Page 17 of The Viscount's Seduction
“An Irish lass.” Bink watched with an amused intensity that left him feeling confused. Bink had an Irish mother, a girl Shaldon had met on some government mission, when he was still the younger son, before he’d inherited. Shaldon hadn’t been able to marry her, of course. He’d been called back to England by his brother’s death, and anyway, Bink’s mother had been too low socially.
Unlike Lady Sirena, an earl’s daughter. She’d be within Bakeley’s reach, if he were so inclined.
Bink laughed.
And Bakeley knew—his brother knew more. Perhaps this time Bink was the one in on Father’s manipulations. Well, turn-about was fair play, wasn’t it?
And forewarned was forearmed.
“What do you know about her?” Bakeley asked.
“Besides her bonny looks?” Bink leaned back and cocked a foot across his knee.
“You are baiting me, just like Shaldon would do.”
Bink grimaced and threw the papers aside. “Her brother, Roland James Hollister, was lost at sea escaping the Crown. He was much older than her. Word was he fought under Corcoran and was connected to Emmet before the nationalist movement was finally stopped.”
“He was a traitor.”
“Aye. The father disavowed him and hung onto the title.”
His hair rose on his neck. “Glenmorrow.” He sliced through a sausage and chewed calmly while inside his nerves danced, remembering. The sudden mission to visit and buy up Glenmorrow’s best stock. The bedraggled estate.
The stable lad he’d argued with, who was no lad.
He carefully swallowed. “That business would have been years ago. Ancient history.”
Bink grunted. “The worst of the rebellion was years ago. He was lost sometime after that.”
She was unsuitable, Father had said. “Even then, she would have been a child.”
Bink harrumphed. “In war, who suffers more than the women and children?”
The thought of Sirena suffering disturbed him. Her shadowed, defiant face as she’d proudly stated her horse’s lineage and challenged him to a race, reared up at him.
He pushed away from the table and began to pace. “Might Shaldon have been in Ireland then?”
“Who knows? Quite possibly.”
“What are you not telling me, Bink?”
“I haven’t been drawn into any conspiracy, if that’s what you’re asking. I learned all of this from Hackwell, who learned it from his lady, who learned it from Lady Jane Monthorpe.” Bink stood also. “And I made the inquiry because, from the look of you last night, I assumed you’d want to know.”
“Funny. Father dared me to investigate. Said it would bring her background to light and ruin her reputation.”
“Well then, see that you don’t blab this among those fools at your club.”
“Or that fool brother of ours.”
Bink laughed. “He’s the perfect sort of spy, shagging his way through every foreign delegate’s wife’s bedchamber. He won’t ruin her reputation if you tell him not to.” He quirked an eyebrow. “But what about you, Bakeley?”
Heat rose in him. Bink always suspected the worst of his brothers, as if being born on the right side of an aristocratic bed lowered a man’s character. “What do you suppose Father had to do with her brother’s downfall? He told me most emphatically that she’s unsuitable, and that I’m to stay away from her.”
“I imagine Shaldon has a file tucked away somewhere with the name Hollister on it. Whether he has one for her, I don’t know. She’s a young woman with only a spinster to protect her. She deserves the benefit of discretion, and to be safe from bored aristocrats tired of their mistresses.”
That was pointed enough to spike his anger, but he bit back a retort and picked a spot of lint off his coat, counting to ten. Shaldon’s return to England had driven Bakeley from sole management of the Shaldon empire into this noble boredom, much more frustrating than either Bink or Charley could imagine.
He forced a laugh. “Did you know Father is scheming to get you a barony?”
