“Nick.” He looked up. His father was standing in the hall, Crouch helping him on with his coat. “Nick, come with me a moment; I wish to speak with you.”

Nick watched as father took his hat, gloves, and stick, then waved him toward the library. He sighed. There would be no help from that quarter. He had failed his father just as he had failed his mother.

“Your stepmother wishes you to accompany her on her calls this morning. I am sure that you would much rather be attending your lessons, but I have given my permission for you to go with her. It goes without saying that I expect you to act in a manner befitting my son.”

Nick closed his ears to the rest of the lecture. He’d heard it before. Sometimes the words changed, but the meaning was always the same. He was to behave in a manner befitting his father’s station. That was of the utmost importance, just as Nanny Williams had said it was. “Your papa’s an earl, and that’s a very important man,” she had told him. “Someday he’ll have a son to follow in his footsteps and be an earl after him, but until then, he’s got you, so you’d best do him as proud as you can. Not that it matters, in the end, since you can’t be the son he needs, but still, you’re here, so you’d best be showing your papa how grateful you are that he recognizes you.”

“Nick.” He looked up to find his father squatting before him, the big hands warm on his knees. “Nick, you do like Gillian, do you not?”

He nodded.

“Good. I like her too. I think—” His father stopped, looking toward the library doors, a wistful expression on his face. Nick had never seen it before, but the sight of it made something deep inside him want to hug his father, and be hugged in return. “I think she likes us too.”

Two pairs of almost identical gray eyes surveyed one another for a moment, exchanging thoughts and emotions without words. Nick blinked back the wetness in his eyes when his father suddenly took him in his arms and squeezed him tight. He buried his face against the stiff neck cloth and wrapped his arms around his father’s neck.

Maybe things would turn out all right after all. Clasped firmly in his papa’s arms, Nick did something he hadn’t done in almost five years. He began to hope.

Six

“Honestly, Gilly, I thought Mama would never leave us!” Charlotte said, slumping back against a watered-silk rose settee and kicking off her slippers.

“I think she just wanted to gossip a little, Char,” Gillian said with a smile, watching as Nick sat on the floor, his knees to his chin as he contemplated Roget, Charlotte’s bad-tempered cat. “You forget that I am now a countess, and therefore someone worth gossiping with.”

Charlotte snorted and threw a fat pillow at her cousin. “Stop your gloating and tell me how you are.”