How the Scoundrel Seduces (29 page)

“I’ve known Tristan for months now,” she confessed. “Don’t blame Jeremy for this.”

“Months?” Papa gaped at her. “But your cousin said you’d met Bonnaud recently. How . . . when . . .”

“It doesn’t matter.” The last thing they needed was
the Major going off half-cocked to destroy Manton’s Investigations. “The point is, we will wed, and that will set everything to rights.”

“Only if I allow it. And I won’t. I swear I will cut you off, girl, if you marry this . . . this fortune-hunting thief. He won’t get a penny.”

“I don’t want her fortune.” Tristan drew his shirt on. “Write up the settlement however you wish. I will not take your money.”

“If there even
is
any money left once my cousin gets through with us,” she muttered.

Her father looked decidedly ill. “What the devil do you mean, girl?”

“Oh, Papa,” she said, her heart aching. “For once, be honest with me. I know that I’m not your blood. That I’m not a true heir to Winborough or the title.”

Avoiding her gaze, he scowled at Tristan. “Is this
your
doing? Have you been filling my daughter’s head with nonsense?”

“I hired him to find out the truth!” Zoe cried.

When her father’s face paled to ash, she wished to God she hadn’t been so blunt. Or so hasty as to tempt Tristan into her bed. Tristan had been right—this should have been handled with finesse, not by rubbing Papa’s face in the faults of his adoptive daughter.

“You . . . you
hired
him?” Papa said. “You told our business to strangers?”

“It’s not as bad as you think,” she said hastily. “I had good reason to believe he’d be discreet. Besides, you left me no choice! You wouldn’t tell me yourself.”

Just then, Aunt Flo came in. “I trust, Roderick, that you got a suitable explanation for why—” She broke off as she caught sight of Tristan, who’d managed to get his cravat tied and was now donning his waistcoat. “Oh.”

“Yes,
oh
!” Papa whirled on her. “This is all
your
fault, blathering to her about her mother and such. Thanks to you, she hired this fellow to find out about Drina! And now he’s gone and ruined her!”

“Oh, Zoe,” her aunt said in that tone of disappointment that so grated on Zoe. “I thought you had better sense than to let some man’s by-blow seduce you.”

“Don’t call him that!” Zoe took a menacing step toward her aunt. “Don’t you ever call him that again, unless you’re prepared to call me the same!”

When her aunt blinked and backed away, Tristan caught Zoe by the arm. “It’s all right, princess. I’m used to it.” He shifted his gaze to Aunt Flo. “And Zoe isn’t ruined.” He slid his hand down to take hers. “We plan to be married as soon as it can be arranged.”

Her aunt gaped at them, then at the Major. “You’re going to allow this?”

“He has no choice.” Zoe steadied her shoulders. “I’m of age. I can marry whom I please.”

“She’s right about that,” her father said wearily. He nodded at Tristan. “Now that this fellow knows our secrets, he will use them to get what he wants.”

Tristan stiffened. “Keep your secrets, sir. They’re of no use to me. As I said, I don’t want your daughter’s fortune. I just want her.”

The way he said it, with a fierceness that showed he
meant it, warmed her beyond words. It wasn’t exactly a profession of love, but then, he didn’t believe in love, did he? For now, being desired by him was plenty.

“I want him, too, Papa. I’m sorry that I . . . destroyed all your plans, but I never wished to marry Jeremy. Being around Tristan has only made that more clear.”

Apparently that had an impact on Papa, for some of the color returned to his face as he looked from her to Tristan. “I see.”

“But I’m afraid, sir,” Tristan ventured, “that in searching for Drina, we have inadvertently . . . well . . .”

“Opened a Pandora’s box,” Zoe finished.

“Oh, Lord,” her aunt muttered.

“And that is solely my fault,” Zoe went on. “So we should probably discuss what Tristan and I have discovered about my natural mother. I fear it may create . . . complications.”

“Complications?” Papa’s jaw went rigid. “What sort of complications?”

Zoe swallowed. “Well, for one thing, we found Drina’s brother. And he’s eager to find her now, too.”

Papa’s eyes widened. “Drina had a brother?”

“You didn’t know?” Tristan said.

Papa was breathing heavily, his shoulders shaking. “No. We thought she might have a . . . a husband, but . . . we . . .” He staggered a bit.

“Papa!” Zoe hurried to his side. “Are you all right?”

He let her take his arm. “Just need . . . water . . .”

Looking alarmed, Aunt Flo rushed over to the wash-stand and poured some water into a cup, then brought
it to him. “He should sit down,” she told Zoe, taking his other arm and helping Zoe guide him to a chair. “This is very hard on your father’s heart.”

Papa fell heavily into the chair and gulped the water as they hovered over him.

“You look awful.” Zoe knelt at his feet. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, no, don’t worry, dear girl.” Her father laid a shaky hand on her shoulder. “I always feared this day would come eventually. That one day Drina’s family would come looking for her. And you.”

“But she sold me to you,” Zoe said. “Why would she want me back?”

“She didn’t sell you.” He frowned at Aunt Flo. “I don’t know why Agnes told Floria such a thing, but it was nonsense.”

“I know why,” Tristan said harshly. “Because your late wife wanted to assuage her guilt over having stolen Zoe.”

Papa glared at him. “We didn’t steal her! Drina gave Zoe to us.”

“G-gave me to you?” Zoe said. “Like handing off an unwanted pet?”

“Not exactly.” Papa uttered a sigh. “The poor woman didn’t really have a choice.”

Tristan was staring at her father with a hard look in his eyes. “Oh?”

Papa ignored him to focus on Zoe. “You see, my dear, when we found Drina, she was stumbling along the road toward York. We were headed in the opposite direction, but your mother . . . I mean, Agnes . . . felt
sorry for her out in the snow, especially once she noticed that Drina was pregnant. So she begged me to stop and help the girl, Gypsy or no.”

He drank more water, his eyes misting over. “I could never deny Agnes anything, you know.”

“I—I know.” Zoe was still reeling from the knowledge that she hadn’t even been born when her adoptive parents met her mother. Until now, she’d assumed she’d been a babe in arms.

“We took Drina into the carriage,” Papa went on, “but we couldn’t get enough information from her to find out exactly where she was headed.” His voice held an edge. “She was in a bad way, poor woman. She’d been beaten about the head and shoulders. It must have sent her into labor, for she bore you in our carriage a short while later.”

“And then she . . . she just gave me to you? On impulse?” Zoe was trying to understand.

“No.” He clenched the cup in his fists as if bracing himself for something. “It all happened very quickly. One minute we were birthing the baby, and the next she was bleeding to death, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.” When Zoe caught her breath, he cast her a guilt-ridden look. “I’m sorry to tell you, dear girl, but Drina has been dead since a few moments after your birth.”

Dead. All this time. Her natural mother had died giving birth to her.

Zoe’s head swam. Drina hadn’t abandoned her. She’d died with Zoe in her arms.

Tears burned Zoe’s eyes, both for the mother she’d never known and for the one she had. Two mothers now lost to her, both loving her.

The tears fell freely, and she let them fall. She let herself mourn the mothers who’d shown their love for her in their own ways.

“Oh, my darling girl, I’m so sorry,” her father said.

“It’s all right, Papa,” she choked out, though it was far from all right.

“You still have me,” he said softly.

“And me, sweetheart.” Though Papa tensed, Tristan ignored him and handed her a handkerchief. “Are you all right?”

“I—I will be.” She dabbed at her eyes and her nose, trying to get control of her tears. “At least I kn-know that she wanted me.”

Her father laid his free hand on her shoulder. “She did want you, indeed. She spoke very little at the end, but it was all about you. She kept saying, ‘
Mi babbi, mi babbi
 . . .’ and clutching Agnes’s hand. We asked if she had a husband and she shook her head no, but we didn’t know if she was saying she had no husband or she didn’t want her husband to have the baby.”

Zoe froze. Oh, Lord, she would have to tell Papa about Hucker. How was she going to tell him about Hucker?

“She said the phrase ‘
milosh corrie’
over and over in her language,” Papa went on, “but we didn’t know what she was saying and—”

Tristan stiffened. “Milosh Corrie is . . . was . . . her
brother. Drina wanted you to bring the baby to him to raise, no doubt.”

When a look of panic crossed Papa’s face, a chill swept Zoe. “You knew,” she said hoarsely. “You
knew
it was the name of someone in her family.”

“Not at first, I swear! A . . . A few years after you were born, I came across a Gypsy and asked him what the words meant. He said they might be a name.
Might,
mind you. I didn’t want to believe it.”

He cupped her cheek, and his gaze turned fierce. “Because by then you were ours.
Our
daughter, damn it! If this Milosh was your father, he’d beaten your poor mother to death. We weren’t giving you up to some bastard who might hurt you.”

Zoe swallowed. She could understand that.

But there was one thing she didn’t. “Why didn’t you just tell me all of this?”

“Zoe—” he began in that placating tone.

“I understand why you kept it secret when I was a girl. You didn’t want to risk my blurting it out. There was a great deal at stake, after all. I do realize that—it’s why I took great pains to hire investigators I could trust.”

As Tristan began to rub her back, she couldn’t keep the hurt from her voice. “But I asked you about it after Aunt Flo let it slip, and you
lied
to me. Surely I could have been trusted with the story by then.”

The weight of what she’d done by opening the investigation hit her, making her heart catch painfully in her chest. “If I’d known Drina was dead, and there would
never be any danger of her returning to make trouble for us, I . . . I wouldn’t have gone off to hire the Duke’s Men. I wouldn’t have risked the title and the estate!”

When her father cradled his head in his hands with a groan, Tristan said in a cold voice, “Ah, but your father didn’t dare let the truth get out to anyone. With one slip, you would risk more than your estate and title. Because essentially he and your mother stole you, breaking a number of laws in the process. He lied in registering your birth, he bribed a government official to record you as entering the country as his child, he probably tossed your mother’s corpse into the woods to rot—”

“No!” Papa’s head shot up. With a dark frown, he jabbed his empty cup at Tristan as if it were a weapon. “We buried her, I’ll have you know. We even said a few words over her grave. There is no law against that.”

“You made no attempt to look for her family.”

“They abandoned her!” He glowered at Tristan. “Drina was alone on that road. So no, we did not go looking for the arses who’d abused the poor woman.” He stared off into space. “You can’t possibly understand what it’s like to want a child so badly—”

“An heir, you mean,” Tristan said bitterly. “That’s all that your kind cares about.”

“My
kind 
? You, sir, have become cynical because of your father’s ways.” Papa’s breath came in quick gasps. “Taking in Zoe had nothing to do with wanting an heir. But we could not . . . That is . . .”

“It’s all right, Papa.” Zoe covered his hands with hers
as she shot Tristan a warning glance. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

“But I do. Bonnaud thinks he knows everything about our ‘kind.’ But he doesn’t know a damned thing about people. Or the meaning of sacrifice.”

He rose from the chair to face Tristan. “I was injured in the war, sir. I cannot have children. Agnes knew that, yet she married me anyway. Because she loved me. Because some things are more important to a woman than . . .” He swept his hand to encompass the bed. “Than that.”

As the color drained from Tristan’s face, Zoe realized exactly what Papa was saying. He was injured
there
in the war, badly enough to prevent children. And perhaps lovemaking, too?

Lord, she didn’t want to think about her parents doing
that.
Still, now that she’d experienced the joy of it . . . It would be horrible to be denied that union with the one she loved. And Mama had really loved Papa. There was no mistaking that.

“But Agnes wanted a baby,” Papa went on. “She never spoke of it, not once. Never uttered a word of reproof. On our return from America, however, I saw the yearning in her eyes when she was helping with a fellow passenger’s babe. So by the time we encountered Drina, I had already been pondering the possibility of our taking in a foundling.”

He ruffled Zoe’s hair. “So when Zoe appeared, we marked it as a sign. God in His mercy had dropped a child into our hands, and we intended to hold on to her,
regardless of what doing so required.” He stared fiercely at Tristan. “I’d do it again if I had the chance.”

“Oh, Papa,” she said, sniffling as she rose to put her arms around him. “I’m glad that you did it, too. I’ve had a wonderful life with you and Mama.” She smiled at her aunt, who looked shattered by Papa’s revelations. “And Aunt Floria.”

Papa held her close, burying his face in her hair. “I’m so sorry I kept it from you, dear girl. Agnes wanted me to tell you years ago, but I was too afraid. And not because I didn’t trust you.”

Holding her away, he fixed her with an aching look. “In my eyes, you were my own daughter. I didn’t want you ever to think otherwise. I didn’t want to weigh you down with the truth. And . . . well . . . I wanted you to choose your husband without your illegitimacy hanging over your head to worry you.”