LITMIR.BIZ

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from the menu selection at the Sword and Shield.”

      Devon continued to ignore her.

      “Okay, so he’s got two daughters,” Heather conceded. “Twins at that. Probably not something you were bargaining for—”

      “I’m not bargaining for anything…or anyone.”

      “But they’re well enough behaved,” Heather prattled on, ignoring the interruption. “They obviously love their dad, and he as obviously loves them. That counts for a lot.”

      Devon gave up with the paper gathering. It was busywork anyway, a diversion from listening to Heather, and wasn’t doing any good. If her friend didn’t say it, Devon was saying it to herself. What’s more, fully half of the litter was hers.

      “It’s not the girls,” she protested. “You know why…”

      “Charles.”

      Devon nodded. Just the sound of his name had her muscles tightening.

      “You can’t allow him to dictate—”

      “Stay out of it,” she snapped.

      “I won’t.” Heather seemed impervious to her friend’s flare of temper. “I care too much about you to let you ruin your life this way. Besides, he hasn’t called in weeks, months.”

      “Because I haven’t been out with anyone in months.”

      “And who’s the loser there? Keep this up and you’ll be a wizened old crone who’s never experienced living, much less loving. Like it or not, you’re going to have to stand up to him and take control of your destiny.”

      “Leave me alone, will you?” Devon implored.

      “I shan’t.”

      Devon plopped down on the sofa, her arms flung out, her head thrown back against a cushion. She sighed. “I know you’re right, but…”

      It had started two years ago when she was still at university. Her brother, Nolan, had introduced her to his friend Charles Robinett. Charles was a duke, several steps higher up in the aristocratic pecking order than a viscount, and from a family of considerable prestige. He was young, only twenty-eight to her twenty-one at the time, a large, physically imposing ex-rugby player. Despite having broken his nose twice, he was a reasonably good-looking chap, if not exactly handsome. He was also reputed to be worth millions.

      Immediately after she graduated, he proposed marriage.

      For all his pedigree and fine public manners, Charles Robinett was hardly her ideal for a husband. Looks were fine, and wealth certainly made life easier. But looks faded, and she had sufficient means of her own to live a respectable life. She didn’t need a man for security or social position. She certainly didn’t need one who was a tyrant, who demanded unquestioned compliance with his wishes without any consideration of her desires or interests.

      When she rejected his offer, he swore he’d do physical violence to any man she showed an interest in. She took it as bluster at the time, the idle petulance of someone who was used to getting his own way without much effort on his part. After all, he was a duke. Then her next two dates were mugged after delivering her home. The first time she could dismiss it as coincidence, but the second established a pattern. The assailants were never apprehended, so there was no way to link the attacks to Charles, but Devon knew he was behind them, especially after he called her to renew his threat. She got the message.

      “You know what happens when you give in to a bully,” Heather stated now. “He becomes more demanding.”

      Would Brent Preston welcome a chance to play Sir Galahad? Devon wondered.

      That was what she’d expected of her brother when she reported Charles’s threat to him. She was sure he’d warn the duke off. Instead Nolan had called her foolish for passing up such a rare opportunity to climb the social ladder. He’d dismissed Charles’s “supposed” threats as a misunderstanding on her part, declaring instead that in his opinion she should take what the man said as a compliment and proof of his devotion to her.

      Devon had been at once stunned and furious that her own brother, whom she’d idolized for so many years, would in effect call her a liar and fail to even investigate a situation which potentially put her in harm’s way.

      Since then their private relationship had been distant and strained, if not quite crossing the threshold to hostility. In public and in the presence of their mother they played their accustomed roles, even joking the way they had in the past. Devon didn’t know what had come over her brother, but the change in him saddened her greatly.

      “I know you’re right,” she told Heather. “But I’m not sure it’s fair to put Mr. Preston in that sort of position.”

      “You’re going to have to stand up to Charles sooner or later, you know. Why not with a man who looks like he can take on half of rugby union single-handedly? Besides,” Heather added, “he’s not going to be here very long. This is just an exploratory trip in case he gets that job transfer.”

      Devon finally laughed. “Perhaps I ought to sell tickets.”

      Heather slouched onto the sofa beside her and grinned. “I’ll buy one.”

      Brent and the girls ate dinner—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was their current favorite—at the hotel that evening after walking around Oxford and seeing a few of the more famous landmarks of the university town. He soon realized, however, that eight-year-old girls weren’t interested in or impressed by ancient seats of scholarship.

      To his own chagrin he found himself a bit bored by it all, as well, without adult companionship. He kept thinking of Devon Hunter. She undoubtedly knew all about the things he was seeing and could show him more. In his mind he pictured her eyes lighting up, her lips smiling, as she recited a concise history of the courts of learning, including ancient tales of duels and chivalry.

      It was foolish really. He’d met Devon only briefly, and she’d turned down his dinner invitation. He also had to remind himself he wasn’t here for the sightseeing or to pursue the opposite sex. The world might see him as unattached, but he still thought of himself as a married man. At least he had until meeting Devon Hunter.

      To his relief, after dinner he found a movie on television that the twins were actually able to agree on. The true sign of their tiredness, however, was that they didn’t put up much of a fuss when he told them it was time to go to bed. They’d been on the go for several days and the pace was finally taking its toll. Within five minutes of their heads hitting the pillows, they were sound asleep.

      He, too, was weary, but he was even more restless. He got out his laptop and continued his search of the Internet for information about the Hunter family. Nolan, he discovered, was the sixth Viscount Kestler. His father, Nigel, had left him the title eight years earlier, when he died at the age of fifty-two of kidney failure, according to one report. Another version alluded to the condition being the result of chronic alcoholism. His wife, Sarah Morningfield Hunter, the mother of Nolan and Devon, apparently came from the landed gentry rather than the aristocracy. The current Kestler estate, Morningfield Manor, was from the distaff side of the family. Brent couldn’t find much about Sarah Hunter, except one article which noted that she was two years older than her late husband and that she was in frail health because of a heart condition.

      By the time Brent turned off the computer and prepared for bed, he didn’t know much more than he had before, nothing, at any rate, that shed light on his investigation into the mystery of Leopold’s Legacy’s DNA.

      The entire evening would have been far more pleasurable, and perhaps more productive, he decided, as he slipped in between the sheets, if Devon had agreed to spend it with them.

      He shouldn’t be thinking about a beautiful young woman while he was lying in bed, and in particular he shouldn’t be thinking about Devon Hunter. His research had disclosed her age, twenty-three, a dozen years his junior. Quite a gap. Yet, when he was in her company, she seemed his match in maturity. He didn’t

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