Pregnant On The Earl's Doorstep. Sophie Pembroke
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here to see the Earl of Lengroth,’ Heather said as confidently as she could, as if it were the sort of thing she said every day.
‘You’re late,’ the woman told Heather sternly. ‘Come on. He’s waiting.’
Heather blinked twice, then followed. She got the feeling that this woman wasn’t used to being disobeyed.
‘Um...how am I late, exactly?’
Well, she was late—six weeks late at this point—but she was pretty sure the woman wasn’t talking about Heather’s period.
‘I didn’t have an appointment...’ Maybe she should have made one. Except she couldn’t imagine that Ross was going to be happy to see her again.
The woman didn’t answer—in fact, Heather wasn’t even sure if she heard her over the sound of her own heavy footsteps on the polished stone floors of the hallway. On either side the walls were painted dark shades of green, in between bare stone columns, and every now and again they’d pass a chair with tartan cushions, as if there to give people a chance to recover from the unrelenting hard darkness of the place.
Finally, after several more hallways, eight chairs and two staircases, the woman stopped in front of another heavy wooden door and rapped her knuckles sharply against it.
‘Come in,’ a male voice called, and as the woman opened the door Heather thought she heard him mutter, ‘Finally...’ under his breath.
Heather stepped inside just as the woman said, ‘The new nanny is here, sir.’
Nanny? Okay, someone had got something seriously confused here.
But as Heather stared at the darkly handsome man behind the mahogany desk she realised that a case of mistaken identity was the least of her problems. Because the man sitting at the desk belonging to the Earl of Lengroth wasn’t the man she’d slept with in London almost two months earlier.
* * *
Cal Bryce had never harboured any ambitions to be the Earl of Lengroth. He didn’t want the title, the castle, the requirement to provide an heir, the responsibility, or to have to uphold the reputation expected of a sterling member of the aristocracy.
And in fairness, he still didn’t have most of those things. He wasn’t the Earl—he remained the Hon Calvin Bryce, as he’d always been as the Earl’s younger brother. The castle wasn’t his—it belonged to his nephew Ryan, the eight-year-old newly minted Earl. He didn’t have to provide an heir—and he didn’t think anyone was expecting Ryan to do so for quite some years yet.
Since his brother Ross’s death, however, the responsibility was all his—at least until Ryan turned eighteen. And the reputation... Well, it seemed that was Cal’s to fix, too.
What on earth made you take that corner so fast, brother? Cal thought, not for the first time since he’d got that middle-of-the-night call and heard Mrs Peterson, the castle housekeeper, shrieking incomprehensibly down the phone at him from thousands of miles away in Scotland.
‘They’re dead! They’re both dead, Cal!’ she’d finally managed to say.
And the bottom had fallen out of Cal’s world.
His whole life Ross had been a constant. And he’d needed that so badly—especially when they were growing up. While the world around them might have believed that the Bryce family were a perfect example of modern aristocracy done right, Ross and Cal had known the truth.
The family weren’t above scandal and outrageous behaviour—they’d just grown very, very good at covering it up.
As a child, all Cal had known was that he had to get out of the way when his father started shouting, and that if he was drinking it was better not to be in the castle at all. Ross, three years older, had taught him all the best hiding places—and the signs to look out for telling him that it was time to run. And when Cal got it wrong Ross had stood between him and the Earl to give his little brother a head start.
Cal had idolised Ross. Until six weeks ago.
Even as he’d grown up into a teen, and then a young man, it had taken Cal some time to realise the true nature of his genetic inheritance. The Bryces hid their scandals well—even from their own flesh and blood. But once he’d seen his first evidence—walking in on his father in bed with the barmaid from the village pub was a scene sadly seared into his memory—he’d started to notice it everywhere. Especially as his parents had become less careful of their words around him.
There was the affair his mother had been having with the family lawyer for most of Cal’s life. The endless parade of barmaids and local girls he’d seen letting themselves out of the castle kitchens in the mornings. The bruises on Ross’s face and arms after a shouting match with their big bear of a father—red-faced and fuming so much of the time.
Hell, there was even the legend of the Lengroth ghost, which was currently causing him issues in ways the woman couldn’t possibly have imagined a hundred years ago when she’d died. The story went that a century earlier one of the local village girls had got pregnant and claimed the father was the Earl. Shunned by the local village people, and with her reputation ruined, she’d come to the castle to ask for his help. The Earl had denied her and sent her away, and she’d fallen down the castle steps and died—although some still whispered to this day that she’d been pushed.
Cal wished he didn’t know the truth about that one, if he was honest. His ancestors were enough of a disappointment to him already.
But not Ross. Ross had married the beautiful and lovely Janey and had two beautiful and lovely children. Ross had bucked the family trend.
Cal couldn’t even look at the battlements of Lengroth Castle without remembering all the awfulness that had happened inside it. But Ross had moved the family in—made the castle a home, even if it was still stone-walled and imposing. Ross had found a way to overcome their genetic disposition towards scandal and bad behaviour.
At least so Cal had believed, until he’d returned home to take over the reins after Ross’s death.
Now he was starting to think that Ross had just been better than all of them at hiding his true self.
Cal had thought that the world of business was hard—building up and running a company with a multiple seven-figure turnover took time, energy and commitment. He’d thought he understood about responsibility and challenges.
But that had been before he’d had to deal with the gambling debts, the lies and promises Ross had left behind him.
And before he’d had to hire a nanny for two grieving and uncontrollable children.
He eyed the latest one—the ninth in six weeks—as Mrs Peterson showed her in. In addition to being a full forty minutes late, she looked a little casual for a job interview, dressed in a flowery sundress and sandals—with a jumper on top because this was summer in Scotland, after all. Her copper-coloured hair flowed loose in waves over her shoulders, and she carried a rucksack on her back, as if she were a gap year student going travelling. Which she might be, he supposed. She looked young enough.
She also had a rubber duck tucked under her arm, but Cal decided he wasn’t even going to ask about that.
The bottom line was that desperate guardians couldn’t be choosers, and the agency must be running out of nannies to send him by now.
Mrs Peterson was also looking unimpressed with her. She, Cal noticed, was wearing her best suit and heels—the way she always did when there was a potential new member of staff on-site or an important visitor of some sort. She must have got more wear out of it in the last six weeks than in the decade beforehand. But Cal knew she’d have her fluffy slipper boots back on the moment she made it back to the kitchen. The stone floors of Castle Lengroth were hard on the feet.
He turned his attention back to the nanny. Part of him wanted to dismiss her out of hand, but another, larger part, knew that he needed her. He wasn’t