A Royal Marriage. Cara Colter

it. She poured tea in lovely, if mismatched, teacups. Probably from the thrift store, too.

      He glanced at the sleeping baby, and was shocked to find that having just met her, he wanted things for her. No, more accurately, did not want certain things for her. Did not want her to grow up wearing hand-me-downs and thrift store clothes, did not want her sleeping in a playpen instead of a crib.

      And there were certain things he did not want for Rachel, either. Crenshaw’s offer of a job bothered him. Despite what she had said about writing, she would obviously need to get reestablished here. He did not want her to be getting up early in the morning, kissing her baby goodbye to go spend a day doing God knew what. Being at someone like Crenshaw’s beck and call.

      It blasted through his mind again. Marry Rachel.

      Though, of course, there were all kinds of other things he could do if he wanted to help Rachel and Carly. He could have the crib packed up and sent to them, anonymously, along with a nice check.

      Yes, that was what he would do. Very sensible.

      He reminded himself sternly, when he found his eyes fastened on the fullness of Rachel’s bottom lip, why he had come here.

      He wondered how he could ask her delicately if she and her sister were full sisters. If they were, naturally the missing girl could not be the Grand Duke of Thortonburg’s illegitimate daughter.

      How to probe?

      “Tell me about your sister,” he suggested. “What makes you think she’s missing?”

      Rachel sighed, and tucked her feet under her. The floor was cold. He tried not to think of the baby playing on a cold floor. He tried not to think of Rachel opening her heating bill with dread.

      “We aren’t as close as we once were,” she admitted. “Victoria didn’t like Bryan, Carly’s father, and it drove a wedge between us. Maybe even more so, when she was proved right. Still, we have always exchanged letters and calls, though maybe not as regularly as we once did. I guess I understand why the police are skeptical. It really is only a feeling I have. A feeling that something is wrong and my sister is in trouble. We’ve always been like that—very in tune with each other.”

      He listened carefully as she talked about her sister. Nothing she said indicated they were anything other than full sisters. Was it possible she might not know the truth? Because he heard unspoken threads that struck him as odd. Subtle hints in her conversation told him her father favored Rachel over Victoria, and her mother Victoria over Rachel. Why?

      He asked, on a hunch, to see a picture of Victoria, and Rachel went and plucked one off the top of a bookshelf. She looked at it with a tender smile, wiped a fleck of dust off it with her sleeve before she passed it to him.

      He struggled to keep his face impassive. Victoria was fire compared to Rachel’s earth. She was beautiful, with cascading dark hair, and vibrant blue eyes that danced and sparkled. Her smile held a certain devilment.

      Because he had just had close contact with Roland Thorton, he saw immediately the similarity. It wasn’t just her coloring, either. It was the way her lips slanted upward, the way she cocked her eyebrow, the way she tilted her head. It was in the straight line of her nose and the angle of her cheekbones. Her resemblance to this island’s most famous family was so striking, he wondered that people had not stopped in the streets to stare at her.