Chapter 1
England, April 1816
Summerlin Hall, Devonshire
“My son, it’s a miracle you’re home again! Such a miracle!”
A miracle or a curse, Walker considered wryly, though he could not help but be moved by his father’s sincerity.
His father, Charles Scott, the Duke of Summerlin, no less.
Not a royal duke, but a duke all the same, the hereditary title granted long ago to Charles’s great-grandfather for loyal service to the Crown.
An ailing man, too, his richly brocaded coat hanging from his too thin frame. He shuffled next to Walker as they walked together into the library that smelled of tobacco and old books, his hand shaking where he clutched Walker’s arm. Watery eyes as pitch-black as Walker’s own stared into his face.
“My son, my long-lost son. Alexander.”
Walker swallowed uncomfortably, but he held his tongue and did not correct his father. He’d done so many times since he’d arrived at Summerlin Hall a week ago, reminding the duke that the only name he’d known his entire life was Walker.
Walker Burke.
Just as the only family he had known was the woman he’d thought his mother, Molly Burke, who had worked as a housekeeper in some of the finer homes in Boston to feed and clothe and educate him.
Yet she hadn’t been his mother at all, but a nanny to him and his twin brother, Andrew, until she had abducted Walker as a two-year-old child and fled with him to America. If not for Molly’s tearful confession right before she died and Andrew’s portrait hanging in the hall that had been like looking in a mirror when Walker had first seen it, he doubted he would have believed the incredible tale.
He and his deceased brother hadn’t just been twins, but identical from their raven-black hair, midnight eyes, and chiseled features many might call handsome. Their father claimed Walker bore the same height and rugged breadth of shoulders as Andrew. Dear God, how could so many loose threads have been woven together into an outcome that had begun as mere happenstance?
“Take me over to the fire, my son. These old bones crave the warmth.”
Walker nodded and walked with his father to the immense fireplace where flames crackled and burned brightly.
His father wasn’t old, but the disease sapping the life from him made him appear twice his age. A pair of sumptuous leather chairs were drawn close to the fire, which was his father’s favorite place to while away the hours amidst his books and maps. The duke sank into the nearest chair with a sigh of relief and gestured for Walker to sit as well.
Instead, though, Walker went first to pour them each a brandy, filling his own glass to the brim.
He could use a stiff drink. Whenever he thought of the uncanny turn of events that had brought him to Summerlin Hall, his head would begin to pound. Just as it was pounding now!
The last time he’d been in England was three years ago when he and his closest friend, Jared Giles, and Jared’s incomparably lovely bride, Lindsay, had been spirited safely out of the country to Brittany, France.AfterLindsay had so courageously rescued them from certain hanging, a daring plan devised by her best friend, Corisande, and aided by her husband, Lord Donovan Trent.
It had been Donovan who had recognized Walker’s striking resemblance to a comrade that had died in Spain while fighting with him against Napoleon’s forces—his twin brother, Andrew Scott!—and who had set an inquiry into motion.
Donovan had seteverythinginto motion. The inquiry into Walker’s true parentage, as well as an inquiry into how Jared had come to be impressed at seventeen into servitude aboard the man-of-warTridentthough he’d sworn he was the Earl of Dovercourt.
Four brutal years of servitude that had left Jared’s back scarred from lashings, followed by three years in a rat-infested prison in the West Indies. Walker had known him for five of those miserable years, impressed as well at only fifteen from an American merchantman after he’d left Boston to seek his fortune upon the sea.
Bitter memories tightening his throat, Walker had all he could do to swallow a draft of brandy.
