Ana Seymour by A Family For Carter Jones Read Free Book Online

pushing heavily on the arms of the chair. “Old bones don’t want to work some days,” he muttered. Then he looked across the desk at Carter, his eyes as piercing and sharp as any man half his age. “Go talk to them, my boy. Make up a story, if you have to. I’d wager it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve stretched the truth to tell a pretty girl what she wants to hear.”
    Dr. Millard softened his accusation with a wink, and Carter grinned as he answered, “You’d win that bet, Doctor.”
    He waited until the doctor had slowly made his way down the office stairs, then reached for his hat. He wasn’t sure he was ready to face Jennie Sheridan yet, but he would send that wire. At the very least, it would get him out from behind this desk.
    Throughout his childhood Carter had watched the comings and goings of Philadelphia mainline society from hidden corners in laundry rooms and butler’s pantries. He’d not merely watched, he’d studied themuntil he could imitate the haughtiest Pennington or the most tiresome Witherspoon.
    He’d learned early to keep out of their way, to allow no opportunities for the rich young offspring of the people his mother worked for to taunt him for his lack of a name. But it had been a lesson learned in heartache. His mother, Maude, had usually been too tired from her days of scrubbing floors and polishing mahogany staircases to lend comfort to the small boy who had, after all, been the result of an entirely improper upstairs-downstairs liaison that had been the one mistake in her circumspect life.
    So Carter was left on his own to watch and plan. His blood was every bit as blue as these elegant men and women who passed him by each day as if he were no more than one of the marble statues currently in vogue. His father had given him the heritage, but not the name. Nor would he ever have the chance to do so. According to Maude Jones, Carter’s father had been sent off in disgrace on a grand tour of Europe after impregnating the family servant and had died in a carriage accident in Italy.
    Sometimes Carter used to spin fantasies about what would have happened if his father had returned from that trip. He would have visited Maude in the tiny apartment she’d been forced to take to await the birth. There he’d have seen his son and would have been so full of fatherly pride that he would have resisted his entire family and taken Maude to wife. And Carter would be living in one of the fine stone mansions instead of lurking there in shadows, waiting for his mother to finish her endless toil.
    Walking slowly down the main street of Vermillion toward the telegraph office, he wondered what had triggered his sudden reverie into the past. It had been months since he’d indulged in those memories. Months, too, since he’d written to his benefactor, a Mr. Arthur Trenton, one of his mother’s employers who had finally noticed the boy in the shadows and had seen fit to send the abnormally bright child first to prep school and then to Harvard.
    Before his mother’s death, Carter had spun fantasies of Mr. Trenton falling in love with Maude and marrying her, which would finally give Carter the name he craved. But, of course, by then Maude was no longer the pretty English immigrant fresh off the boat. Years of labor had roughened her skin and dulled her bright eyes. Arthur Trenton never so much as glanced her way.
    He’d send Mr. Trenton a wire instead of a letter. That would show him how prosperous Carter was becoming, how important. No time for pen and paper. Just a wire, businesslike and expensive. He’d tell him what an important position he’d obtained—district attorney. It sounded impressive. In a wire there would be no space to provide the exact details of his jurisdiction. He wouldn’t be able to tell the old man that his days consisted mostly of farm disputes and dealing with small-town politics.
    His thoughts came to an abrupt halt as he nearly collided head-on with a solid wall of