The Worthington Wife Read online

“Champagne cocktails,” Diana said. She took several long swallows.

  “Diana—” Julia frowned. “You should slow down.” Diana had been drinking much too much of late. They had been in London together last week and she’d rescued a drunken Diana from a party and taken her to the Savoy to keep Diana from getting behind the wheel and driving when she could barely stand.

  “It’s for courage,” Diana protested. “They found the heir and he’s coming here to see exactly what he’s inherited—what he gets to take away from us.”

  Diana’s ominous words made Julia shiver. The heir to Worthington had been found. After the old earl had died at the end of the War, Anthony’s younger brother, John, had inherited the title. Tragically, John Carstairs had died a year ago in a car crash and the hunt had begun for the next in line to the title.

  “What do you mean, what he gets to take away from you?”

  “Mummy believes this man—who’s American—will turn us out to starve. He hates us all.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  Diana drained her cocktail. “It’s all very thrilling. His mother was Irish, a maid working in a house in New York City. My grandmother disowned her younger son—my uncle—over the marriage and the family cut off all ties. It left them in poverty. So Mummy fears he will throw us out into poverty now.”

  “Surely your mother is wrong. That was years ago, and it was not your fault. This man can’t still be bitter and mean to be so harsh.” Now Julia saw how pale her friend was beneath her rouge. She was truly afraid. “Diana, it would be ridiculous. After a World War, this man must see that family feuds are utterly meaningless. He must have a decent nature that can be appealed to.”

  “Mummy doesn’t think so. And to protect us, Mummy wants me to marry him. He is my cousin, but royal cousins marry all the time, including first cousins. It would all be quite legal.”

  “This is 1925. No one will force you to marry, Diana, against your will.”

  Diana laughed a cold, jaded laugh that sent another chill down Julia’s spine. “The thing is—I am willing to marry him. By all reports, he’s quite handsome. He’s going to be an earl. Master of my home. If one of my brothers had become the earl, I would have had to marry to survive. It’s what women like us have to do. And this way I can have everything—a rather sexy husband, the title of countess and the home I grew up in.”

  How strong were these cocktails? “But you haven’t even met this man. Don’t let your mother push you into something ill-advised.”

  “I’ve decided that I really must have a husband. And there are so few men left for us. The War took them from us.” Suddenly Diana grasped her forearm. “I need you to help me, Julia. He’s arriving in time for dinner, then he’s going to stay. I must convince him to propose.”

  Julia looked at Diana’s worried face and huge blue eyes. “I suspect he will fall in love with you the first moment he sees you.”

  “He won’t. He really does hate us because the family cut his father off. Apparently, this Cal holds rather a grudge. He doesn’t even use his real name. That’s why it took so long to find him. He goes by his mother’s maiden name of Brody.”

  The footman came past and Diana snatched another cocktail. “I think convincing him to marry me might prove a challenge. Because, you see, I have to convince him to like me.”

  “Why shouldn’t he like you?”

  “Because...well, isn’t it obvious? He will see me as the privileged daughter who had everything while his family lived in squalor. I need to be more like you, Julia. Doing good works and such. Mummy is going to try every trick in the book to force a marriage, but her ideas will be crude and obvious. They will be the kind of plots intended to work on Englishmen with a sense of honor and obligation. I don’t think that’s going to work on an angry American.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Diana waved her hand and champagne sloshed over the glass. “Oh, Mummy would think that if the American was found in my bedroom, he would feel he had to marry me. She’s dreadfully Victorian when it comes to scheming. My plan is to be the sort of woman he can admire. Of course I have no idea what sort of woman that is. Maybe it isn’t the noble saint. Maybe he would like a bad girl. You observe people and understand them. Figure out the kind of woman he wants and help me to convince him I’m that woman.”

  “Diana, this is mad. How can you possibly want to marry a man you do not know—” and apparently fear “—based on trying to be someone you are not?”

  The Countess of Worthington was approaching and Diana put her lips right beside Julia’s ear. “Darling, I’m pregnant,” she whispered. “I have to marry. I have to.”

  Pregnant? Julia floundered to think of something to say, but Diana looked to the door and said, in husky tones, “Oh Lord, it’s the American. He’s arrived.”

  The butler, Wiggins, looked as if he’d sucked on a lemon, but he cleared his throat, gave a glance of complete disdain at the astonishing-looking man beside him—he had to look up to do it—and announced, “His lordship, the Earl of Worthington.”

  “It’s Cal,” the man said. A slow, wicked grin curved his mouth as if he was enjoying himself immensely.

  “Oh, good heavens,” the countess moaned quietly. “He looks like he was found in a ditch. How can this man be the earl instead of my sons?” Unsteady suddenly, she almost fell over. Julia hastened to the countess’s side and supported her.

  The man who called himself Cal stood well over six feet tall. A threadbare blue sweater stretched across his chest, topped by a worn and faded leather coat. He wore a laborer’s rough trousers. His black boots had never seen a lick of polish.

  His tanned face set off his golden hair, which was slicked back with pomade, but light, shimmering strands fell over his eyes. Eyes of the purest, most stunning blue. Vivid and magnetic, they looked like a blue created by an artist, as if they could never be real.

  He looked a great deal like Anthony. But the new earl was more grizzled, his features sharper and more intense. His nose had a bit of a kink to it, as if it had once been broken.

  The entire room had gone silent, staring at him in shock and horror. As if a bear had wandered into the drawing room.

  For a fleeting moment, Julia saw the American’s expression change. The confident smile vanished and a look of hard anger came to his eyes.

  Was this evidence of his bitterness? Or perhaps these were all the clothes he had and their shock had hurt him.

  Julia helped the countess down to the settee, next to her grandmother.

  Then she realized the silence had stretched from awkward to insulting.

  No one seemed to know what to do with the earl—Cal—so she smiled at him and stepped forward. She curtsied. “How delightful to have you arrive and I do hope your journey was not too taxing. Shall I have one of the footmen show you to your bedchamber so you can change for dinner? Perhaps you would care to freshen up.”

  Stubble graced his jaw, as if he had not shaved for days. Up close, she saw how different he looked from Anthony. He looked too challenging, too bold.

  At her small speech of welcome, his golden brows lifted. “My journey wasn’t ‘taxing’ as you put it. I know you aren’t the countess. Are you one of my cousins?”

  “No, I am a friend of the family. We are neighbors. I am Julia Hazelton. I was engaged to be married to Anthony, who was your cousin, but Anthony was killed at the Somme.” She rushed through that bit, giving herself no time to dwell on the words. “Allow me to do the introductions—and if there’s a name you forget, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Aren’t you the sweetheart, Julia?”

  The countess made a horrible pained sound. Julia heard her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Langford, sputter in outrage.

  The mocking tone in his voice made her wary, but she made the intro
ductions of all those in the room. The eligible bachelors had not yet arrived, so it was just the Carstairs family—the countess, Diana and the two other daughters, Cassia and Thalia. And Julia’s family.

  Zoe greeted Cal with open American charm, welcoming him. Nigel accepted his handshake. Her mother and Grandmama threw looks of sympathy toward the Countess of Worthington. Diana and her younger sisters curtsied.

  Julia struggled to not stare at Diana’s waist beneath her gold dress. She feared if she did, everyone would read her mind and know her friend’s secret. It might be 1925, but to bear a child out of marriage meant a woman was ruined forever.

  Would Diana really marry Cal and keep her secret? Julia turned her gaze to Cal. Would her friend really marry him on such an enormous lie?

  Goodness, she had looked at him for far longer than was polite—and he was staring right back at her. With anger crackling in his blue eyes. She smiled calmly at him, though inside her stomach fluttered with shock.

  She had grown up around Englishmen—they either showed no emotion at all or they clumsily displayed it. But the energy and emotion—and fury—that seemed to sizzle around this man stunned her.

  Was Lady Worthington right? Did he mean to hurt them? Julia would never stand for that. She simply wouldn’t.

  He still held her gaze. “I’d better go and get dressed,” he said.

  Wiggins, the butler, moved close to him. “If you need to avail yourself of evening dress, I do believe there are clothes belonging to the late earl that would fit you—”

  “I don’t need them. I’ve got my own sets of fancy duds.” The anger seemed to abate. His unhurried, naughty grin dazzled again. “I like dressing like this, because I don’t need to impress anyone with what I wear. I don’t judge a man by his suit. I judge him by his actions.”

  Julia saw her grandmother lift her lorgnette. “Appropriate dress is an action,” the dowager pointed out haughtily.

  “I suppose it is.” Cal turned his stunning smile onto Grandmama. “But I know how to clean up when I want to.”

  Then he was gone. Julia’s heart was pounding. For some reason, the man set her pulse racing.

  “He is awful, isn’t he?”

  The whisper by her ear startled her. Diana stood at her side, and bit her lip. “He’s so rough and uncouth and common. I don’t want to marry him, but at the same time...I can’t help wanting him.”

  “Wanting him?” Julia echoed, confused.

  “You know...in bed.”

  “Diana!” Julia exclaimed in a horrified whisper.

  2

  The American’s Revenge

  As the butler led him to his bedroom, Calvin Urqhart Patrick Carstairs—now the 7th Earl of Worthington—remembered the shock on Lady Worthington’s face when he walked into the drawing room and grinned.

  A month ago, he had been woken from a hangover, hauled out of his bed in his apartment in Paris and told by a pale, nervous young lawyer named Smithson that he had inherited a title, three estates and the contents of four modestly invested bank accounts from the family who thought he wasn’t good enough to lick their boots.

  The lawyer who tracked him down had stammered and blushed throughout the meeting. Cal’s latest model, Simone, had been walking around the room half-naked. She liked to feel sunlight pouring through the window on her bare breasts, and she liked to keep Cal looking at her. The lawyer had looked like his eyes were going to leap out of his head.

  Cal had poured himself a glass of red wine to clear the hangover, then he’d let the lawyer explain his supposed good fortune—

  “The master’s apartments have been prepared, my lord.”

  The snooty tones of the Worthington butler brought Cal back to the present. The man had his hand on the doorknob of the room, but wasn’t opening it. Maybe he hoped to learn it was all a joke before he let Cal across the threshold of the earl’s bedroom.

  It was a double door, so Cal shoved the other door open and walked in.

  His trunk and his case were already in the room. The butler pointed out the bed, probably assuming he had no idea what a bed looked like if it wasn’t a dirty mattress on the floor. The man opened the doors to the bathing room and the dressing room, as well as a small room with large windows where the earl would traditionally retire to prepare his correspondence.

  “It’ll do,” Cal said indifferently.

  Haughtily, the butler tried to look down his nose at Cal—though his eyes came up to Cal’s shoulders. “Is your manservant traveling with you?”

  “Don’t have one,” Cal replied, and he laughed at the look of smug satisfaction on the butler’s face. “I’m bohemian. Wild and uncivilized. If you think you’ve been proven right about me because I don’t have a valet, wait until I start holding orgies in the ballroom.”

  The butler turned several fascinating colors. His cheeks went vermilion, his forehead was puce and he developed an intriguing blend of violet and scarlet on his neck.

  It gave Cal the itch to create a modernist portrait of an English butler, done in severe blocks of color. Red, purple, yellow-green and stark white.

  “When should I tell the countess you will return downstairs?” the man asked, sounding as if his windpipe wasn’t drawing air. “I will send a footman to unpack.”

  “I won’t stay up here long. The footman can finish that job while I’m at dinner.”

  “Very good.”

  The butler turned away and stalked toward the door, but before he reached it, Cal called, “Wait.”

  The man turned, lifting his brow self-importantly.

  “The dark-haired woman with the pretty blue eyes—Julia Hazelton. Was she really my cousin’s fiancée? Anthony died at the Somme, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes. We lost Lord Anthony to that battle. Indeed, Lady Julia Hazelton was his intended. It was a tragedy, devastating to us all.”

  Yeah, Cal imagined it would be, since he was standing here now. “Why is she here?”

  “Her family was invited to dine, and she is a close friend of the family.”

  “Did she find someone else—after my cousin died?”

  “Lady Julia is still unmarried, my lord. If I may ask, what is the purpose to these questions, my lord?”

  “I’m curious,” he answered easily. “And if you’re going to ask a question anyway, don’t waste time asking permission to do it.”

  The butler, whatever the hell his name was, glared snootily. “Very good, my lord.” Bowing, he retreated.

  The door closed behind the butler’s stiff arse.

  For the hell of it, Cal jumped on the bed, landing on his arse in his dusty trousers. He crossed his ankles, his boots on the bed.

  He could just hear how his mother would berate him for that, so he slid off.

  He went into the bathroom to wash and shave. Showing up scruffy had been his plan and it had served its purpose. The Countess of Worthington, his aunt, had looked like she was going to faint. She would expect him to show up at dinner looking equally bohemian and she would expect that he would have the table manners of an orangutan.

  His family had stared at him with suspicion. He’d seen condescension on the countess’s face, resentment on the faces of his cousins. His family had all glared at him, sullen, angry...and scared.

  Lady Julia had been the only one to welcome him. She had been the perfect English lady to him, polite and unflustered.

  Traits he should have hated, given how he knew the aristocracy really behaved. She was likely no different than the rest of them. Masking her disdain behind a polite, reserved smile.

  But she had been nice to him. And his mother would say that she didn’t deserve to have him judge her—and dislike her—just because of who she was.

  Cal opened the bag that contained his straight razor and he filled
the small sink with some water—

  Hell. That was freezing cold. He ran the other tap, but it didn’t get any warmer. Cold-water shaving it would have to be.

  He drew the sharp blade along his cheek, slicing off dark blond stubble. He had been looking forward to this ever since that morning when he’d been drinking while the lawyer was outlining the meaning of his new position.

  At first he’d wanted to tell the young lawyer with the slicked-back hair to go back to the damned countess and tell her where she and her snobby family could stick their title.

  They had disowned his father; they had rejected and vilified his mother for the sin of being an honest, decent woman from a poor family. His mother, Molly Brody, had gone into service to a rich family on Fifth Avenue; his father had been a guest. The usual story. Except his father, Lawrence Carstairs, had been idealistic. He’d fallen in love with the maid he seduced and married her.

  Then his father had died. And his mother had gotten sick...

  Cal had been fourteen years of age, with a younger brother who was eleven. That was the only reason he’d swallowed his pride and begged the damn Carstairs family for help. He’d been a desperate boy trying to save his mother’s life. And they’d refused. To them, he and his mother and his brother, David, didn’t exist.

  Clearing his throat, the young lawyer had asked him when he would like to book passage back to England.

  Cal had been ready to laugh in the face of Smithson Jr. of Smithson, Landers, Kendrick and Smithson. Go to England? He liked painting. He liked Paris. He’d finally found a place where he felt he belonged. He was happy in Paris whether he was sober or drunk, which he felt was a hell of an accomplishment.

  “When you take up residence at Worthington Park, there is a dower house available for the countess,” Smithson had explained, after pulling at his tie. Simone had come into the kitchen and stood in front of the window so the sunlight limned her naked breasts. Blushing, the lawyer had said, “Should I relay your instruction to have it made ready?”

  “For what?” he’d asked.

  “For the countess to move into, when you take up residence in your new home.”