Sophie Pembroke - Pregnant On The Earl's Doorstep

There was still no sign of the duck’s owner, but Heather had been a teacher long enough to know that when a child threw a duck at you it meant you weren’t wanted. In fact, she was pretty sure she’d have been able to figure that much out even without her teaching qualification.

Carefully, she reached down to the water and retrieved the duck as it bobbed past, tucking it under her arm.

‘I don’t want to be here, either, kid, believe me,’ she muttered.

And then she took the next step anyway—because what choice did she have?

She’d made a mistake and now she needed to own up to it, deal with it and face it head-on. She knew only too well what happened when people ducked their own guilt and tried to cover up their actions with lies.

The big brass knocker on the castle door echoed around the courtyard as she lifted it and let it fall against the wood. At least she’d survived the steps and the duck missile. As long as the door didn’t open outwards and send her flying into the moat she was almost there.

And then would come the really hard part.

She’d practised what she would say to Ross—it was hard to think of him as the Earl of Lengroth at this point—all the way up on the train. She’d thought of different ways to break the news, but it all came down to the one basic fact.

I’m pregnant. With your child.

She really hoped his wife wasn’t in the room when she saw him again.

Not that he’d mentioned his wife, of course, when they’d met that night in London. Or his kids. He’d told her about the castle, and about lonely dark Scottish nights—even in early June, apparently. He’d talked about the countryside and his responsibilities and the parties he went to.

But he’d failed to mention his family. And he hadn’t been wearing the wedding ring she’d seen on his finger later, in the most prominent website photo of them all—a large family portrait.

‘You must have all the aristocratic ladies after you,’ she’d joked, when he’d told her where he lived and shown her a snapshot on his phone. ‘How do you know they’re interested in you and not your castle?’

‘Trust me,’ he’d replied with a wicked grin. ‘My castle is the least impressive thing about me.’

Heather groaned, just remembering the line. How had she fallen for that? She blamed the cocktails her friend Lacey had insisted on them drinking.

Was anybody ever going to open this door? She really wasn’t enjoying reliving the worst mistake of her life in her head while she waited. She’d done enough of that over the last month as it was.

Now she was there, at Castle Lengroth, she just wanted to get this over with. She wanted to see Ross Bryce and tell him everything. She wanted this to be someone else’s problem, too, even if just for a few minutes before he inevitably threw her out.

Heather didn’t have high hopes for this meeting. But she knew it was something she had to do. Ross deserved to know about the baby—even if he didn’t want anything to do with it, or her, after this. At least she’d have done the right thing.

Because, apart from one stupid night in London almost two months ago, Heather Reid always did the right thing. Her mother had taught her that much—if only by being a stunning example of what happened when a person didn’t.

Finally the door creaked open to reveal an elegant, polished older lady in a navy skirt suit and a cream blouse, with a string of pearls around her neck and sensible navy shoes on her feet.

‘I’m 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.