Page 51 of A Remarkable Rogue

“You have to stay away until all this is over,” he explained solemnly. “Clayton and I will make certain you’re hidden somewhere safe.”

She wiped her trembling hands on the towel, then folded them on her lap. God help her, they were shaking worse than when she’d sewn up his arm.

She’d known this moment would come, when the men who had been blackmailing her would finally attempt to kill her. But she’d never expected to feel this powerless, this helpless… Once more, her life had been ripped from her control.

“Scepter knows you revealed Braxton’s message to me,” he continued. “You’re too much of a risk for them now.”

“But I don’t know anything!”

“Perhaps your Robert does.” An unexpected harshness laced his voice.

The trembling in her hands now shook all of her. “No. That’s im—”

“Or maybe Robert’s directly involved with them, and that’s how they knew what to use to blackmail you.”

“Oh, Nate, you’re so wrong.” She forced herself to fight against the fear squeezing her heart, not for herself but for Robert… “I let you believe, but—but it’s not what you think.” She dropped her gaze to her hands and twisted them in her skirt. She couldn’t look him in the eyes when she admitted the truth. “Robert isn’t my lover.”

“Then who is he?”

She answered so softly that the words were nearly silent on her trembling lips. “Robert is my son.”

Fourteen

Her son.

Sydney’s words pierced into Nate as painfully as the slash throbbing in his forearm.

Robert was her child? All this time, he’d been convinced Robert was her lover, and that was why she’d risked her life to protect him.

But a child…

Impossible.There were no signs of a boy, not once in all the days he’d been guarding her. Lady Agnes had never mentioned a baby; neither had St James and Olivia Everett.

Yet the pain in her eyes—

The cold realization seeped over him like ice water. They hadn’t told him because none of them knew. The boy hadn’t been missing from her life for just the past few weeks since Scepter had been blackmailing her. He’d been absent for far longer than that.

He narrowed his eyes on her. “Where is he?”

A stricken expression darkened her face. “In Warwickshire. I have a country house there.”

The confusion inside him gave way to complete disbelief. “Why isn’t he in London with you?”

“Because I can’t have him here. He isn’t—” She wrapped her fingers in her skirt to keep her hands from shaking and finished, “He isn’t Rowland’s son. The scandal that would happen if anyone found out…”

She swallowed hard, unwilling to put words to her fears.

As she began to rise from her chair, he clasped her arm and stopped her. “Whyisn’t he in London?”

Unexpected anger flared in his gut. Situations like hers happened all the time among ladies of thetonwho got with child. They would place the baby with distant relatives to raise as their own, then return to society a few months later as if nothing had happened.

But Sydney wasn’t one of those women. She was brave and generous, independent and strong, and she couldn’t have cared less about scandal.

Or so he’d thought.

Apparently, he didn’t know her at all.

He clenched his jaw. “Your son deserves your love and protection.”