He nodded. “So you took a risk.”
“Except it wasn’t a risk. I thought I loved him. I’d spent my young, entitled life without a care in the world. I wanted for nothing. And, in the great error made by every entitled child since the beginning of time, I searched for the thing that I did not have instead of celebrating the things that I did.”
“What was that?”
“Love,” she said simply. “I did not have love. My mother was cold. My brother was distant. My father was dead. Caroline’s father was warm, and near, and alive. And I thought he loved me. I thought he would marry me.” She shrugged the memory away with a smile. “Foolish girl.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his handsome brow furrowed. “What is his name?”
“Jonathan.”
“That’s not the part I want.”
She shook her head. “It’s the part I will give you. It does not matter who he is. He left, and Caroline was born, and that is that.”
“He should pay for what he has done.”
“How? By marrying me? By becoming Caroline’s father in name as well as deed?”
“Hell, no.”
Her brow furrowed. Everyone with whom she’d ever discussed Caroline’s birth had agreed that if only she would name the man, all would be well. Her brother had threatened her with marriage, as had half a dozen women who lived with her in Yorkshire, after she’d birthed Caroline and raised her into childhood. “You don’t think he should be forced to marry me?”
“I think he should be forced to hang by his thumbs from the nearest tree.” Her eyes widened, and he continued. “I think he should be stripped bare and made to walk down Piccadilly. I think he should meet me in the ring in the heart of this place, so I can tear him apart for what he did to you.”
She would be lying if she did not say she enjoyed the threats. “You would do that for me?”
“And more,” he said, the words not boastful, but quick and honest. “I hate that you protect him.”
“It is not protection,” she said, trying to explain. “It is that I don’t wish him relevance. I don’t wish him the power men hold over women. I don’t wish him to be a part of me. Of who I am. Of who Caroline is. Of who she might become.”
“He is none of those things.”
She watched him for a long moment, wanting to believe him. Knowing the truth. “Maybe not to me… but to them… to you… of course he is. And he will be, until there is another.”
“A husband. With a title.”
She did not reply. Did not have to.
“Tell me the rest.”
She lifted one shoulder. Let it fall. “There is not much to say.”
“You loved him.”
“I thought I loved him,” she corrected. And she’d believed it. But now…
Love. She turned the word over and over in her mind, considering its meaning, her experience with it. She had thought she had loved Jonathan. She’d been so sure of it. But now… here… with this man, she realized that what she had felt for Jonathan was minuscule. A thimbleful.
What she felt for Duncan West was the wide sea.
But she would not put a name to it. That way lay danger.
Because, for all her secrets, for all the lies – he had them, too.
She shook her head and looked down at her lap, where his long, bronzed arm crossed her pale legs. She placed her hand on that arm, playing with the golden hairs there. Repeated herself. “I thought I loved him.”
“And?”
She smiled. “I told you, a tale as old as the hills.”
“And after?”
“You know that, newspaperman.”
“I know what they say. I wish to hear what you say.”
“I went to Yorkshire. I ran away to Yorkshire.”
“They say you ran with him.”
She laughed, the sound humorless even to her ears. “He was long disappeared from my life by then. Gone before daybreak the morning after we —”
He inhaled his anger, and she stopped. “Go on,” he urged.
“I took a mail coach. My maid’s sister’s aunt knew of a place in Yorkshire. Somewhere girls could go. To be safe.”
He raised a brow. “A duke’s sister, riding by mail.”
“There was no other way. I would have been caught.”
“Would that have been bad?”
“You did not know my brother then. When he discovered what had happened, he was furious. And not a little bit terrifying. My mother was filled with hate and disdain. We never spoke again.”
He narrowed his gaze. “You were a child.”
She shook her head. “Not once I had a child of my own.”
“So, this place… it took you in.”
She nodded. “Me, and Caroline.” She thought back to Minerva House, to its welcome inhabitants and its lush lands. “It was beautiful. Peaceful and warm. Filled with acceptance. It was… home.” She paused. “The last home I really had.”
“You are lucky you had one at all.”
She watched him carefully, sensing that there was more to the statement than it seemed, but before she could press him, he asked, “How long were you there?”
“Four years.”
“And then?”
“And then my mother died.” He tilted his head in question, and she explained, lost in the tale. “I came home, feeling that I should be in London to mourn her. I brought Caroline – ripped her from the safety of her home, where no one had ever judged her – I brought her to this horrible place. London in season. And one day, we took a walk down Bond Street, and I counted the stares.”