Chapter 1

The wailing could be heard throughout the entire house. Though the nursery was on the third floor of Farley Park's east wing and the master's apartments occupied the second floor of the west wing, the baby's crying carried there, faint but no less distressing. Even when James Lindford retreated to the book-lined estate office on the first level, he could not entirely blot it out.

What was wrong with the child that she spent every night screaming? Frustrated, he ran one hand through his disheveled hair, then turned and stalked away from the tall window and its view of the night-shrouded countryside.

More to the point, what was wrong with the nurse he'd hired that she could not appease the poor baby?

He ought to be able to sleep through the din. Young Clarissa had no trouble doing so. But then, the older of his two daughters had to sleep at night. She expended so much energy creating chaos during the day that she collapsed exhausted every night, only to begin the cycle anew come the morn.

He paused before the liquor cabinet, straining to hear. Was that silence?

Then it came again, Little Nadia's angry, sobbing wail. So far away, yet she might as well have been in the same room, for her cries pierced his heart and tortured him with guilt.

How had he gotten himself into such an insane situation? What had possessed him to think he could be a good parent to the two little girls he'd so casually fathered? If the investigators he'd hired ever located his third child and she turned out to be even half as unruly as these two, he'd end up in Bedlam.

Somewhere a cock crowed, though dawn was only a hint upon the horizon.

He would get no more sleep this night than he had any other during the past week. Rather than console himself with whiskey, he ought to go up in the nursery and comfort his poor motherless child. Perhaps if he were lucky, Clarissa would sleep later than usual, and he would only have to deal with one unhappy daughter at a time.

In the nursery a solitary candle burned, but it revealed more than enough. The nurse lay on her cot, hidden beneath a heavy counter plane with a pillow clasped over her head. Meanwhile Nadia sat in her bed, sobbing as if her heart were broken.

Guilt poured over James like frigid winter rain. The poor little girl was nine months old, yet already her mother had died, her mother's family had rejected her for her mixed Indian and English blood and she'd been dragged halfway around the world to live in a chilly foreign land nothing at all like her native India.

It was his responsibility, however, to mend it. So with another sigh, this time of resolution, he crossed the room, vowing to discharge the cold hearted, incompetent nurse and find someone - anyone - who could ease his little daughter's unhappiness.

"Hello, Nadia. Hello," he said hoping his raspy voice sounded more soothing to her ears than it did to his own.

Startled, she looked up, a sob catching in her throat. Her chin trembled as if she were about to let out another wail. But a yawn over took her first, and before she could work herself back up to a scream, he lifted her, tangled bed linens and all, and began to waltz her around the slant-ceiling nursery. "One, two, three. One, two, three. It's time to dance with me."

Nadia yawned again, a huge, trembling exhalation, and after a moment the weight of her head came to rest on his shoulder. James smiled and nuzzled his cheek against the baby's silky black locks. Notwithstanding her unhappy temperament, she was the most amazing little thing, incredibly beautiful with blue-gray eyes set within thick black lashes. Right now those lashes were clumped together with tears, and even in her sleep her little chin and baby lips trembled from her emotional storm. So he kept on waltzing, though slower now, and reduced his singing to a humming version of Strauss' latest offering.

Despite the pandemonium her presence had introduced into his life, James freely admitted that Nadia was his child and his responsibility. So were Clarissa and another child whom he hadn't yet located.

It wasn't as if he hadn't known about his children. He'd supported every one of them from the moment of their births. For years he'd convinced himself that he was meeting his obligations by providing their respective mothers an adequate income to house, clothe, feed, and educate them. But two years ago his complacency about his role in their lives had been shaken when Marshall McDougall had arrived from America looking for the man who'd so casually fathered him, then abandoned him.

That man had turned out to be James' first stepfather - his sister Olivia's father. But even though his stepfather had been dead for years, the man's long-ago actions might very well have ruined Olivia and their mother, as well as cast serious shadows on James' reputation and that of their other half-sister Sarah.