Snowbound With The Heir. Sophie Pembroke

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      Jasper eased himself into the driver’s seat and immediately turned up the car’s heating. It was colder than ever out there—chillier even than his father’s reception when he’d returned home to Flaxstone a week or so earlier. And Jasper hadn’t honestly thought that was possible.

      The earl, in all his aristocratic glory, had obviously decided that the rift in the family had to be Jasper’s fault, rather than a result of his own behaviour. Jasper had had plenty of time to think about it over the past five years, and the only conclusion he’d been able to reach was that his father’s life hadn’t ever allowed for the possibility of not getting everything he wanted—so he just took it, and to hell with the consequences for everybody else.

      Well. One thing he couldn’t just take was his son’s respect. That had been lost five years ago when he’d discovered the truth about his father—and nothing that had happened since showed any signs of the earl winning it back.

      But he was done thinking about his father for the day. He’d done what he came here to do.

      Coming back to the UK at all hadn’t been his first choice; he was happy with the life he’d forged over in America, with the reputation he’d built up and the portfolio of work he’d created. But then his father had emailed and told him that, given Jasper’s absence, he intended to legitimise his other son as his heir, too. The title was Jasper’s by law, and Flaxstone went with the title, but everything else—the business, the money, the properties—that was the earl’s to distribute as he pleased.

      And apparently his illegitimate son by the housekeeper was what pleased him most. The son Jasper had only discovered existed by accident, five years ago, and the reason he’d left home in the first place.

      His best friend, Felix.

      Jasper hadn’t come back for the money, or the property, or the business. He’d come back for his reputation and, most of all, for his mother.

      And it was his mother that had brought him to Stonebury Hall with Tori.

      Stonebury Hall would be the perfect home for his mother, if Jasper couldn’t dissuade his father from making a big, public announcement, and the earl went through with his latest, ruinous plan. Jasper wasn’t even sure his mother knew about Felix, or if his father had any intention of telling her before the rest of the country. His mother, lovely and loving as she was, had never really seemed to inhabit the same world as the rest of them, as far as Jasper could tell. She was perfect for opening church fetes, throwing Christmas parties and keeping their little corner of England the way things had been fifty years ago, when she’d watched her mother run her own home in a fashion that was out of date even then, but she’d never really caught up with the changing times—or shown any desire to.

      But the changing times had caught up with them.

      Right now, the earl was still sticking his fingers in his ears and humming, metaphorically at least, telling himself that an illegitimate son, brought up in the household, with his mother still working at the house, was nothing in this day and age. That no one would care that the boy Jasper had grown up with, whose birthday was just weeks before his own, was actually his half-brother.

      That Jasper’s father had been lying to him, and everyone else, his whole life.

      People would care, that Jasper was sure of.

      Jasper had cared, mightily, the day he’d found out—an accidental glimpse of some paperwork in his father’s office that had turned out to be his updated last will and testament, detailing what he left to each of his СКАЧАТЬ