“I’m sorry, madam.”
Gripping her cane with her right hand and clutching his coat sleeve with her left, Olivia let him guide her slowly toward the house, where Cecil’s butler was already waiting in the lighted doorway. “Do try to eat more, Granger. I used to buy a new car for what clothing costs these days.”
“Yes, madam.” As he helped her up the three flagstone steps that led to the front door, he said, “How will you let me know when you wish me to come for you?”
Olivia halted, stiffened, and glowered ferociously at him. “Do not even consider leaving this driveway!” she warned. “We, at least, shall not accede to the whims of a petty tyrant. Park over there under the porte cochere.”
Cecil’s butler heard that and coolly countermanded the order as he reached out to help her remove her coat. “Your car is to wait outside the gates, not under the porte cochere,” he informed her imperiously as Granger turned and began making his slow way back to the flagstone steps. “Please instruct your driver—”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort!” she interrupted scathingly, thrusting her cane at him and struggling out of her coat herself. “Granger,” she called after him.
Granger turned on the second step and looked at her, his silver brows raised inquiringly.
“While you are parked under the porte cochere, if anyone approaches you, you are to run over them with my car!” Satisfied, she gave the butler a frosty stare. “There’s a black foreign sports car parked under the porte cochere,” she said. “To whom does it belong?”
“Mr. Mitchell Wyatt,” the butler replied.
“I knew it would be his!” Olivia exclaimed gleefully, shoving her coat at the butler and snatching her cane out of his grasp. “He is not subject to the whims of a petty tyrant, either,” she proudly informed him. Leaning heavily on her cane, she began making her awkward way across the foyer’s uneven slate floor, toward the sound of voices in the living room. Behind her, the butler said, “Mr. Cecil said you are to await him in his study.”
Despite her brief show of bravado, Olivia was uneasy about confronting her formidable brother in private. He had an uncanny way of anticipating defiance, even before an outward act took place. Rather than go directly to his study, she angled toward the living room on the left. Stopping beneath the arched entry, she craned her head, hoping to catch sight of an ally—an exceptionally tall, dark-haired man who’d also defied Cecil’s order and parked his own car under the porte cochere.
The living room was crowded with guests, but there was no sign of Mitchell, nor in the dining room, where more guests were partaking of a lavish buffet. She was retracing her steps back through the living room when Cecil glanced up from the people talking to him and saw her. He stared at her with the cool, speculating expression of a long-standing opponent; then with a curt jerk of his head in the direction of his study, he ordered her to get herself there at once. Olivia put her chin up, but she complied.
Cecil’s study was on the opposite side of the slate hallway from the living room, beyond the main staircase and toward the rear of the house. Normally, the heavy paneled study doors were closed during large parties to discourage guests from congregating in Cecil’s private domain, but tonight a thin strip of mellow light glowed from between them. With one hand on the door handle, Olivia paused to give her legs and lungs a brief rest; then she straightened her back, lifted her head—and froze in surprise at the scene revealed to her in that narrow shaft of light.
Mitchell had his arms around William’s wife, and Caroline’s cheek was pressed against his chest, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this,” she said brokenly, lifting her face to his.
“We have no choice,” he said flatly, but not unkindly.
Olivia’s momentary shock gave way to sympathetic understanding. Poor Caroline looked as thin and pale as a waif. Naturally, she’d seek comfort and support from a male family member, but her profligate father was honeymooning somewhere in Europe with his fifth wife, and Cecil would offer her only more of his terse lectures on the need to show strength in times of travail. Caroline’s fourteen-year-old son needed all the comfort his mother could give him, and Caroline put on a brave face for him, but she had no one to lean on herself—no one except Mitchell.
Olivia felt a rush of gratitude that Mitchell had come into the Wyatt family fold at exactly the right time to help Caroline and Cecil through their grief. Unfortunately, Olivia had the feeling Mitchell wouldn’t “help” Cecil out of a burning house if he had a choice. He obviously had no desire to further a relationship with his family or meet any of their friends, and—worst of all—Olivia was quite certain he intended to leave Chicago very soon and without a word of warning to anyone except Caroline.
Olivia understood exactly why he felt as he did. The Wyatts had disposed of Mitchell as an infant as if he had been nothing but an offensive piece of litter cluttering up their perfect, tidy lives. She’d known a little about the fate of Edward’s unwanted baby long ago, and Olivia had done nothing to change it; therefore, she accepted Mitchell’s contempt for her as her just deserts. What she could not accept was the thought of his leaving Chicago too soon. She wanted him to get to know her first and realize he could trust her. She wanted him to call her “Aunt Olivia” before he went away. Just one “Aunt Olivia” before he left, and she’d be satisfied. But there was something else Olivia wanted much more, something she had to have from him before it was too late: forgiveness.
At the moment, however, her most pressing concern was that Cecil might stalk up behind her, yank open the doors to his study, and put an entirely wrong interpretation on the scene inside. Rather than barging in on the couple and, in so doing, make Caroline feel guilty and force Mitchell to give unnecessary explanations, Olivia decided to alert them to her impending arrival. Accordingly, she banged her cane on the heavy door as she fumbled with the latch, and then for good measure, she held her cane out in front of her like a blind person’s walking stick and entered the study, tapping and poking at the oak floor, her gaze fixed upon the old planks as if they weren’t to be trusted with her weight.
“Do you need more light?” Mitchell asked.
Olivia raised her head as if surprised by his presence, but it was the irony in Mitchell’s voice that startled her. He stood in front of the fireplace, exactly where he’d been before, but Caroline had dropped into a nearby chair. Olivia’s heart ached at the sight of the dark smudges beneath her hazel eyes. “My poor child,” she said, laying her hand on Caroline’s golden hair.
Caroline tilted her head back and pressed Olivia’s hand to her cheek instead. “Aunt Olivia,” she said in a forlorn voice.
Olivia would have stayed at Caroline’s side, but she realized Mitchell had stepped back from the fireplace and was idly surveying the study’s many portraits. The large room was a veritable shrine to the Wyatts, with framed portraits of every size and description crowding the walls and covering the mantel. This was the first overt indication she’d seen him give that he had any interest whatsoever in any of the Wyatts—or at least Olivia wanted to think this was an indication of interest. “That is your great-grandfather,” she told him, moving to his side and gesturing to the portrait above the fireplace. “Do you see the resemblance?”
“To what?” he said, deliberately mocking the notion.
“To you,” Olivia persevered stubbornly, but he shot her a cold warning glance—one that looked exactly like those warning glances of his great-grandfather’s; then he slid one hand into his pants pocket and strolled a few paces away. Olivia heeded his warning, but she watched him from the corner of her eye, hoping for another opportunity to chip away at his glacial defenses if he showed interest in a different portrait.
Cecil always kept people waiting; it proved his superiority over them. Normally it annoyed Olivia when he did it to her, but now she hoped he’d keep them waiting here for an hour. A few moments later, Mitchell paused to study another portrait, an
d Olivia hurried to join him; then she gaped at the picture he’d singled out. It was a portrait of a girl seated demurely on a garden swing, with pink rosebuds twined in her long hair and silk ones embroidered on the skirt of her white dress. Mitchell slanted Olivia a sidewise look. “You?” he asked.
“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “How did you figure that out? I was barely fifteen at the time.”
Instead of answering, he nodded toward another portrait. “And that’s you as well?”
“Yes, I was twenty, and I’d just become engaged to Mr. Hebert. That’s him, right there. Our portraits were made the same day.”
“You don’t look quite as happy about the engagement as he does.”
“I wasn’t,” Olivia confided, forgetting that she had intended to draw Mitchell out and not the reverse. “I thought he and his family were a little … stuffy.”
That brought a fascinated smile from him. “Why did you think they were ‘stuffy’?” he asked, turning the full force of his undivided attention on her.
“It—it seems silly now, but one of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and another ancestor was a general in the Civil War, and I felt his family made too much of that—you know, boasted about it in an unseemly way.”
“Appalling behavior,” he agreed with amused gravity.
Basking in the glow of bantering with him, Olivia endeavored to do more of it. “Yes, it was. I mean, it wasn’t as if they came over on the Mayflower!”
“I’m sure they tried,” Mitchell joked, “but it was a small ship, and they probably couldn’t get reservations.”
“Well, if they couldn’t,” Olivia confided, leaning closer to him, “it’s because we were already on it!”
He laughed, and Olivia lost her head and blurted out her thought: “The Wyatt men are a handsome lot, but in my day, we would have called you a dreamboat, young man.”
His expression chilled the instant she implied that he was one of the Wyatt men, and Olivia was so desperate to recover the ground she’d lost that she pointed out a feature his forebears did not possess. “They all have brown eyes, too, but your eyes are blue.”
“I wonder how that happened,” he said in a bored drawl.
“Your moth—” Olivia cut the sentence off; then she changed her mind and decided he had a right to know. Might even want to know. “I remember that your mother had beautiful, deep blue eyes. I’d never seen eyes as blue as hers before or since—until now.”
She waited for him to ask for more information about his mother, but instead, he folded his arms across his chest and stared down at her, looking coldly impatient and very bored. Olivia pulled her gaze from his and pointed to a small portrait just beyond the one of George Hebert. “What do you think of him?” she asked, drawing Mitchell’s attention to a portly gentleman wearing a starched shirt with a tie striped in shades of pink, blue, and yellow.
“I think he had appalling taste in neckties,” Mitchell replied curtly, and walked away.
Olivia glanced at Caroline, who slowly shook her head, silently stating the obvious: Olivia had made a mistake by mentioning his mother and another mistake by trying to make Mitchell acknowledge his relationship to the men in the portraits.
Olivia watched him move from one painting to the next—a tall, broad-shouldered man who was looking at portraits of men who frequently resembled him so strongly that he had to feel as if he were looking in a mirror, a slightly blurry one at times, but a mirror nonetheless. Pride was causing him to deny the resemblance as well as his heritage, but as she studied him from across the room, she marveled at the futility of his effort. His forebears were tall, like he was, their bearing proud, their intellects extraordinary, their temperaments—uncertain. Just like his.
She thought of his criticism of the striped necktie her father-in-law had worn, and as she looked at Mitchell’s profile, amusement lifted her spirits a little. From the toes of Mitchell’s gleaming black Italian loafers to his custom-tailored charcoal suit and snowy white shirt to the impeccable cut of his thick black hair, Mitchell was—as all Wyatt men were—tastefully conservative and immaculately groomed.
However, three things she’d discovered about him while they looked at the portraits set him distinctly apart from his forebears: his dry sense of humor, his smooth urbane charm, and that smile of his. The combination was positively lethal—lethal enough to make even an old woman like her feel a little giddy. The Wyatt men were forceful and dynamic, but generally had little humor and even less charm. If they were Humphrey Bogarts, then Mitchell was Cary Grant, but with a hard jaw and chilly blue eyes.
“This will not take long,” Cecil said in an abrupt voice as he stalked into the room.
Olivia stiffened inwardly and watched her brother walk to his desk. It irritated her that Cecil was two years older than she but arthritis hadn’t bent his spine. “Sit down,” he ordered.
Mitchell walked over to Olivia and pulled a chair out for her; then he walked over to the corner of Cecil’s desk, shoved his hands into his pants pockets, and lifted his brows. “I said sit,” Cecil warned him.
An expression of icy amusement flicked across Mitchell’s face, and he looked around behind him.
“What are you looking for?” asked Cecil.
“Your dog,” Mitchell replied.
Olivia stiffened and Caroline drew in a sharp breath. Cecil stared hard at him, his expression resentful … and then, almost respectful. “As you wish,” he said; then he switched his gaze to Olivia and Caroline. “I wanted the two of you present because I feel that I owe it to Mitchell to say this in front of the entire family, and as fate would have it, we are the only adults left in this family.”
Returning his gaze to Mitchell, he said, “Many years ago, pride and anger prompted me to do you a grave injustice, and I want to admit that now, in front of your aunt and your sister-in-law. My anger had nothing to do with you; it had to do with your father and the woman who was your mother. My son, Edward, was a womanizer, and I detested that in him. While his young wife was dying of cancer, he got another woman pregnant—your mother—and I could not forgive him for that. Nor could I overlook your mother’s total lack of scruples. She consorted with my faithless son, knowing full well his wife was dying, and she was so utterly lacking in common decency that it was beyond her to understand the insult it would have been to Edward’s dead wife had he married her and produced a child with her six months after his first wife’s death.”
Cecil stopped, and Olivia worriedly scrutinized Mitchell’s face, wondering how he felt hearing these ugly truths about both his parents, but he looked detached—as if he were listening to a slightly distasteful story that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. If Olivia hadn’t noticed the imperceptible tightening of his jaw, she’d have believed he was thoroughly bored.
Oblivious to such nuances of expression, Cecil said, “May I continue being blunt?”
“Please, by all means,” Mitchell replied with mocking civility.
“I was disgusted—no—revolted by your parents’ behavior, but when your mother hired a sleazy lawyer to try to extort money from me and compel me to raise her bastard child as a Wyatt, my revulsion for her became loathing, and I would have done anything within my power to thwart her. Anything. Can you understand my feeling in this regard?”
“Perfectly.”
“If your mother had simply wanted money in order to raise her son and have a decent life, I could have understood that,” Cecil added, and for the first time, Olivia thought she saw surprise or some other emotion flicker across Mitchell’s enigmatic face. “But she hadn’t a grain of maternal feeling in her body. Money and ‘being around rich people’ were all that counted to her, and she figured that should be enough for her child, too.”
Cecil stood up. Olivia noticed he had to brace his hands on his desk, as if he felt weaker than he wanted to show. “You were the child of a spineless man without character or decency and a scheming, mercenary little slut. It never occurred
to me that you could turn out well in view of all that, but I was wrong, Mitchell. Your Wyatt heritage came through strong and untainted. I loved your brother William, and he was a good father and husband, but he was soft and he had Edward’s lack of ambition. You, Mitchell, are a throwback to your Wyatt ancestors. I tossed you out into the world with nothing except an opportunity to educate yourself and make social contacts. You turned that into an impressive little financial empire in a decade. You inherited your ability to do this from your Wyatt ancestors. You may not have been raised as a Wyatt, but you are one.” Finished, Cecil looked at him expectantly.
Instead of sounding pleased, Mitchell sounded entertained. “Am I supposed to regard that as a compliment?”
Cecil’s brows snapped together at the amusement in Mitchell’s voice; then a satisfied smiled lifted his thin lips up at the corners. “Of course not. You’re a Wyatt, and we Wyatts do not seek, nor do we need, the approval of others.” As if he suddenly realized he had not softened the younger man up in the least, Cecil changed tactics. “Because you are a Wyatt, you will also understand how difficult it is for me to admit that my anger and pride caused me to make a disastrous error in judgment many years ago—an error for which you have paid your whole life. I don’t expect you to forgive me, because Wyatts do not settle for mere apologies for what is unforgivable, and I am already eighty years old, so there aren’t enough years left to me to atone. I, too, am a Wyatt, so I cannot ask for forgiveness I am not entitled to. I can only ask you for this—” The old man held out his hand, and it trembled slightly. “Will you shake my hand?”
Olivia was moved almost to tears, and Caroline’s soft lower lip was quivering with an encouraging smile, but Mitchell ignored Cecil’s gesture. “Not until I understand what we’re shaking hands on.”