A Gentleman Never Tells(19)
Suddenly, Brent remembered soft, willing lips pressed gently on his, luxuriously silky hair threading between his fingers, and an enticing breast flattened beneath his palm. When she was kissing him, he would have bet a hundred shillings she was an innocent, but now he wasn’t so sure. She had a fiancé, and if she had kissed Brent so wantonly, having just met him, there was always the possibility she’d gone much further with her fiancé. Not that it mattered to Brent what she’d done or with whom. He didn’t even know what the devil he was doing thinking about her again.
All he wanted to do was get this meeting with the duke behind him so he could go back to the park and concentrate on the more important matter of searching for Prissy while there was still a chance she was alive. He had vowed to keep the dog safe, and he was miffed at himself because he’d let the sweet lips of a tempting lady make him forget all about Prissy.
“But what man could have resisted her seduction?” he mumbled to himself.
Brent headed toward his bed but stopped when he heard the heavy stomp of booted feet running up the stairs. He knew what all that noise meant and, quite frankly, he wasn’t up to it.
The door swung open, hitting the wall with a bang. Brent’s identical twin brothers strode into his bedchamber as if they owned it, just the way they always had since they were two years old. Matson, the firstborn twin, plopped onto the middle of Brent’s bed and made himself comfortable by leaning against the headboard. The heels of his riding boots landed on Brent’s pressed white shirt. Iverson sauntered over to the brocade slipper chair, turned it around, and straddled the seat.
Raymond, Brent’s ever stiff and proper valet, walked calmly into the bedchamber behind them. “Excuse me, my lord. I explained to your brothers that you were preparing to leave for an appointment, but they insisted on seeing you immediately, and I couldn’t stop them.”
“No reason for you to try, Raymond. When they want to see me, they don’t let anything stand in their way. Thank you; that will be all.”
With all the correctness of a well-paid man, Raymond nodded once, turned around, and walked out, gently closing the door behind him. Brent would have had the fellow out looking for Prissy, too, but the man was so stiff and proper about everything he said and did, he would be completely useless combing the park.
Brent turned his attention to his brothers. They were tall, powerfully built men who wore their business success and breeding well. Even though he’d grown up with them, the only thing that made it possible for him to tell the two apart was the fact that, whether intentional or not, Iverson always wore his hair longer at the nape. And even though they were the spitting image of each other as far as looks, they couldn’t be more different in personalities. Iverson had always been the one to jump to conclusions, a ready to do battle hothead, and Matson a slow-to-action reasonable thinker.
It hadn’t been easy, but Brent had kept his mother’s secret for ten years. At the back of his mind, he knew the time would come when the twins would want to come to London. And before that happened, he had to tell them the man they had always thought to be their father wasn’t. And the man who had fathered them was very much alive and living in London.
As Brent looked at his brothers making themselves quite comfortable in his bedchamber, his mind drifted back to that stormy evening more than a month ago at his Brentwood estate.
Rain beat against the window panes, and the fire crackled and roared as Brent, Matson, and Iverson drank brandy in the drawing room, catching up on old times. It was the first time he’d seen them in the two years since their mother had died. They had come home to tell him they would be moving their shipping business from across the sea in Baltimore, Maryland, to London. Brent was getting nowhere in trying to talk them out of it.
“But why?” Brent asked for probably the twentieth time. “If your shipbuilding business is successful in Baltimore, why do you want to move it to London?”
“Damnation, Brent, why not?” Iverson said. “Only where we live will change, not the business itself.”
“Besides, England is our homeland,” Matson added. “We stayed in Baltimore only because our father started the business there and, for whatever reason, insisted we keep it there. Out of respect to Mama, we stayed there after he died. But she’s gone now, and we’re coming home. We never planned to live there a lifetime.”
“And quite frankly, Brent,” Iverson said, “we should have moved the company right after she passed.”