Jason said grandly, “Grandmother, may I offer you my arm?”
“Certainly, my boy. It has to be better than hanging on to Hollis. That old man is as weedy as a dormouse.”
CHAPTER 3
Northcliffe Hall
Silence hung heavy in the drawing room that evening. Tension swirled in the air, thick with bone-deep concern, unspoken worries, and unasked questions. Then Corrie appeared in the doorway carrying a freshly scrubbed twin under each arm, their beautiful small faces alight with excitement and shock because it was so very late and they weren’t in their beds, Nanny snoring not six feet away from them.
“Uncle Jason, it’s us again!” Douglas Simon Sherbrooke, older than his twin by exactly eleven minutes, broke free of his mother and ran as fast as his legs could carry him to Jason, who caught the little boy when he leapt into the air in his general direction.
“I see that it is,” Jason said, nuzzling Douglas’s neck. He smelled just like Alice Wyndham, after her evening bath. He felt tears well up. He looked down to see Everett Plessante Sherbrooke tugging at his trouser leg, ready to yell or burst into tears, Jason couldn’t tell which. He scooped up the little boy and held both of them close, letting them pat his face, give him wet kisses and talk nonstop, words that weren’t really words but rather twin-talk bursting out of those small mouths, just like the incomprehensible language he and James had shared.
Douglas drew back and said, “Everyone said you looked just like Papa and Aunt Melissande, but you don’t, Uncle Jason.”
“That’s true, Douglas. I don’t look exactly like your papa, but it’s close, don’t you think, Everett?”
The other impossibly beautiful little face scrunched up in thought. Everett then announced, “No, Uncle Jason, you look like yourself, and you look like me too. Not Douglas—he looks like Papa. Yes, that’s it, you look like me.” And that little face wore the same wicked look Jason had seen on his mother Corrie’s face.
&n
bsp; Douglas said, after another wet kiss on the right side of his uncle Jason’s neck, “Grandpapa can’t stand that I look like Papa and Aunt Melissande. She always brings Everett and me little almond cookies when she visits. Grandpapa says blessed hell, he’ll never be free of The Face. What’s The Face, Uncle Jason?”
Jason heard his father groan, his mother laugh. He turned to his father, brow raised. “Cursing, in front of this little scamp?”
“He’s got ears as sharp as you and James had when you were his age,” Douglas Sherbrooke, the earl of Northcliffe said, and poked his wife in her ribs. “Be quiet, Alex. I don’t believe a lad can be too young to learn of the Sherbrooke curse.”
“I agree,” Corrie said. “No, don’t you dare disagree with me, James Sherbrooke. Blessed hell is always your prelude when you’re ready to cut loose.” She grinned over at Jason. “He gets mad at me—only the good Lord could possibly understand why—and I know he wants to throw me out a window, but he has to make do with blessed hell and stomp out of the room.”
“A monstrous lie,” James said, then loudly cleared his throat when his two little boys turned wide eyes to him. “Jason, do you want me to liberate you from at least one of those imps?”
Both imps wrapped their arms more tightly around Jason’s neck, nearly choking him. Jason shook his head. “Not yet. All right, lads, can we settle ourselves down for a moment or do you want me to dance you around the drawing room? Your grandmama can play a waltz on the piano, if you like.”
“Let’s dance!” Douglas shouted, his feet kicking out.
“I want to waltz too,” Everett shouted in Jason’s other ear. “What’s waltz?”
There was laughter in the air now, the awful deadening stress and anxiety swept under the carpet, at least for the time being. To Jason, it felt wonderful. He began to waltz slowly about the drawing room, tightening his hold on the squirming little bodies, kissing their ears and their chins, and watched his mother pick up her skirts and walk quickly to the piano where she soon was playing a waltz he’d heard at a ball in Baltimore some two months before.
James Sherbrooke, Lord Hammersmith, twenty-eight minutes older than his twin, sat back, aware of his smiling wife’s warm self now pressed close to his right side, and looked toward his brother. He wasn’t surprised Jason looked as natural as could be waltzing around with two small boys in his arms, since James Wyndham had often written about how well Jason handled his own four children. He wondered if James Wyndham had ever told Jason about all the letters he himself had written here to Northcliffe Hall, at first to reassure all of them, then later detailing Jason’s successes on the racetrack, the mares he’d selected for James’s breeding program, the wonderful stallion he’d found for his host that had made him a bloody fortune in stud fees.
But all the letters didn’t make up for the lost years. He felt his heart fill to bursting. At least his twin had finally begun acknowledging all of them after two years of perfunctory, emotionless letters.
Little Douglas was right; they were no longer identical. Well, they were, objectively, but anyone who knew the both of them wouldn’t confuse them anymore. Jason was more—what was the word? More spare, maybe that was it, though they were still of a size. The big changes were on the inside. James could see the suffering deep in his twin’s eyes, and it hurt him, even as he understood it.
They’d never been identical on the inside, but they’d been connected, had known what the other worried about, what the other was feeling at any given moment. Their experiences had made them into vastly different men, the advanced age of thirty not all that far distant. He looked toward his smiling father, nearly sixty, his black and silver hair still thick, as he was always pointing out to his wife.
James saw that Hollis was stationed near the drawing room door, his foot tapping to the beat of the waltz. He was smiling, and there was such love and relief in that smile that James felt warmed to his soul. He knew how Hollis felt.
Now James had to find out what was in his twin’s mind. But not tonight. His precious, loud, and demanding little boys had saved the evening from being a silent torture, everyone afraid to say anything that could be taken the wrong way, everyone walking on eggshells around Jason. He said to Corrie, “Have I told you recently that you are very smart indeed?”
“Not since last May, I believe it was.”
He rubbed his knuckles on her cheek. “You brought Douglas and Everett into nail-biting silence and look what happened. Jason is waltzing with them.”
“It seemed the thing to do,” she said.
James took Corrie’s hand in his. He leaned back, and allowed the warmth of the laughter to flow through him.