Free The Inheritance by Joan Johnston

night?”
    Colin hadn’t yet learned to hide his emotions, and Nicholas easily perceived his son was upset. Yet the boy didn’t immediately launch into speech. He crossed the room and stood at the window, staring out into the darkness. Nicholas stayed by the door, waiting patiently, knowing that Colin would be more likely to reveal his problem if he wasn’t pushed into doing it.
    “How soon are we leaving here, Pa?” Colin asked.
    Nicholas smiled. “We just got here, Colin. Are you homesick already?”
    Colin turned and Nicholas saw the tension in his son’s face and body. “I’m not homesick at all.”
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    “I don’t fit in here, Pa.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “I never once thought of myself as being any different because you weren’t married to my mother,” Colin said seriously. “That sort of thing matters here.”
    Nicholas hissed in a breath. “The circumstances of your birth don’t make you different from anyone else.”
    “But I’ve been treated differently because of it.”
    “By whom?”
    “It doesn’t really matter, Pa.”
    “It does to me,” Nicholas said in a dangerous voice. “I asked a question, Colin. Who treated you differently?”
    The whole story came pouring out. How Colin had met the most beautiful girl in the world. How they had gone walking in the gardens of Rockland Park.How he had felt his heart was going to pound out of his chest when she looked up at him. How they had returned to the drawing room, and he had been confronted by the earl, Lady Roanna’s father, and been told in no uncertain terms to keep his distance.
    “Because I’m a bastard, Pa.”
    Nicholas’s lips flattened. “I’ll speak to the earl, Colin.”
    “Would you, Pa? I wouldn’t ask except I want to see Lady Roanna again. At first I figured to see her no matter what her father said. Then I started thinking maybe she wouldn’t agree to see me if her father didn’t allow it. It would be easier all around if the earl changed his mind.”
    “You’re that smitten with her?” Nicholas asked.
    Color rose in Colin’s cheeks, but he met his father’s gaze. “I never met a woman like her, Pa. She’s … my heart … I can’t breathe when I’m around her, my chest is so tight. I want to protect her and … and hold her.”
    “I see.” Nicholas couldn’t keep the frown from his face. He had known the day would come when his son fell in love for the first time. Strangely, he hadn’t infected Colin with his disdain for women. Not that he hadn’t warned his son that a woman wasn’t to be trusted, but that admonition had fallen on deaf ears. Colin trusted everybody. That was Simp’s doing, Nicholas knew. For every bad thing Nicholas had to say about women, Simp had come up with a story of something good.
    Nicholas saw his son headed for heartbreak and wanted to step in to stop the disaster before it occurred. Colin was too young to be thinking about marriage, and young ladies like the earl’s daughterthought of nothing else. He cursed the circumstances that kept them in England. The easiest way to resolve the problem was to go home to America. But that simply wasn’t possible.
    He had another choice besides interference. He could let his son deal with the problem on his own. Most likely, the earl would guard his daughter so closely that Colin would be denied her company. Nicholas could hope that absence would not make the heart grow fonder, that if Colin didn’t see Lady Roanna Warenne he would forget about her.
    He searched his son’s features and scowled at what he found. He knew that look. It had rested upon his own face once upon a time. The boy was besotted. Colin would find a way to see the earl’s daughter. With or without the earl’s permission.
    His son was looking at him with trust and with hope. Colin believed he could do anything. Nicholas wasn’t so sure he would be able to resolve this matter to Colin’s satisfaction. As he was in a