He looked up at his mother, a smile on her face at catching them in such a loving embrace. He stepped back from Mariah, but he didn’t lower his arm from around her waist.
“I thought I might find you two here.” She came forward and took their hands in hers, squeezing them affectionately. “I am so very happy for both of you.”
“Thank you, Mother.” He placed a kiss on her cheek.
She arched a brow. “Although it certainly took you long enough to figure out what the rest of us already knew.”
He rolled his eyes and repeated dryly, “Thank you, Mother.”
She smiled lovingly at him. “I know you want to get back to your guests, but I have something that I thought you might want to see.”
She pulled a small book from her reticule, and her smile saddened with wistful melancholy.
Robert tensed. “What’s that?”
“Your father’s journal. Annabelle found it while she was looking through the books in the library at Park Place.” She handed it to him. “I marked an entry that I think you should read.”
With a kiss to his cheek and another to Mariah’s, she retreated toward the door.
She called back to them, “Of all the accomplishments your father achieved, the one that he was most proud of was his family. He always believed that it was his children who gave him his greatest purpose in life.” She paused, a look of love shining in her eyes for her son. “He would have been so proud of you, Robert.”
She slipped away to go back upstairs to the party.
As Robert stared after her, the journal heavy in his hand, he felt Mariah’s reassuring touch on his shoulder. He ignored the stinging in his eyes and looked at her.
She said gently, “Read it, my love.”
Nodding wordlessly, with a dark dread settling on his chest, he opened the book and flipped through the pages filled with his father’s distinctive handwriting to the last entry. The one written just hours before his death, while he had once again been waiting up for Robert to return home. Holding his breath, he read over the entry.
Still sowing wild oats, yet with the potential to be the most successful of all my sons…Then his heart lurched into his throat— He tries my patience, but I take such great pride in him. He has become the good man I have always known he would be.
“I knew it,” Mariah whispered as she read over his shoulder. “Your father loved you, Robert, and he believed in you, always.”
He blinked hard as he tore his gaze away from the page, but her face blurred. He forced out hoarsely around the knot chocking in his throat, “How did you know when I didn’t?”
“Because I love you myself, and I recognized the same signs in all those stories your mother told about you and your father.” She wrapped her arms around him. “And just like him, I am so very proud to have you in my life.”
She pressed into his embrace, and he welcomed the softness of her body against his, the warmth and love she carried for him.
“We found a true partnership after all, minx,” he murmured.
Then he lowered his head and kissed her.
AUTHOR’S HISTORICAL NOTE
In 1825, Parliament authorized the building of new docks at St Katharine’s. As Henry Winslow knew, the only way to increase the quayside was to create more riverbank, exactly what engineer Thomas Telford designed—two joined inland basins connected to the Thames by an entrance lock. Ultimately, construction consumed approximately twenty-three acres. Over 1,250 houses were demolished, along with the twelfth-century medieval church and the hospital of St Katharine’s by the Tower, for which the area was named. Nearly 12,000 inhabitants, who were mostly poor dockworkers living in slum-like conditions, lost their homes. Only the property owners were compensated.
Unable to accommodate large ships, the docks were never a commercial success, and in 1968, the St Katharine’s Docks were closed. Development of the site as a residential and leisure complex commenced in the 1970s. Now known as the Docklands, the area comprises luxury apartments, upscale shops and restaurants, and a yachting marina. It is a model of successful urban redevelopment.
I would like to believe that the Gatewell School for Orphans of the Sea shared a similar fate to St Katharine’s by the Tower. The hospital lost its buildings in 1825 but relocated its services to nearby Whitechapel. After several more moves around London, it relocated in 1948 to its present location in Limehouse, one mile from its original site. Its mission continues today.
Miranda Hodgkins has only ever wanted one thing: to marry Robert Carlisle. And she can’t wait a moment longer. She boldly sneaks into his bedchamber with seduction on her mind and is swept into the most breathtaking kiss of her life. But she never dreamed that kiss would be with Sebastian, the Duke of Trent—Robert’s formidable older brother…
An excerpt from
If the Duke Demands
follows.
CHAPTER ONE
Islingham, Lincolnshire
January 1822
Miranda Hodgkins peeked out cautiously from behind the morning room door. The hallway was empty. Thank goodness. Drawing a deep breath of resolve, she hurried toward the rear stairs and reached a hand up to her face to make certain that her mask was still firmly in place.
The grand masquerade ball that had been held in celebration of Elizabeth Carlisle’s birthday had ended, and now the guests were dispersing…those who had come only for the evening’s ball into a long line of carriages, those few remaining for the last night of the house party into their rooms in the east wing. And the family would eventually make their way to their rooms in the west wing. Exactly where Miranda was headed.
She scurried up the dark stairs, knowing the way by heart from years of playing at Chestnut Hill with the Carlisles when they were all children. She knew which steps squeaked and how to move over them without making a sound, just as she’d attended enough parties here to know that the servants would be busy in the lower rooms of the house and that the family would take several minutes to say good night to all their guests.
If this had been any other night, she wouldn’t have been sneaking around like this. She would have gone home with her auntie and uncle and stayed there, instead of changing into her second costume of the evening and sneaking back to Chestnut Hill. And she would have entered right through the front door instead of through the cellar, with no one thinking twice about seeing her in the house that bordered her auntie and uncle’s farm and that felt like a second home to her.
But this wasn’t just any other night. Tonight, she planned on declaring her love for Robert Carlisle. The man she wanted to marry and spend the rest of her days making happy.
And the man she planned to surrender her innocence to tonight.