'Twas the Night After Christmas (20 page)

P
ierce just stood there, shocked. A small, brown-haired, blue-eyed boy was standing in his drawing room, wearing a nightshirt and clutching something in both fists. And he was looking at Pierce as if he’d just seen the devil himself.

Then he began to cry. “M-Mama!” he blubbered. “I–I don’t want to be s-sent away!”

Camilla hurried to his side and caught him up in her arms. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly as she pressed his head to her shoulder. “I’m sure it will be fine, muffin, just fine.”

She wouldn’t meet Pierce’s eyes. She just kept cradling the boy, whose little frame shook from the force of his fear.

“Your son, I take it,” Pierce managed to croak.

Oh, God, she had a child whom she’d hidden from him. And
here he’d been thinking that he meant something to her, that they meant something to each other, when all the while . . .

“Don’t let the g-great earl send me away!” the boy wailed, and Pierce got ahold of himself. At the moment this concerned a child, and only a child.

A child who was Camilla’s
son,
for God’s sake.

“No one will send you away, lad,” Pierce said hoarsely.

The boy stopped crying to peer at him through red-rimmed eyes. “But . . . but her l-ladyship said I h-had to keep out of s-sight or—”

“Mother knew?” Pierce asked Camilla, his chest tightening painfully. “You’ve both been keeping this from me?”

Camilla’s gaze shot to him at last, a look of pure panic in her eyes. “Please, you have to understand.” Hitching the boy higher on one hip, she clutched him close as if he might be snatched from her at any moment. “I needed to work to support Jasper, and my employers expected me to be unencumbered, so I always told them I was. Then I sent Jasper to live with Kenneth’s brother and his wife.”

“They don’t like me,” the boy muttered.

“That’s not true, Jasper,” Camilla chided gently. She met Pierce’s gaze. “They’re very Scottish, you see, and very religious. And they already had three young children of their own.” She stroked the lad’s curls. “But even so, I wouldn’t have brought him here if your mother hadn’t found out about him and asked me to.”

“
Mother
asked you to bring a child here?” he echoed, incredulous. She wouldn’t keep her own son, but she’d had some stranger’s boy brought to Montcliff?

“Yes,” Camilla said warily, no doubt guessing the source of his incredulity. “Why do you think it was so hard for me to believe that she could ever have been cruel to you? She’s been very kind to me and Jasper.”

He took a step toward them, and the lad squealed and grabbed his mother. “It’s all right, lad. I won’t hurt you.” He glared at Camilla. “What the devil have you been telling him about me?”

“You’re the g-great earl,” Jasper whispered, his eyes wide with fright. “I’m not s-supposed to let the great earl see me, or I’ll be s-sent away.”

“You won’t be sent away,” Pierce bit out. When the boy flinched, he modulated his tone. “No one will send you away from your mother, boy, least of all me.” He cast Camilla a hard look. “I can’t imagine why you would tell him such a thing.”

She lifted her chin. “Mr. Fowler was very clear in my interview—he said that you required that I be childless,” she said defensively. “I needed the position. I wasn’t about to tell him I had a little boy.”

“Well, I don’t know why he would think—” He groaned. “Damn. It must have been the day we talked about children. I let it slip that I didn’t intend to have any. Since I didn’t want to elaborate on why, I told him some nonsense about not liking them.”

When Jasper looked horrified at the thought, Pierce caught the boy’s gaze and said firmly, “But I never meant that last part.” He shifted his gaze back to Camilla. “And I never gave Fowler any specific rule about not having children on the estate, either, I swear. He came to that conclusion on his own.”

Great God, they must have been keeping it secret from Fowler, too. From the beginning? How had they managed it?

Then something else occurred to him. “It was Jasper I heard yesterday in the drawing room.”

Swallowing hard, Camilla nodded. “We had to send him off with Maisie in a bit of a hurry. You gave us quite a fright coming home early.”

The thought of the two women living in fear that he might send the lad off made his heart wrench in his chest. “Do
all
the servants know?”

“Just the ones here. We dared not tell anyone else, for fear that Mr. Fowler would find out. And as you may have noticed, there’s a bit of rivalry between the manor servants and the dower house servants, so the latter were more than happy to keep the secret.”

He hadn’t noticed any rivalry. Bloody hell, he was oblivious. He’d been thinking he had a firm grasp on everything regarding his estate, not to mention his life and his relationship with Mother, when the truth was, he didn’t know a damned thing.

Even Camilla was a stranger to him again. But despite the betrayal he felt over the secret she’d been keeping from him, he couldn’t blame her. At least she fought for her son. It was more than he could say for his own mother.

Except that Mother had fought for
this
boy. Pierce didn’t know whether to resent her or respect her for that.

The boy was staring at him less fearfully now. “So you’re not . . . going to send me away?”

“No,” he managed to say past the lump in his throat. Memories of that day in the carriage with Titus swamped him. Jasper
couldn’t be much younger than he’d been, and he remembered only too well how much it had ached to be separated from his parents. “You’re safe here, Jasper. It is Jasper, right?”

The lad bobbed his head.

“How old are you, lad?”

Jasper glanced to his mother, and she nodded encouragement. His eyes still held a hint of wariness as he stared up at Pierce. “I’m six and three-quarters.”

Pierce bit back a smile. “As old as all that, are you?” He ventured nearer, relieved when Jasper didn’t recoil from him. He kept his voice soft and unthreatening. “What’s that in your hands?”

Jasper eyed him a long moment before opening them to show three tin soldiers in each. “Her ladyship said that for every day I kept out of sight, I could have one. I’ve got seven now.” He frowned. “Well, six. I lost one yesterday.”

The lump in Pierce’s throat thickened. “Here in the drawing room.” It took all his effort not to react to the fact that his mother had been giving this lad
his
soldiers. It wasn’t as if he needed them anymore.

Camilla’s gaze on him softened, became apologetic. “She said there were a lot. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind.” Somehow he forced humor into his voice. “I’m a bit old for them now, don’t you think?”

Jasper hesitantly held out a hand. “If you want, you can have one of mine. I can share.”

The peace offering from a reluctant six-year-old was nearly more than he could take. “You keep them,” he rasped. “You’ve been a brave lad, and you deserve them.”

That actually got a smile out of the cherub. And he really was a cherub, with reddish-brown curls and sky-blue eyes that saw too much. Rather like his mother’s.

“What do you say?” Camilla prompted.

“Thank you, sir,” he mumbled.

“You call him ‘my lord,’ dearest,” she corrected him.

“ ‘Sir’ is fine,” Pierce interjected.

Jasper gave a big yawn, and Camilla looked at Pierce. “I should probably put him back in bed.”

Pierce nodded. My God, what a nightmare it would have been if the lad had wandered in while they were in the midst of . . . “You should stay with him,” he said gruffly, even as his body still ached for her. “He needs you right now.”

The grateful look in her eyes cut him to the soul. “Thank you.”

She had already started for the door when the boy said, “Wait! I got to ask the great earl something.”

Pierce went up to them. “What is it, lad?”

“You’re more important than Mr. Fowler, right?”

Pierce stifled a smile. “You could say that.”

Jasper tipped up his chin in an unconscious imitation of his mother’s usual gesture of defiance. “So if Mother and me and her ladyship wanted to go to the fair tomorrow, you could tell Mr. Fowler it was all right, and we could go.”

Camilla sighed. “Jasper heard me tell your mother that we couldn’t take him there because Mr. Fowler might see.”

“But her ladyship
said
we could go, before Mother said we couldn’t,” Jasper went on in a rush, “and I really, really
want
to go,
in case they have a sleigh there. I want to see a sleigh, and the fair is tomorrow, and—”

“I’ll tell Mr. Fowler myself that you’re allowed to go anywhere you wish. You needn’t worry about that.”

The beaming smile that spread over Jasper’s face made Pierce’s heart tighten. It was so easy to please a child. And yet so easy to bring his world crashing down around his ears, too.

“Are
you
going, my lord?” When Pierce stiffened, Jasper added hastily, “Because if
you
went, Mr. Fowler couldn’t do anything to stop it. And none of the boys would bother me or Mother.”

“What boys are bothering you and your mother?” Pierce asked, more fiercely than he’d intended.

“He’s thinking of London,” Camilla explained. “You know how it can be in the city for a woman and a boy alone—just the usual nonsense. But nothing has happened here. Jasper hasn’t even been to town yet, because I didn’t dare risk his being seen by Mr. Fowler. I’m sure everyone in Stocking Pelham will be perfectly polite.”

“Especially if
you
went with us,” Jasper persisted.

“Jasper!” his mother chided. “His lordship has more important things to do than to squire you to a fair.”

“Do you want me to go?” Pierce heard himself ask.

The boy’s eyes lit up. “That would
grand.
”

“Really, you don’t have to,” Camilla put in hastily, her voice low. “It’s kind enough of you to overlook the fact that—”

“It’s not kind of me,” he clipped out. “It’s the right thing.”

She dropped her gaze. “Of course.”

He hated seeing her so cautious around him, so worried
that he would somehow send her boy away from her.
Him,
of all people. She ought to know better.

“We’ll all go, Jasper,” he said, though it also meant spending the day in Mother’s company. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning—you, me, your mother, and her ladyship.”

“And Maisie, too?” Jasper asked, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

“Jasper!” her mother said, obviously exasperated.

Pierce couldn’t help laughing. The lad was certainly adept at getting what he wanted. “Maisie, too.”

“I’m so sorry, my lord,” Camilla said. “I swear, I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said, hating how formal she was being with him, but understanding why. “He’s a good lad and deserves a reward.”

Even if it meant that Pierce spent a day in hell.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “You have no idea what it means to me. And to him.”

He stared at her. “I have some idea, believe me.”

She flushed. “Forgive me for not trusting you with the truth. You deserved better.”

“It’s all right—I understand. When a child is involved, nothing can be left to chance.”

A sweet smile, the very twin to her son’s, spread over her face. When she glanced down at Jasper, who’d fallen asleep on her shoulder, her expression grew pensive. “My lord, I think perhaps it would be better if after this we did not . . . ”

“I know.” She had come to her senses, realized how unwise it would be for her to share his bed when she had her son to
consider. Not that he relished the idea of making love to her, knowing that she’d be doing it out of gratitude for his not sending her son away. But he still wanted . . . still yearned . . .

It didn’t matter what he wanted. The boy was what mattered at the moment. “Besides,” Pierce added with a forced smile, “you have an early day ahead of you tomorrow. I believe Mother mentioned that the two of you had to be at the fair with the servants to help set up the booth.”

“Yes, we do. Thank you for understanding.”

But as she left the room with her lad in her arms, he realized he didn’t care if she had a son. He didn’t care that it meant she might be looking for a husband, something he didn’t intend to be to
anyone,
even her. Nor did he care that getting intimately involved with a woman in her situation was unwise at best and dangerous at worst.

Like the devil that he was, he still wanted her in his bed.

The question was, what the bloody hell was he going to do about it?

A
t seven the next morning, Camilla hurried a very excited Jasper down the stairs. She was already late—her ladyship had risen at six and was hoping to leave by seven thirty. But wrangling a six-year-old into his first skeleton suit took some doing, even for a woman who’d done it countless times with young lads in the orphanage. And Maisie hadn’t been able to help, because she was busy helping her ladyship.

The countess met them at the bottom, a look of worry on her face.

Camilla immediately launched into an apology. “I know we’re running late. Do Jasper and I have time for breakfast?”