The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister #2)

“I knew him,” the housekeeper had said. “I was only first maid, then, and we’d all fight over who had to take him tea. None of us wanted the task, he was that fearsome.”


Fearsome. He’d seen his father angry a few times in his life, and Oliver supposed he was fearsome. But he’d understood that she had meant more than that. His father was fiercely intelligent and brooked no foolishness.

The housekeeper had sighed.

“He was the sort of man who I thought would be running all of London in twenty years. Sometimes you meet a man, and you just know about him. You know he’s going to be something more.” She’d sighed fretfully and readjusted her cap. “That’s what we all said at the time. We just knew. It was a feeling you had, looking at him. And then it all came to nothing.”

It all came to nothing.

Oliver glanced at his father. Hugo had cast his line in the deep pools at the edge of the river and sat without speaking, without expecting. Waiting to see if Oliver wanted to talk, assuming that anything that needed to be said would be.

It hadn’t come to precisely nothing. All that energy had been devoted to this—into fishing trips with boys who were not really his sons, to money made and then immediately invested into his children.

Every bit of excess that the business had produced had gone to his family—helping Laura and her husband start a dry-goods store in town, paying for Oliver’s university tuition, managing Patricia’s shorthand lessons and then, when she had married Reuven, giving them enough to start their own business in Manchester.

It all came to nothing.

No. It wasn’t going to be nothing. Oliver was going to make his father’s sacrifice mean something. He was going to make it mean everything.

“Does it matter,” Oliver asked, “if I want it very, very badly?”

“What is it you want?” his father asked.

I want you to be proud of me. I want to do everything you dreamed of and deliver it at your feet.

Oliver reached out and pulled a twig from the dirt, rolling it between his fingers. There were uglier wants, too, ones that made him feel almost uncomfortable.

I want them to pay.

Instead he shrugged. “Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man’s son?”

His father did look up at that. “I didn’t raise another man’s son,” he said sharply. “I raised my own.”

“You know what I mean,” Oliver said. “And that’s precisely what I am talking about. Why claim me? Why treat me the way you have? It must have been an enormous struggle deciding what to do about me. I know you loved Mother, but—”

“You were as much my salvation as your mother was,” his father interrupted brusquely. “You were never a burden that I had to grow accustomed to carrying. It was quite simple. If I could make you mine, in defiance of blood and biology, it would mean that I wasn’t his.”

“Whose?” Oliver asked in confusion.

“My own father. If you were mine, I wasn’t his.”

Oliver leaned back and watched the ripples on the river. He knew—vaguely—that his father’s father had not been a good man. His father had made a few curt remarks about it over the years, but he spoke little about it.

“Claiming you was like claiming myself,” his father said. “It was that easy.”

Oliver shut his eyes.

“So what is this thing you want so badly?”

“I want to be someone,” Oliver breathed. “Someone…who matters. Who can make things happen. Someone with power.” Someone who would never be shoved around again. Bradenton had it right; he had power, and Oliver had wants. That was a balance that begged for reversal.

His father didn’t say anything for a while. Finally he spoke. “Of all my children, you and Free are the most like me. It’s a gift, and like all gifts, it comes with a sting.”

“Odd,” Oliver said quietly, “that I should take after you more than the older girls.”

His father made a noise of protest in the back of his throat, but didn’t speak.

“I know,” Oliver said. “I know. I don’t mean to imply that you’ve been less than a father to me. It’s just that… The son of Hugo Marshall shouldn’t consider the offer I’m toying with. I might be the son of the Duke of Clermont. I have it in me.”

“Hmm,” his father said. “You have an odd view of me. I’ve done a great many things I’m not proud of.”

“Me, too. There are times I’ve been quiet. There are times I’ve spoken when I shouldn’t, just to keep myself from the effort of fighting.”

“That doesn’t make you into a man like your sire,” his father said. “It just makes you into a man.”

Oliver’s line had floated too far. He shook himself and reeled it in before the lure could tangle in the brown weeds on the far side of the stream.