Page 5 of Miss Hawthorne’s Unlikely Husband (The Troublemakers Trilogy #3)

They’d been forced to use ports in the south to send these last barrels.

But she’d also sent two saplings he was certain were near death at this point, and a pouch of seeds from the family orchard with instructions for him to begin his own orchard.

The hope was that even if she couldn’t send him those things ever again, he could still keep that connection as a branch of that family tree.

A reminder that he was no longer a son but a patriarch.

He was grateful for her consideration in working so hard to send them this last shipment along with a way to continue the legacy in this home away from home.

Indeed, she had sent more of everything.

A fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Richard when he’d first seen the wagons lumbering down the drive.

But the idea of this letter being the last he would receive from her was difficult to swallow.

Once again, he and A’wei were being cut loose to face a lonely future in a world that was rarely kind or welcoming to them.

Isolation wasn’t new to him. He’d faced it a thousand times in a thousand different ways, or so he’d believed.

Now he wondered if he’d ever understood what it meant to be on his own because he’d never in his entire life felt like this .

A’wei, thank God, was taken care of and his two closest friends were married and settled in their own lives with their wives; Basil with A’wei and Leo with Regina Mason.

They weren’t truly out of touch, but there was an unmistakable distance now.

After all, they were in a different stage of their lives.

Now it was only him.

Unless he took a wife and started a family of his own, that is.

The prospect had never been unappealing as a concept for Richard.

Having been raised in a close and loving family, he had always wanted to recreate that for himself, especially after losing his parents at such a young age.

He’d always liked the idea of laying down his own roots and establishing some stable ground.

There was only one true issue. His choice of bride.

The women of England and Europe were fine and well, but while they had just about come to terms with the existence of black men in their countries, they still had little to no idea what to do with a Chinese man like him.

He was a novel curiosity at best or a dangerous alien at worst. Sentiments in America were even worse.

His father had paved his way as best he could.

Everyone knew Edmund Thornfield of Durant Mills, and as his son, Richard was a known entity within the family business before his father passed away.

Business was business and money opened doors, especially when it was associated with established pillars of industry like his family.

But as much as marriage was firstly a matter of business to so many, the idea of marrying their daughters to a Chinese lurker somehow seemed a bridge too far.

At thirty-four years of age, Richard was rich, landed and possessed of not only several properties in Britain and Europe, but a scrupulously maintained reputation.

Yet, he danced and charmed debutantes with a peculiar amount of freedom and ease that few, if any other eligible gentlemen of his ilk could boast for one very simple reason.

He wasn’t truly pursued by even the most desperate of mamas.

Members of the ton had never seen him as a desirable son-in-law.

It had occurred to him to ask his grandmother to arrange a marriage for him with a family in China as his father had done.

It would have been easily done as marriage to a European based Chinese merchant would be seen as a rare enough opportunity for the many Han merchant families in China.

But that would inevitably leave A’wei on the outside.

They would never truly accept her as a member of his family.

The idea of moving to China had occurred as well.

He could sign over the bulk of his holdings and the business to A’wei and her children with Basil, shave half his head in the Manchurian style and live out his days with his mother’s family.

But that would not only leave A’wei ostracized, but he would barely be able to see her.

When she died, he would be halfway around the world.

By the time he got word of it, she would already be cold in her grave.

The idea left him physically ill.

Richard had always known, even as a child, that his bottom line was and would always be his family.

The death of his parents had only reinforced that sentiment and focused it squarely on his sister.

The idea of leaving her or making a choice that separated them was impossible.

So that left him in England where the best he could hope for was a polite marriage to a woman who tolerated him but in some way would always be ashamed of him.

He’d spent his entire life fighting against the stereotype of being weak, effeminate and strange regardless of the fact that very little about his body was visibly dissimilar to any other men in England.

In fact, he was taller than most of them at six foot two with a build to match.

The most stark difference was perhaps his face, the ‘phoenix eyes’ his mother had given him and the olive tone of his skin.

He’d gotten into the habit of keeping his body strong and healthy because he’d learned to stay prepared between Eton and Cambridge.

Those pale little round eyed boys loved nothing better than to pick on the lone skinny Chinese student in their midst. Those attacks became less frequent when they realized that diffidence wasn’t in Richard’s nature, and of course having good friends like Leo and Basil had certainly helped.

Now the attacks were less obvious. They came in substandard business proposals, the occasional lost invitation, generalized insolence or the occasional kidnapping.

He didn’t like thinking about it, but that experience had shaken him to his core.

The fact that it had happened, that Trent could have smiled and played the part and then done that to him when embezzlement didn’t work out.

The fact that his uncle could hate him enough to make him disappear.

He’d never fully confronted his uncle about his role in that, mostly because he couldn’t trust himself to keep a level head around the man.

Richard had managed to regain his freedom in relatively short order, but even two years later, he still had the occasional nightmare about the clank of steel manacles and dark stinking rooms with no way out.

The things he found himself unable to move past in the aftermath were the two things that were irreplaceable to him: the pocket watch his father had passed to him before he died, and the experience of giving A’wei away at her wedding.

The rest didn’t matter as much. It still bothered him that he couldn’t find his father’s pocket watch no matter where he looked.

A’wei, at least, was deliriously happy, reveling in her loving marriage and her brand new adorable children.

He could take some comfort in that even though he hated that he hadn’t been there to do his duty as her brother.

The replacement pocket watch he’d purchased over a year ago, however, only served as a reminder of what he’d lost. Every time he looked at it, a dull rage began to boil in his blood.

Any enjoyment Richard got from society at this point was petty and grim.

There was an ugly satisfaction in the fact that his uncle lived off an allowance controlled by Richard and if he wanted to, he could destroy that man’s life on a whim.

The only thing that held him back was his mother’s lessons and the love his father had still harbored for his little brother even after years of arguing.

Richard was honest enough to admit that he took up space in every public area he could simply to watch the ton squirm.

He knew that most of them felt the same way as his uncle, that they would rather he disappeared instead of forcing them to witness his existence, his success, his growing prominence in their sacred circles thanks to Leo and Ada.

They would never make him bow, hide or defer to them.

He would claim every inch of ground he was entitled to as his father’s son regardless of the cost.

All that was what he faced outside his home, however.

The home his parents had made was still a source of comfort to him, a true blend of his two parents from the lotus pond in the garden to the architecture of the dwelling.

Did he really want to let someone who couldn’t value those things into his only place of refuge for the sake of children?

Before today, the answer was no, but now with the letter before him in his grandmother’s neat Mandarin characters, he was beginning to wonder.

He’d never wanted to be alone, but the idea had never left him feeling lonely before.

Would marriage fix that?

He sighed and set the letter down on the desk, rubbing his hands roughly over his face.

He needed to get out of this room and do something with himself.

He stood and snatched up his jacket before striding out the study door.

Exercise was what he needed. Should he go for a ride or simply a walk?

Or maybe he needed something more visceral, something to get him out of his morose thoughts for the rest of the day and likely the night.

His butler, a tall, reedy man with a hard face and a soft heart, stopped him at the stairs. “Are you going out, sir?” he asked.

“I am. Do you need me, Evers?”

“Yes, sir. Did you have any plans for this particular shipment?”

Richard spared him an unamused look as he continued down the stairs. “You’ve been dealing with this since before I’ve been in this house, Evers. Do you still need direction?”

“Yes, sir, only there seems to be a good deal more than usual this time.”

Richard ran over the list in his mind. He hadn’t seen anything out of the usual. “What do you mean?”

“I’d rather not say, sir, but it is far more than food and the odd scholarly items.”

What else had she put in those damn crates? “Put the food stuff in the cellar, the two plants on my desk in the greenhouse and the rest in the study on the first floor. I will handle it when I return.”

“All of the rest, sir? Those alone are nearly forty crates, sir.”

Richard let out a breath. Forty crates. Only forty to last the rest of his life. “Yes. All of them.”

“Very good, sir. Will you be back for dinner?”

“No, but I should be back tonight.”

Should he go to Rachel? She wasn’t a pleasant woman, his mistress of thirteen years, but it hadn’t stopped him from taking her as a lover.

Last year, he’d been busy with Ada’s residences and fixing the damage Trent had done to his family business, leaving little time for such pleasures.

She, in turn, had taken her pleasures elsewhere on the continent.

He knew she must have returned home from her time abroad in Italy, and she didn’t live too far from Lodge Hall.

Lady Rachel Tremaine never missed the London season or a chance at sex.

Perhaps a solid fuck was what he needed to reset his head and decide what it was he truly wanted.