recover from the unrelenting hard darkness of the place.
Finally, after several more hallways, eight chairs and two staircases, the woman stopped in front of another heavy wooden door and rapped her knuckles sharply against it.
‘Come in,’ a male voice called, and as the woman opened the door Heather thought she heard him mutter, ‘Finally...’ under his breath.
Heather stepped inside just as the woman said, ‘The new nanny is here, sir.’
Nanny? Okay, someone had got something seriously confused here.
But as Heather stared at the darkly handsome man behind the mahogany desk she realised that a case of mistaken identity was the least of her problems. Because the man sitting at the desk belonging to the Earl of Lengroth wasn’t the man she’d slept with in London almost two months earlier.
* * *
Cal Bryce had never harboured any ambitions to be the Earl of Lengroth. He didn’t want the title, the castle, the requirement to provide an heir, the responsibility, or to have to uphold the reputation expected of a sterling member of the aristocracy.
And in fairness, he still didn’t have most of those things. He wasn’t the Earl—he remained the Hon Calvin Bryce, as he’d always been as the Earl’s younger brother. The castle wasn’t his—it belonged to his nephew Ryan, the eight-year-old newly minted Earl. He didn’t have to provide an heir—and he didn’t think anyone was expecting Ryan to do so for quite some years yet.
Since his brother Ross’s death, however, the responsibility was all his—at least until Ryan turned eighteen. And the reputation... Well, it seemed that was Cal’s to fix, too.
What on earth made you take that corner so fast, brother? Cal thought, not for the first time since he’d got that middle-of-the-night call and heard Mrs Peterson, the castle housekeeper, shrieking incomprehensibly down the phone at him from thousands of miles away in Scotland.
‘They’re dead! They’re both dead, Cal!’ she’d finally managed to say.
And the bottom had fallen out of Cal’s world.
His whole life Ross had been a constant. And he’d needed that so badly—especially when they were growing up. While the world around them might have believed that the Bryce family were a perfect example of modern aristocracy done right, Ross and Cal had known the truth.
The family weren’t above scandal and outrageous behaviour—they’d just grown very, very good at covering it up.
As a child, all Cal had known was that he had to get out of the way when his father started shouting, and that if he was drinking it was better not to be in the castle at all. Ross, three years older, had taught him all the best hiding places—and the signs to look out for telling him that it was time to run. And when Cal got it wrong Ross had stood between him and the Earl to give his little brother a head start.
Cal had idolised Ross. Until six weeks ago.
Even as he’d grown up into a teen, and then a young man, it had taken Cal some time to realise the true nature of his genetic inheritance. The Bryces hid their scandals well—even from their own flesh and blood. But once he’d seen his first evidence—walking in on his father in bed with the barmaid from the village pub was a scene sadly seared into his memory—he’d started to notice it everywhere. Especially as his parents had become less careful of their words around him.
