Heartwishes Read online

  With love, Tamsen.

  “Wow,” Gemma said aloud. She’d already stumbled on a mystery and a romance. She glanced at her watch, told herself she had plenty of time before lunch, then stretched out on her stomach and began to read in earnest.

  2

  COLIN FRAZIER WAS frowning. He had at least fifty things he needed to do today, but here he was, driving out to the guesthouse to pick up one of his mother’s students. The other two were already in the main house, chatting so amiably to his mother that they sounded like long-lost relatives. The young woman, Isla, kept saying that everything was “exquisite,” while the man had tried to buddy up to Colin’s brother Lanny by talking about cars. Since Lanny had rebuilt his first transmission when he was eight, it was evident that the job seeker, Kirk, knew nothing about anything with wheels.

  As for Colin’s youngest brother Shamus, he stood to one side and moved a coin around on his fingers. Their parents had forbidden Shamus, who was the artist in the family, to draw anything for fear that he’d come up with some outrageous caricature of the visiting students and embarrass his parents—or actually, just their mother. Their father tended to laugh at whatever Shamus drew.

  Everything had started about three years ago when Mrs. Frazier found out that the last earl of Rypton, her husband’s very distant relative, had died without issue, so the title was being retired. What she wondered was if the title could be revived, which would mean that her husband could possibly be the earl and she the countess.

  On the night she’d posed this question, the family was at home in the living room, and her three youngest sons had gone into riots of laughter. Shamus, still in high school, grabbed his sketchbook and made an unflattering caricature of their mother wearing a crown.

  As they say, she was not amused.

  Alea Frazier put her chin up and left the room.

  “Now you’ve done it,” her husband said. “I’ll be in the doghouse for weeks. Lanny! Wipe that smirk off your face and start planning your apology.” He glared at his youngest. “And you, young man, with your drawing . . .” He trailed off, as though the punishment he had in mind was too dire to speak of.

  With a great sigh, Mr. Frazier heaved himself up out of his favorite chair to go in search of his wife. He paused in the doorway. “This is something that means a lot to your mother, so I want no more making fun of her. If she wants to be a lady, then she can damned well be one. Got it?”

  After he left, it was a full two minutes before the three youngest boys were laughing again.

  Lanny, the third eldest, turned to Colin, the oldest, because his big brother wasn’t laughing. “Come on, lighten up. Don’t you think this is hilarious?”

  Colin raised an eyebrow. “What I want to know is what our dear mother plans to do in her quest to find out if Dad can be an earl.”

  Peregrine, Pere for short and the second eldest, said, “Think she’ll make Dad buy her a castle?”

  “With a moat?” Lanny asked.

  Pere acted like he had a sword in his hand and attacked Lanny. “Will we brothers become sworn enemies and fight each other to become the next earl?”

  Shamus was sketching his brothers’ mock sword fight and didn’t look up as he said, “Colin will get the title next. You two will have to kill him to get it.”

  At that, Pere and Lanny, their arms extended as they held imaginary swords, turned toward their brother, who was sitting at the end of the long couch. “That’ll be easy,” Lanny said and made a lunge.

  In the next second, Colin was up. He grabbed Lanny about the waist and lifted him onto his shoulders.

  At that moment Mr. Frazier reentered the room. “If you boys break anything, it’ll come out of your allowance.”

  With a snort of laughter, Colin put his brother down. Their father had made them sound like children, but Colin had just turned twenty-seven, while Lanny and Pere were twenty-five and twenty-six.

  “How’s Mom?” Colin asked.

  “All right.” Mr. Frazier gave his eldest son a look that said this was only the beginning. When Mrs. Frazier took on a project, she became a force of nature, like a tornado that plowed across the earth, sucking up everything in its wake. And it looked like this earl of Rypton thing was going to be her next undertaking.

  That was three years ago, but recently the old house in England that had belonged to the earls was put up for sale, and it took all Mr. Frazier’s ability to talk his wife out of buying it. The compromise had been for her to purchase every scrap of paper—“our history” as she called it—that had been squirreled away in the house and have it shipped home to Virginia.

  When she’d returned from her solitary trip to the auction—and before the bills arrived—the family thought she’d probably bought half a dozen or so boxes full of old papers. Instead, six FedEx trucks had arrived bearing professionally crated trunks, baskets, boxes, and even suitcases packed full of crumbling old documents.

  Mr. Frazier wasn’t happy when he’d had to move two vintage cars out of the guesthouse garage so it could be filled with what she’d bought. “Alea,” Mr. Frazier had said with extreme patience as he looked at the collection, “who’s going to go through all this . . . this . . . ?”

  “Don’t worry, dearest, I’ve taken care of that. I called Freddy, and he and I had a good long talk about how to go about this. He came up with a truly brilliant plan.”

  “Freddy?” Mr. Frazier asked, his jaw rigid. Frederick J. Townsend was the president of his wife’s university alma mater—and her old boyfriend. The man she’d almost married. “And how is ol’ Freddy?” Mr. Frazier asked, his teeth clenched.

  “Excellent, as always. He’s going to send me the résumés of some young people who are qualified for the job, probably Ph.D. students. I’ll choose four or five of them to come here to be interviewed. Or do you think that’s too many? Maybe I should cut it down to three. Yes, that’s a good idea. Freddy promised that he’d send the very best the university has to offer. What do you think, dear?”

  Mr. Frazier narrowed his eyes at his wife. He knew when he was being bamboozled. She was leaving out a great deal, such as the salary she’d probably already offered, and how long this person was going to be in their employ. And since she’d insisted on putting her hoard in the guesthouse garage, he had a suspicion about where this student was to live. “I think,” he said slowly, “that you and I are going to sit down and you’re going to tell me exactly what you’re up to.”

  “Of course, dear,” she said, smiling. “I’d love to tell you everything.”

  It was at dinner that night that the family was told of the plan to hire someone who would live in one of the guesthouses and spend two or more years reading and cataloging the material from England.

  “Two years?” Pere asked in shock.

  Lanny said, “Just make sure she’s female. And pretty.”

  “I think the three girlfriends you have now are quite enough,” Mr. Frazier said, but Lanny just grinned.

  Mrs. Frazier turned to her eldest son. “Colin, what do you think?”

  The family knew that Colin kept his opinions to himself. His mother often said that her eldest son had been born independent, that he went where he wanted to when he wanted to. His father said that Colin had been given the short end of the stick. By the time he was three, he’d had two younger brothers who flamboyantly craved attention. With his father working seventy hours a week and his mother dealing with two demanding children, Colin had learned to take care of himself—and to not bother anyone with his needs and wants.

  “I think,” Colin said slowly, “that the whole project will be good for you.” Shamus, the last of his mother’s five children, would leave for college next year, and their mother was going to be lonely. Only Colin lived in Edilean—and he spent so much time in town that he might as well be in another state. Someone living in the guesthouse and spewing out stories about the family’s past would probably entertain his mother. Maybe there’d be moments when she’d forget ho