Page 17 of Ravishing Camille
Pierce sighed dramatically. “You always could smell blarney at twenty yards.”Except this is none and you know it.
His father extended a hand to the brown leather chairs near the fireplace. Today, no fire burned. The air was warm. The sea breeze misty with the flavor of salt flowed through the open windows.
“I will go up to London in a week or so.” He sank to the comfort of the opposite chair and brushed a hand down his tan linen trousers. “I realize it’s summer and no sane Englishman does business in August, but I must make the most of my time here.”
His father’s face fell. “You’ve set a date to return to Shanghai? I thought you were flexible.”
“I am. Really. Call me undecided. But as for business matters, you know I cannot sit still while we wait for every lord and lady to return from the country! I do want to go to London soon and settle a few problems.”
“I understand. I could never wait for their summer hiatus either. And it seems they’ve gotten worse in the past ten years since they’ve had a taste of jungles and deserts the world over. Personally, I’ve always gotten more done in a room with two men. But the Europeans have a different method.”
“They’re too used to negotiating everything from their marriages to their cattle sales in drawing rooms.”
“Forgive me then, if I want to discuss a few matters of business with you here, even if you are on holiday.” His father filled his pipe and took a damn long time doing it.
“What bothers you?” he asked at last.
His father arched a brow. “You know me well.”
Pierce laughed. “You taught me to pay attention!”
“Ah.” The man demurred. “Your success, Pierce, is your own. Look at the Shanghai company. You took over what Victor had built and tripled it.”
“He admitted his heart was not in it.” Pierce liked Ada’s personable husband, whose ambition to sit in Parliament was more to his taste than haggling with Chinese merchants. “I wanted a new adventure.”
His father examined his pipe, then put it down unlit. “You wanted more than that.”
“I did.” He was old enough to admit it. He was wiser now to not commit those errors again. “I made a few mistakes. I was not proud of them and I needed to grab a new challenge to find the contrast.”
“They were not business mistakes, Pierce.”
His father met his gaze. If he waited for Pierce to discuss Elanna, the Countess of Carbury, he would wait forever. Pierce knew what had happened to the woman who was so rebellious, so hateful of her husband that she had ruined her life with countless affairs and numerous public displays of anger toward her husband. True, the Earl of Carbury had been a bully, but she had learned how to best him at it. When he died six years ago, she could have seized the opportunity to take her young son Nate home and in time, marry one of the men she had favored. Instead, she packed up her son and left him with her brother Julian, the duke of Seton, and his wife, Lily. Nathaniel, who was born on the same day as Lily’s and the duke’s oldest son Garrett, lived with them and was as well cared for as one of their own.
Pierce’s attraction to Elanna was an ill-founded obsession with her boldness. He knew it then. He understood it, even if he could not disentangle himself from her lure. He’d not gone near her and had not had an affair, though some in the family thought he might have gone that far. But no. He’d been sane enough to avoid that. He had watched on in horror as she ruined her life.
In the end, she had destroyed her husband, herself and nearly so, her only child. The knowledge of that was so stark that anyone with any sense understood it. As had he. Only on a logical level, however. On an emotional one, he had sympathized with her. And yes, he had lusted after her. Foolish of him. He knew better. He’d met a thousand women, appreciated them, desired a few, enjoyed their company, their intellect. He’d had mistresses, too. Each for very limited times and discreetly so. But Elanna had been a fascination, a fire in him, as if he could not believe someone could be so destructive. She was a geyser, irrepressible. Like fireworks, unpredictable. But she was also venomous. Mercurial, self-centered, irredeemable. Even as he wanted her, he’d been mystified by his desire for her. And too, he was ashamed of his infatuation with her.
When she’d disappeared, he wanted to as well. His brother-in-law Victor’s offer to take on half share of his Shanghai Trading Company had been his saving grace. It had been the perfect solution to his need to escape, building his own steel and iron works by proxy here in Europe. But in China in six years, he’d expanded Victor’s company, now half his, transforming it into the largest foreign-owned textile export company in the east coast region of Kiang-suprovince. In that time, he also added more exports of tea and fine porcelains, increasing his own wealth to the point that he finally felt whole, accomplished and satisfied.
His father smiled at him, all empathy. “But you’re here now and well.”
“I am, Da.”
“We worried about you after you wrote that you’d lost the woman you planned to marry.”
He considered the empty black grate. “I wanted to call in her Methodist minister even as she lay dying, but she wouldn’t have it. She said she had gone to her temple and consulted her Buddhist fate teller about our friendship. The man had read her stones and declared our ‘friendship’ would remain intact, eternal. He said that after May was gone, I would soon become whole. May said she would not taint that wholeness to take any part of me away from my future.”
“She is not yet gone from you a year, Pierce.”
“In many ways, she will never be. She was a creature of her environment. Part Scots. Part Chinese. One-quarter really because her mother was the daughter of an English clerk and his Chinese wife. Her father is full Scots, descended from Highlander rebels who love taking a bite out of Englishmen’s ambitions.
“She was educated, quick-witted, spoke Cantonese and Mandarin, Spanish as well as English. She saw the values of Confucian devotion to harmony and Buddhist principles of peace. But she also valued the virtues of aggressive western men. Few can. We can be beasts abroad.”
“Anywhere, Pierce. I saw it in the shipment of black men from Benin. I saw it as Rebels fought Yankees to bitter death. You don’t have to live outside your own culture to be a menace to others and your own integrity.”
“So true.” Pierce sighed. May had gumption, like Elanna. Yet was unlike her, in so many ways. “She had patience and a humility that allowed her to view the other as one to value. May was her name. May Warren Macfarlane, a child of both East and West. I miss her.”
“Your friend, Mister Macfarlane, is, I assume, her relative?”
