Jack's in Ceylon

"Father sent my stepbrother to Ceylon, over a year ago." Charlotte answered slowly, a little unnerved by the intensity of Mr. Fuller's questioning. "My family has interests there, a tea plantation and trading brokerage; Father told Jack that he could go a long way towards growing up if he learned to run a place like that in the tropics." She noticed Fuller's face tighten when he heard Jack was half a globe away and could contain her curiosity no longer.

"Why do you care so much about Jack?" For an answer Fuller climbed off the bed and walked naked across the room to retrieve the small book of poetry she had noticed by Mary's portrait. Charlotte's eyes followed his bronzed figure like a cat following a bowl of cream, what was it about his narrow waist and firm ass that made her think and act like a bitch in heat? She was so caught up in watching the muscular figure of her lover glowing in the yellow light of the lantern, that she almost didn't understand what Randy was saying when he started speaking again.

"Jack was Mary's lover." Fuller told her with a grim look on his face, and perhaps mistaking her confusion for disbelief, he opened the book to the front flap and pressed it into her hands. "Do you recognize his script?"

The precise penmanship certainly could be that of her brother. She could not be sure, but in all other ways Fuller's claim was possible. The timing of her brother's sudden departure and the tension between Jack and her father made a lot of sense if Lord Marlton discovered his son had impregnated one of the scullery maids. Jack always had been a romantic at heart. Recalling the down-beaten expression on Jack's face as he left for Portsmouth made Charlotte wonder even if he had fallen in love with Mary? That, far more than the inconvenience of a pregnant scullery maid would have brought out the anger in her father.

"I think you're right." Charlotte spoke slowly, carefully forming the words as she handed the book back to Fuller, and then a new thought. "I wonder if Jack even knows Mary was with child, or if she's now dead?"

Randy choked back his angry retort about gentlemen playing with the hearts of serving girls and then cowardly running off rather than facing the consequences of their behavior. Until this moment he hadn't even considered the possibility that Mary's seducer had been anything other than a villainous cad, but it was at least possible that Charlotte's step brother was not completely at fault for his sister's ****.

"Do you have your brother's address?" Randy was unsure if he intended to sail to Ceylon and string up the boy by his cock, or write to him and inform him of the fall-out caused by his actions, but he did want to find out where this Jack of hers was.

"No, but Father does." Miss Charlotte answered him nervously. "He keeps all his correspondence locked in his office desk with his business papers." After a moment of hesitation she added cautiously, "If your plan is to exchange me for information about Jack, I doubt Father would agree, of the two of us his preference was always for his first born."