On the fourth day after Keir had recovered from the fever, he was well enough to walk down to the beach cove with Merritt. A sunken lane led from the house to a path that opened onto a beach of fine sand, spread beneath a blue taffeta sky. Farther on the west side, the shore graded to pebble and shingle before rising into a white chalk cliff. The beach had a well-tended look, as if someone had sifted and cleaned the sand, and filed the edges of the tide pools. Even the grasses of the dunes were orderly, as if someone had run a giant comb through them.
Although Keir would always prefer his island to anywhere else in the world, he had to admit this place had its own magic. There was a softness about the air and sun, a trance of mist that made everything luminous. Lowering to his haunches, he ran his palm back and forth over the fine golden sand, so different from the caster-sugar grains of the beaches on Islay.
At Merritt’s quizzical glance, he dusted his hands and smiled crookedly. “’Tis quiet,” he explained. “On the shore near my home, it sings.”
“The sand sings?” Merritt asked, perplexed.
“Aye. When you move it with your foot or hand, or the wind blows over it, the sand makes a sound. Some say it’s more like a squeak, or whistle.”
“What makes it do that?”
“’Tis pure quartz, and the grains are all the same size. A scientist could explain it. But I’d rather call it magic.”
“Do you believe in magic?”
Keir stood and smiled into her upturned face. “No, but I like the wonderments of life. Like the ghost fire that shines on a ship’s mast at storm’s end, or the way a bird’s instinct leads him to his wintering grounds each year. I enjoy such things better for no’ understanding them.”
“Wonderments,” Merritt repeated, seeming to relish the word.
As they walked idly along the shore, while sandpipers darted and pecked at the tide wash, Keir was filled with an ease he hadn’t known since boyhood. A holiday feeling. He’d never gone this long without working in his adult life. But he knew the sense of well-being came mostly from the woman beside him.
Talking with Merritt was like slipping into one of those silk-lined borrowed coats from the Challons. Comfortable, luxurious. She was whip-smart, understanding the details, the unsaid words. She had a way of wrapping people in empathy that extended to everyone from the duke down to the young assistant groundskeeper. It was the kind of charm that made people feel wittier, more attractive, more interesting, in her reflected glow. Keir was doing his level best to resist her lure.
But he was so drawn to her, so damned besotted.
He adored her fancy words . . . “prevarication” . . . “resplendent” . . . her easy smiles . . . her perfumed wrists and throat. She was like a beautiful gift that begged to be unwrapped. Just being near her made the blood sing in his veins. Last night, the mere thought of her naked, along with just a few strokes of his own hand, had been enough to bring him to a shuddering, bone-jarring climax—an experiment he’d regretted when his ribs had instantly burned as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. And yet he still craved her, worse now than yesterday.
To protect himself, he tried to keep barriers between them. He did his best not to confide in her, nor did he invite confidences. He was friendly but polite, surrounding his heart with steel-plate armor and hoping that would be enough to keep it safe. If not . . . he’d end up ruined for any other woman.
He had to leave soon, or it would be too late. It might already be.
In the afternoon, Keir spent time with Phoebe in the family parlor. She played with the baby on a quilt spread across the floor, while Keir occupied a comfortable chair nearby. He’d taken an immediate liking to Phoebe, who was friendly and straightforward, with a sharp edge of humor. She shared the running of an Essex estate with her husband and could talk so easily about ordinary subjects, like farming and husbandry, that Keir could almost forget she was the daughter of a duke.
“I thought you might want to see this,” Phoebe said, nudging a weighty leather-bound book across the low table in front of him.
“What is it? A scrapbook?”
“A photograph album of my family.” She paused before correcting herself. “Our family.”
Keir shook his head, refusing to touch the album. “I dinna see the need.”
Her brows lifted. “You’re not the least bit curious about your own relations? You have no questions? You don’t even want to look at them?”
“We may not be kin. No one can put it to hard proof.”
“Hogwash.” Phoebe gave him a sardonic glance. “A preponderance of circumstantial evidence meets the legal standard of proof, and in your case, there’s more than enough to erase all reasonable doubt.” She paused before adding gently, “As you’d already know, if you would just talk with Father.”
Keir frowned and reached out to a lamp on a table beside his chair, playing with the beaded fringe trim on the shade. He’d had little interaction with Kingston so far, and never just the two of them, for which he was thankful. He wasn’t ready for the uncomfortable and inevitable conversation that awaited them.
Fortunately, the duke hadn’t been inclined to press the issue, probably because his days were too damned busy as it was. Every morning he read a mountain of reports and correspondence, dictated to a private secretary, and dispatched a footman to post letters and telegrams. In the afternoons, there were meetings with tenants, tradesmen, or estate managers, and sometimes with people who’d come from London or beyond.
At the end of the day, however, all business was set aside, and it was time for relaxation. They would all gather for dinner at a table weighted with silver and crystal and lit with abundant candles. White-gloved footmen would bring out marvelous dishes . . . platters heaped with succulent red-and-white shrimp, called pandles by locals, still smoking-hot from the gridiron . . . tureens of bisque sprinkled with tender shreds of Chichester lobster . . . Amberley trout spangled with toasted almond slices, served directly from the pan onto the plates. There were endless varieties of fresh vegetables, and salads chopped as fine as confetti, and bread served with newly churned butter, and platters of local cheese and hothouse fruit for dessert. Keir had never eaten so well in his life.
The invalid menu, of course, had been swiftly discarded. Keir had filled his plate with defiantly generous portions, his gaze daring Merritt to object, and she had only smiled wryly, letting him have his way. Ah, he liked her so damned much. She might be a wee bully when it came to certain matters, but she was never a nag.
“Are you going to talk to Father?” Phoebe persisted, bringing his thoughts back to the present.
“He hasn’t asked me to,” Keir muttered.
“He’s waiting for you to ask.”
“I dinna know what he wants. He has enough sons. There’s nothing I could give him he doesn’t already have, and nothing I need from him.”
“Must it be a transaction? Can’t you simply accept the relationship, and enjoy whatever it turns out to be?”
“Oh, aye,” he said sarcastically, “I’ll enjoy it like a trout being guddled.”
“Guddled?”
“’Tis when you stand in a stream, near a boulder or steep bank, and ease your bare hand into the water beneath the trout. After a while, you start to tickle his belly and chin with your fingertips. When you’ve won his trust, and he relaxes to your hand, you shove your fingers into the gills, haul him out, and soon he’s in a hot pan with butter and salt.”
Phoebe laughed. “My father . . .” she began, and paused. “Well, I suppose he is something of a guddler. But you won’t end up in the pan. Family is everything to him. When he was a young boy, he lost his mother and four sisters to scarlet fever, and was sent away to boarding school. He grew up very much alone. So he would do anything to protect or help the people he cares about.”
She hefted the album into Keir’s lap, and watched as he began to leaf through it dutifully.
Keir’s gaze fell to a photograph of the Challons relaxing on the beach. There was Phoebe at a young age, sprawling in the lap of a slender, laughing mother with curly hair. Two blond boys sat beside her, holding small shovels with the ruins of a sandcastle between them. A grinning fair-haired toddler was sitting squarely on top of the sandcastle, having just squashed it. They’d all dressed in matching bathing costumes, like a crew of little sailors.
Coming to perch on the arm of the chair, Phoebe reached down to turn pages and point out photographs of her siblings at various stages of their childhood. Gabriel, the responsible oldest son . . . followed by Raphael, carefree and rebellious . . . Seraphina, the sweet and imaginative younger sister . . . and the baby of the family, Ivo, a red-haired boy who’d come as a surprise after the duchess had assumed childbearing years were past her.
Phoebe paused at a tintype likeness of the duke and duchess seated together. Below it, the words “Lord and Lady St. Vincent” had been written. “This was taken before my father inherited the dukedom,” she said.
Kingston—Lord St. Vincent back then—sat with an arm draped along the back of the sofa, his face turned toward his wife. She was a lovely woman, with an endearing spray of freckles across her face and a smile as vulnerable as the heartbeat in an exposed wrist.
Keir’s gaze lifted to Phoebe’s classically beautiful face, with clean-chiseled angles inherited from her father. “You favor him more than her,” he said.
“You favor him more than anyone,” she replied gently. “The resemblance is too close to be coincidence. You can’t deny it.”
Keir let out a quiet groan. “I’m nothing like him or the rest of you. My world is different than yours.”
Phoebe’s mouth twisted. “One would think you’d been brought up on a pirate ship, or another planet. You’re Scottish, that’s all. You were only raised a few latitudes north of here.” She paused. “I’m not even sure you’re technically Scottish.”
Keir gave her a blank look.
“The only Celtic ancestors on the Challon side are Welsh,” she explained. “I’ve looked up your mother’s family, the Roystons and the Plaskitts, and according to Debrett’s Peerage, there’s no Scottish blood in either lineage.”
“I’m no’ a Scot?” he asked numbly.
Whatever Phoebe saw in his face caused her to say hastily, “I’ve only gone back two generations.”
Keir dropped his head in his hands.
“Is something wrong with your lungs?” Now she sounded worried. “You’re wheezing.”
He shook his head, breathing through his fingers.
“I’ll look farther up on your family tree,” he heard Phoebe say firmly. “I’ll find a Scottish ancestor. I have no doubt you’re as Scottish as . . . as a leprechaun wearing a kilt, riding a unicorn through a field of thistle.”
Keir looked up long enough to tell her dourly, “Leprechauns are Irish,” before he dropped his head again.
