Читать книгу Secrets Of His Forbidden Cinderella - CAITLIN CREWS - Страница 10

HIS EXCELLENCY MATEO ENRIQUE ARMANDO DE LUZ, Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli, Grandee of Spain, and a man without peer—by definition and inclination alike—did not care for American women in general or the loathsome, avaricious Marie French in particular. He had viewed her corruption of his once proud father as a personal betrayal, and had celebrated their inevitable divorce as if it were his own narrow escape from the grasping woman’s mercenary clutches.

That his father had fallen for such a creature had been a deep humiliation Teo was terribly afraid stained him, too. They were de Luzes. They were not meant to topple before such crassness, much less marry it.

His father’s subsequent wives had, at the very least, been from a certain swathe of European aristocracy. Only Marie Force had managed to tempt the Eighteenth Duke into breaking from centuries of tradition. Only her, a coarse and common woman whose gold digging had already been a thing of legend.

Teo was the only heir to dukedom that had never been polluted in living memory—until Marie.

By extension, Teo had never cared for Marie’s daughter, either, with those same unearthly purple eyes that had always seemed to him a commentary on her character. Or decided lack thereof.

Even though Amelia had been little more than a child—sixteen is not precisely a toddler, came a contrary voice inside him that he chose to ignore—Teo had been certain her sins had been stamped upon her then, every new curve a bit of dark foreshadowing. With such a mother, she had only ever been destined to head in one direction.

“Pregnant,” he said, as if tasting the word.

“Coming up on eighteen weeks,” she replied, with rather appalling cheer. When he only gazed at her in disbelief, she continued. “If you count backward, you’ll find that it matches right up with the Masquerade.”

“Thank you, Miss Ransom,” Teo replied after a moment, in the frigid tones that usually made those around him quail, scrape and apologize. The woman standing just inside the door of his study looked notably unaffected. “I am capable of performing simple mathematical equations.”

All she did was smile. As if she doubted him, but was magnanimously keeping that opinion to herself.

It…irritated him. And Teo was rarely irritated by anything—because his life was arranged to avoid anything and anyone who might dare to annoy him in any way.

Perhaps he should have expected something like this. Pregnancy claims upon him were always and forever naked attempts to grab a chunk of the de Luz fortune and then bask in the glory of the many titles, honors and estates that went along with the name. It wasn’t really a surprise that this impertinent, insolent creature of questionable parentage had developed ideas above her station when she’d spent those mercifully brief years thrust into the exalted realm of his family.

Teo understood it, on some level. Who wouldn’t wish to be a de Luz?

Amelia Ransom, still cursed with those indecorous purple eyes, stood before him on a rug so old that its actual provenance was still hotly contested by the historians who periodically combed through the de Luz house and grounds and wrote operatic scholarly dissertations on the significance of the family collections. That she should be deeply shamed by her presence here—and the fact that the carpet beneath her feet boasted a pedigree while she did not—seemed not to have occurred to her.

Especially while she was issuing preposterous accusations. Involving fancy dress and dyed hair, of all things.

It was all so preposterous, in fact, that Teo could hardly rouse himself to reply further.

Because he was the current head of one of the most ancient houses in the world, and the favor of his time and good temper was not granted to any bedraggled creature who happened along and turned up at his door.

Not that many creatures, bedraggled or otherwise, usually dared “turn up” in his presence. Or managed to “happen along” in the first place even if they did dare, as he employed what he’d believed until now to be an excellent security service. He made a mental note to replace them. Before the next dawn.

And remembered as he did that Amelia’s mother had been notable chiefly for the things she’d dared. All of which she’d gone ahead and executed without the faintest notion of her own gaucheness.

Hadn’t he always known that her daughter would turn out just like her?

“I’ve learned many things since September,” said the creature before him. He had recognized her on sight, of course, though he had not intended to gift her with that knowledge. Because she should have assumed that she was entirely unworthy of his notice and his memory alike. Instead, she was talking at him in that same offensively friendly voice that made him think of overly bright, manic toothpaste commercials. “One of them—which you would think ought to go without saying—is don’t disguise yourself and have relations with your former stepbrother and think there won’t be repercussions.”

“I have yet to accept that any ‘relations’ occurred,” Teo said in what he thought was a mild voice, all things considered.

“Acceptance, or the lack of it, doesn’t change the facts,” Amelia replied, and Teo saw a glimpse of something steely in those garish eyes of hers. “And the fact is, I’m pregnant with your baby.”

“How convenient for you.”

He watched her from his position against his desk, where he felt significantly less at his ease than he had moments before. Amelia, meanwhile, did not seem particularly thrown by his reaction. There were no tears. No wilting or wailing, the way there normally was during outlandish pregnancy claims—if the reports he’d received were to be believed. If anything, she brightened.

“I’m informing you because it’s the right thing to do,” she told him, with a hint of self-righteous piety about her, then. “Not because I need or want you to do anything. Consider yourself informed.”

She turned then, and Teo almost let her go. Purely to see if she would do what he thought she meant to do, which was march straight off—but only so far, as it was difficult to extort money from a man once ejected from his presence. He assumed she knew it.

He decided he wouldn’t play her game. “Surely the point of disguising yourself, as you claim you did, and then deciding to have ‘relations’ with me under false pretenses, would be to stay. Not to flounce off because I’ve failed to respond as you would like.”

It would have been easy enough to find photos of the Masquerade, he told himself. He had danced with a luscious redhead, then disappeared with her for a time. Anyone might have guessed what they’d been up to.

That certainly didn’t mean that this woman was that redhead. His mind reeled away from that possibility even as his body readied itself, remembering.

Amelia waved a distinctly impolite hand in the air, and compounded the disrespect when she didn’t turn back to face him. “I don’t care what you do with the information, Teo. I think we can all agree that it’s appropriate to inform a man of his paternal rights. That’s all I wanted to do, it’s done, the end.”

“Surely a letter would have sufficed.”

She did turn then. Not all the way. She looked back over her shoulder, and he was struck against his will.

Hard.

Teo truly hadn’t believed that Amelia Ransom, of all possible people, was the mysterious woman he’d enjoyed so thoroughly at the Masquerade last fall. But he remembered…this. Almost exactly. The hair had been a bright red, the eyes a dramatic shade of green that now, in retrospect, he should have known was false, and she’d worn an intricate mask that took over the better part of her face. The mask had been a steam punk design and so intricate, in fact, that she’d claimed she couldn’t remove it—and he hadn’t cared, because her mouth had been sweet and hot, her hands had been wicked, and he’d had his fingers deep inside her clenching heat mere steps from his own damned party.

“Right,” she said. Drawled, really. And “disrespectful” didn’t begin to cover the tone she used. Or that direct stare. “Because you would have opened a letter that I sent.”

“Someone would have.”

“And believed it right away, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe it now, Miss Ransom. I’m not certain what you thought a personal visit would accomplish. All you have done is remind me of the low esteem in which I hold your entire family.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you don’t have a lot of feelings about my poor grandma in Nebraska. I doubt you know about her at all, so lowly is her existence next to this whole…display.” And Teo felt the umbrage of nearly twenty generations of de Luzes rise within him as she managed to do something with her face to indicate how little she thought of him, this grand house where history had been made and was still revered, and more or less everything he stood for. “So that low esteem, I’m guessing, is aimed directly at my mother.”

“Your mother is little better than a terrorist,” he retorted. Icily. “She sets herself a target, then destroys it.”

“Yes,” Amelia said drily. “This house is virtually rubble at our feet. It was the first thing I noticed.”

“Once she got her claws in him, my father was never the same.”

Teo discovered, with some consternation, that he was standing straight up from the desk when he hadn’t meant to move. More, he was far too tense, with the temper she did not deserve to see kicking through him.

“My condolences.” Amelia did not sound the least bit apologetic, much less sympathetic. “I must have misunderstood something. I thought he was Luis Calvo, the Eighteenth Duke of Marinceli, a man possessed of the same great wealth and immeasurable power you now wield. While my mother is…a mere divorcee. Who was the victim?”

“You must be joking. Calling Marie French ‘a divorcee’ is like calling a Tyrannosaurus rex a salamander.”

Amelia’s gaze flashed a deeper, darker shade of violet.

“There are very few things that I know to be incontrovertible truths,” she said. And though her voice was soft enough, her gaze seemed to slap at him. “But one of them is that wealthy men fend off paternity suits the way a normal person slaps down mosquitoes on a summer night. Since our parents actually were married, no matter what opinions you have about that union, I thought I owed you the courtesy of telling you in person.”

“Such courtesy. I am agog.”

She turned all the way around to face him then, but if he thought she would lower her gaze meekly, it was his turn for disappointment. Amelia held his gaze steadily, and Teo could admit he found it…surprising.

Not discomfiting. He was the Duke. He was not discomfited.

But the truth was that most people did not dare hold his gaze. Or not for very long. Most people, as a matter of fact, treated Teo with the deference due his title.

A deference he had come to believe was due to him, personally, as the holder of the title, because of course it was no easy thing to quietly command an empire while pretending he did nothing but waft about to charity balls. Thrones were for the powerless in these supposedly egalitarian times, and the de Luzes had always trafficked in influence and strength.

Teo was somehow unsurprised that it would be this bedraggled American, daughter to a woman so coldly mercenary that she was her own cottage industry, who not only dared—but kept staring him down.

As if he was a challenge she could win.

But the fact he was not surprised did not mean he liked it.

“What is it you want, Amelia?” he asked, aware that his tone was cool. The word of a de Luz had once been law. These days it merely sounded like the law, which was close enough.

She blinked at him as if he was…obtuse.

It was not a sensation he often had.

“I’ve already told you what I want. What you need to hear, at any rate. That’s all I wanted. To tell you.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart. You wished to inform me of my supposed paternity, and then…what? Blow away like smoke in the wind?”

“Nothing quite so poetic. I thought I’d go back home to San Francisco. Try to enjoy the rest of my pregnancy and prepare for life as a single mother.”

And she smiled sweetly at him, though he would have to truly be obtuse not to hear the decided lack of sweetness in her voice.

“I see. You are keeping this miraculous child, then?”

She tilted her head slightly to one side, her gaze quizzical. “I wouldn’t trouble myself with coming all this way, then storming your very gate—literally—if I wasn’t planning on keeping it. Would I?”

It was Teo’s turn to smile. Like one of the swords that hung on his walls, relics of the wars his ancestors had won.

“It is with great pleasure, Miss Ransom, that I tell you I have not the slightest idea what you would or would not do in any given circumstance.”

“Now you do.”

“I’m taken aback, you see.”

He had already straightened from his desk, and he suddenly found himself uncertain what to do with his hands. It was such a strange sensation that he frowned, then thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as he would normally. It was almost as if he wanted to do something else with them.

But no. He might have shared a few explosive moments of pleasure with this woman—a circumstance he had yet to fully take on board—but he was a grown man stitched together with duties and responsibilities. He did not have the option to be led around by his urges.

“That must feel like a revolution,” Amelia said. Rather tartly, to his ear. “What’s next? Will the serfs rise up? Will they march on their feudal lord?”

“You seem to have mistaken the century.”

“Right.” Again, that insolent drawl. She made a great show of looking all around her, as if she could cast her glinting eye into every corner of the rambling house that had stood here—in one form or another—for so many centuries. “I’m the one stuck in the wrong century. Got it.”

“What astounds me is the altruism of your claim,” he said, finding his temper rather thinner than he liked. When normally he prided himself on being the sort of lion who did not concern himself overmuch with the existence of sheep, much less their opinions. “Out of the goodness of your heart, you chose to come here and share this news with me. That would make you the one woman in the world to claim she carries an heir to the Dukedom of Marinceli, yet has no apparent intention of claiming any piece of it.”

“I’m hoping it’s a girl, actually,” the maddening woman responded. In a tone he would have called bland if he couldn’t see her face. And that expression that seemed wired directly to the place where his temper beat at him, there beneath his skin. “If I remember my time here—and in truth, I prefer to block it out—there has never been a Duchess of Marinceli. Only Dukes. One after the next, toppling their way through history like loose cannons while pretending they’re at the center of it.”

His temper kicked harder. And he found he had to unclench his jaw to speak. “If you do not wish to make a bid for the dukedom, and you claim your only motivation is to inform me of this dubious claim of yours, I am again unclear why this required a personal audience.”

“I was under the impression that this was the kind of thing that was best addressed in person,” she said. Very distinctly. As if she thought he was slow. “Forgive me for daring to imagine that you might be an actual, real, live human being instead of this…caricature.”

“I am the Duke of Marinceli. The doings of regular people do not concern me.”

She rolled her eyes. At him.

Teo was so astonished at her temerity that he could only stare back at her.

“Noted,” she said, in that bored, rude way that he remembered distinctly from her teen years. Though it seemed far more pointed now. “You are now informed. When you receive the legal documents, you can sign them happily and in private, and we can pretend this never happened.”

“I beg your pardon? Legal documents?”

Amelia folded her arms, and regarded him steadily, as if he was challenging her in some way. And Teo was beginning to suspect that what beat in him was not strictly temper.

“Of course, legal documents,” she chided him. She chided him. “What did you think? That I would trust you to let this go?”

“Let this go?” he repeated. And then he actually laughed. “Miss Ransom. Do you have any idea how many enterprising women, whether they have enjoyed access to my charms or not, take it upon themselves to claim that I have somehow fathered their child?”

“You’re welcome to treat me like one of them. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy if you thought I was lying.”

Teo hadn’t really made a determination, not yet. He hadn’t let himself connect his mysterious redhead to this…disaster. Or he hadn’t wanted to let himself. But there was something about the way she said that that kicked at him. As if she really, truly wanted him to dismiss her. And that was so different from the other women who had turned up over the course of his life to make their outlandish claims that it made something deep inside him…slide to the left. A simple, subtle shift.

But it changed everything.

“We will determine if you are lying the same way we determine any other claim,” he managed to say despite that…shift.

“What does that mean? Ritual sacrifices? Forced marches? The dungeons?”

He lifted a brow. “A simple paternity test, Miss Ransom. The dungeons haven’t been functional for at least a hundred years.”

“I can take any test you like,” she said after a moment. “Though that seems like a waste.”

“Funnily enough, to me it doesn’t seem like a waste at all. It seems critical.”

She shrugged. “We can prove that you’re the father if you like, but I’m only going to want you to sign documentation giving up your parental rights.”

And something in him stuttered, then slammed down. Like the weight of the whole of this monstrous house he called his home, loved unreservedly and sometimes thought might well be the death of him.

“Miss Ransom,” he said, making her name yet another icy weapon. “You cannot possibly believe that if you are indeed carrying my child—the firstborn child of the Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli—that I would abdicate my responsibilities. Perhaps your time here as a child—”

“Hardly a child. I was a teenager.”

But Teo did not want to think about the teenager she’d been, too curvy and unconsciously ripe.

Had he noticed her then? He didn’t think he had, but it was all muddled now. The girl he’d tried to ignore and the redheaded witch who had beguiled him into losing his head were tangled around each other and thrust, somehow, into this pale woman who stood before him with her blond hair flowing about her shoulders, not the faintest trace of makeup on her hauntingly pretty face, and eyes the color of bougainvillea.

He was forced to accept that it was not merely his temper that seethed in him.

But he kept speaking, as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Whatever age you were, we clearly failed to impress upon you the simple fact that the members of my family take their bloodlines very seriously indeed.”

“I’m well aware.” And there was something in her gaze then, and in the twist of her lips. It dawned on him, though he could hardly credit it, that the august lineage of his family was not, in fact, impressive to her. “But if I recall correctly, you’re the person who, upon the occasion of our parents’ wedding, loudly proclaimed your deep and abiding joy that my mother was too old to—how did you put it?—oh, yes. ‘Pollute the blood with her spawn.’ I can only assume that any child of mine would be similarly polluted at birth. You should disavow us both now, while you can still remain pristine.”

It took Teo a long moment to identify the hot, distinctly uncomfortable sensation that rolled in him then. At twenty-six he’d had a sense of his own importance, but had imagined his own father would be immortal. His recollection of their parents’ wedding—evidence that his once irreproachable father had lost it completely, a deep betrayal of everything Teo had ever been taught, and a slap against his mother’s memory—was that he had been quietly disapproving. Not that he had actually said the things he’d thought out loud.

“I don’t recall making such a toast,” he said now. Stiffly. “Not because such sentiments are anathema to me, of course. But because it would be impolite.”

“You didn’t make a toast. Heaven forbid. But you did make sure I heard you say it to one of the other guests.” And he might have thought that it hurt her feelings, but she disabused him of that notion in the next moment by aiming that edgy smile of hers at him. “In any case, I thought it would be impolite not to tell you about this pregnancy.”

Teo didn’t care for the way she emphasized that word.

“But it can end here,” Amelia said, merrily. “No legal pollutants to the grand Marinceli line. I’m sure that in time, you’ll find an appropriately inbred, blue-blooded heiress to pop out some overly titled and commensurately entitled heirs who will suit your high opinion of yourself much better.”

Teo had never heard his duties to his title and his family’s history broken down quite so disrespectfully before. It was…bracing, really. Like a blast of cleansing winter air after too long cooped up in an overheated room.

She claimed she was pregnant, and he couldn’t dismiss the claim, because it seemed likely—however impossible and no matter how he wished it untrue—that she really had been the redheaded woman he had sampled the night of the Marinceli Masquerade.

More than sampled. He had been deep inside her, sunk to the hilt, and had woken the following morning wanting much, much more—another unusual sensation.

But this was not the time to lapse off into that cloud of lust—a cloud he now knew was deeply inappropriate and, if she was telling the truth about her pregnancy and his paternity, might well have already changed the course of his meticulously plotted life. It didn’t matter why she’d come here or what game she was playing.

Teo wanted answers.

He prowled away from the desk, moving toward the chairs that sat before the fire. “Come in. Remove your coat. Sit, for a moment, as you deliver these little atom bombs of yours.”

He made that sound like an invitation. A request. It was neither.

Amelia did not move. She stood where she was, still just inside the door, and…scowled at him.

Teo was certainly not used to people contorting their face into any but the most obsequious and servile expressions, but that, too, was not the issue here. He reached one of the chairs, and waved his hand at it.

“Sit, please,” he said, and this time, it sounded far more like the order it was.

Amelia continued to scowl at him in obvious suspicion. But despite that, she moved closer. With obvious reluctance. In itself another insult.

“Most people consider it an honor to be in my presence,” he told her drily.

She sniffed. “They must not know you.”

And Teo’s memory was returning to him, slowly but surely. He normally preferred to pretend those years hadn’t happened. Those embarrassing, American years, when Marie French had draped herself over the priceless furniture, and laughed in that common, coarse way of hers. But now he had the faintest inklings of recollection where the daughter was concerned, and not only about those problematic curves.

Amelia had not faded quietly into the background, as would have been expected of any other girl her age. Not Marie French’s daughter. He had the sudden, surprisingly uncomfortable memory of the uppity little chit mouthing off. Not only to him, which was unaccountable, but on occasion to his father, as well.

Which was unacceptable.

He couldn’t say he much cared for either the recollection or a repeat of it now.

Amelia took her time moving across the floor, and then even more time shrugging out of her coat. Then, not to be outdone—and not to obey him totally under any circumstances—she then held it to her as if it was a shield as she sat down in the armchair Teo had indicated.

He took his time seating himself opposite her, putting together the pieces. If he squinted, he could see the pieces of the wild redhead who had made the tedious Masquerade that tradition insisted he throw far more entertaining than usual. He wished his body wasn’t so delighted at her return. It could only cloud the issue all over again.