Let Love Find You by Johanna Lindsey Page A

backfire on him if he wasn’t. The backfiring part did worry him a bit. It could put an end to his profitable new sideline. This matchmaking business he’d fallen into had turned out to be a boon that was helping him to finance his breeding farm. And now, with London’s richest hiring him, too, it could well turn out to be more profitable than the farm had been thus far.
    He’d rather not see his sideline shut down. What he’d started with his new farm was far more exciting and challenging than running the already established farm in Lancashire for hisuncle, and it gave him a greater sense of purpose. Not that he wouldn’t have been happy working up in Lancashire, considering how much he loved horses. But it just wasn’t the same there after Donald and Lydia had moved to London.
    He hadn’t known they’d been planning to do that for quite a while and had only waited until he finished school to tell him about their plans.
    “I don’t want you to think we’re abandoning you, far from it,” Donald had told him a few weeks after he’d come home from school. Waving his hand to encompass the estate, he’d said, “All this will be yours one day, since you’re my heir. Now that you’ve finished school, you’re old enough to take over here.”
    Donald had actually adopted him after Devin’s mother had died so Devin could carry on the family name. How ironic, when he’d wondered more than once if he would ever even have met these only surviving members of his family if his father hadn’t wanted him gone from the house Devin had lived in as a child. His mother certainly hadn’t ever mentioned that she had a brother until the day she kicked him out of her life.
    Devin had never spoken of these things with his uncle. After his mother died, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about her at all. He’d hated her for dying. And then he’d been sent off to school, a fancy one, and all the questions that had been too painful to ask got buried.
    Until that day when Donald had told him he was giving him the farm and had added, “Your mother would have been so proud of you.”
    The mention of his mother opened the floodgates. “You disowned her, didn’t you? Is that why she never told me about you until the day you collected me from London?”
    “No, we’d just had a falling-out is all. It doesn’t matter now.”
    Obviously his uncle didn’t want to talk about it even then. But Devin’s bitterness had returned, and all those old questions he had never asked were resurfacing.
    “Don’t you think I’m old enough to hear it, that I’m a bastard?”
    “Of course you’re not!” Donald tried to insist, but the color drained from his face and he couldn’t look Devin in the eye when he reiterated, “She married your father. He just died when you were a baby.”
    “A man whose name I can’t even remember because she refused to ever speak of him? Was he her creation? Or yours?”
    Donald sighed, sat back, and closed his eyes. He was in his midfifties then, though he looked older. Blond hair thoroughly peppered with gray, blue eyes so like his sister’s, weathered skin, stooped shoulders. He hadn’t just bred horses all his life, he’d trained them, he’d groomed them, he’d fed them, he’d treated them as if they were the children he’d never had himself. And he’d imparted all his knowledge and love of horses to the boy he’d taken in all those years ago.
    Devin didn’t think his uncle was going to say another word, he looked so pained. Devin would have let the matter go because of that. He loved his uncle. The man had been nothing but good and kind to him.
    “My sister had such good prospects,” Donald finally said with a touch of some old bitterness. “Three proposals before she was even of age, one from a viscount. But she fell in love with a man from London she couldn’t have, and you were the result. When she wouldn’t come home, I said some harsh things she never forgave me for. I let pride