Pleasures of a Notorious Gentleman by Lorraine Heath Page A

once shared. Perhaps if he pretended all was well, it would be.
    Wearily he battled the pain and shoved himself to his feet. Without his cane, he was fairly crippled when the agony was as great as this. Staggering forward, he fought to keep his balance as he made his way to the horse. It shied away. He cursed. He cooed. He sought to gentle it as he limped toward it. Thunder boomed and it skittered away.
    He dropped his head back and allowed the rain to beat unmercifully on his face. With the increasing torment of his leg, he couldn’t walk all the way back to Grantwood Manor. He needed the damned horse. Why the bloody hell had he ever dismounted? The throbbing ache he’d experienced in the saddle was nothing compared with what was coursing through him now.
    With renewed determination, he took a deep breath, struggled to ignore the shards of pain, and hobbled after his beastly horse.
    “W hat do you think of the girl?” Tessa Seymour, Duchess of Ainsley, asked.
    “She’d look lovely on canvas.”
    Sitting at her vanity, she twisted around and glared at the young blond Adonis with the golden eyes lounging on her bed waiting for her to finish her nightly rituals. All the various creams she applied to her face, throat, and arms were all that kept her from looking all of her forty-seven years. “Leo.”
    She did not bother to hide her displeasure with his answer. He demanded complete honesty between them. It had terrified her at first, but now she saw the wisdom in it. It was liberating, and she had come to realize that no matter her faults, he would always forgive her.
    He shrugged. “You think she could be his salvation.”
    “I hope she could be, yes. He seems so lost. While they don’t say anything, I know Westcliffe and Ainsley harbor much guilt over Stephen’s circumstance. After all, they purchased his commission.”
    “And the queen sent him where she would. They couldn’t have known that this bloody situation with Russia was going to erupt into a godforsaken war that would not be over quickly.”
    True enough. The newspapers had been filled with reports. And the casualties. So many casualties. The telegraph had shrunk the world, given the war an immediacy unlike any before it.
    It had nearly killed her when she’d received word that he’d died. A mother was not supposed to have a favorite. But she did. She always had. Stephen. She had adored his father with every fiber of her being. The Earl of Lynnford. He’d been her lover when she was married to the Earl of Westcliffe. She’d never told Stephen the truth of his parentage.
    Shame, when she was younger, had stopped her. Fear, as she grew older, trapped the truth within her.
    Lynnford had not even known. But since Westcliffe had stopped visiting her bed as soon as she announced she was carrying their first child and never returned, even after his heir was born, she had no doubts regarding Stephen’s true father.
    She’d gone to Lynnford with the news of Stephen’s death. “You must go to the Crimea and fetch his body. I’ll not leave him so far from home.”
    “Tessa, he would want to be buried beside those who fought next to him.”
    “I don’t care what he wants. Call me selfish, but at this moment, I only care what I want.”
    “This is a fool’s errand.”
    And so she’d told him that which she’d sworn to never reveal. “He’s your son.”
    She’d held him while he cried. She’d given him a son and taken him away in the space of a solitary heartbeat.
    He’d admitted that he’d sometimes suspected Stephen was his son. But he had his own family and had been too cowardly to pursue the matter.
    But she didn’t view him as cowardly. She saw him as a man who wished to bring as little hurt as possible to those he loved. What was to be gained with knowledge?
    It was when he’d sent word to the army, alerting them that he would be arriving to bring back the body of Major Stephen Lyons, that they’d learned Stephen was not dead.
    It was