Page 41 of Duke with a Deception
But he didn’t want to talk about this now.
Didn’t want to talk about it ever.
Daphne was a part of his past he had buried deep, too deep to resurrect, tamped down with debauchery and spirits and opium and sin in the intervening years. Until there had been nothing good left, and all that had remained had been the few pieces he had left abandoned in the nursery when she had died.
He’d been too much of a coward to face them. What a fool he was. He’d had to face them tonight, with his new wife standing there looking at him with her pale, tender eyes that saw too much.
“I’m sorry,” Verity apologized.
She didn’t owe him an apology. He was the one who was wrong. Who had lied to her. Who was lying to her still. If she only knew, she would despise him. Which was all the more selfish reason to keep the truth from her forever.
He poured gin into his tumbler again.
“Were you married previously?”
He bit out a bitter laugh. “God no. Lucinda was my mistress.”
“Oh.”
Verity’s response was small and hesitant. He was being a bastard to her. None of this was her fault. But he wasn’t prepared to face his own past, damn her. Worse, he had thought he was beyond this wealth of feeling, so human and puerile. He had thought he had drowned his grief, poisoned it with potions until nothing had remained.
How utterly humbling to discover that, apparently, he had been wrong.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Nor, he was sure, would it be the last.
King tossed back another gulp of gin and turned once again to Verity, who was watching him in the fashion he imagined she might a beast of prey in the wild, uncertain if it would attack her. Why did she have to be so bloody good and kind?
The need to explain surged, surpassing his desperation to obliterate his thoughts with spirits. A sigh left him, ragged and painful.
“It was a long time ago,” he forced out, “all of it.”
His grip on his tumbler was so forceful that it was a minor miracle it hadn’t shattered, raining glass and what remained of his gin to the floor. Verity had moved hesitantly closer. The lamplight glinted off the golden locket at her throat, and the sight set his teeth on edge. Her lady’s maid had fetched it fromhis chamber, where she had inadvertently left it earlier. How he wished she would leave the thing off.
And how he wished he knew what she kept within it. Some memento of her beloved Lord Leopold? A lock of his hair? Likely not, he thought quickly, for Lord Leopold’s hair had been far lighter than his own. If she ever deigned to open it, she would have wondered at once whose hair she carried so near to her heart. King would replace it with something more suitable, he decided. Diamonds or rubies or whatever she wished, shimmering and beautiful just like she was, not simple and plain, not the reminder of a dead man she wrongly believed he was.
“I didn’t mean to pry when I went to the nursery,” Verity said gently, stopping before him.
She was temptation incarnate, her heavenly curves wrapped in demure lavender silk that was likely a gown she’d worn during her coming out. The style was flattering but no longer as popular. It didn’t matter. She could have donned a dirty old sack, and she would have been every bit as alluring. He wanted to take her in his arms, lose himself inside her. But he also wanted to push her away, to leave his painful past locked away where it belonged. Where it was best kept.
“I told you to wait until tomorrow,” he reminded her sharply. “If you had but listened, all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.”
The servants would have packed away Daphne’s blanket and her doll and whatever else remained. Verity would have had no notion of her existence, and King could have continued pretending as if his daughter’s death hadn’t almost killed him.
Verity’s chin jerked up in a show of defiance. Perhaps he had pushed her too far.
“I regret that my discovery has caused you distress,” she began, “but I am not yours to command. You make me sound asif I am a dog who must obey whatever my master decrees. This is my home as well, is it not?”
“Of course it is your home.” He finished his gin and poured another.
It wasn’t acting quickly enough. He needed oblivion, and he needed it now.
“If it is my home as well as yours, then I should be capable of visiting the nursery to ascertain how best to prepare it for Emma,” she countered.
“I never suggested you couldn’t visit it, but you damned well could have waited until the servants had removed anything that was unnecessary for you to see.” He took another bracing pull of gin.
Standing at the threshold of the nursery had made him remember. It made himfeel.
Daphne’s small form in his arms, so wondrous. She’d had his nose. He hadn’t had an inkling of how he intended to raise her since she had been born on the wrong side of the blanket. But he had been determined to do so, to give her everything he could, to be the father to her that his own had never been. To raise her in love and tenderness instead of shouts, rages, and blows.
