Page 87 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Oliver turned back to the top of the page, ran his finger down the row of figures for the third time, and arrived at the same discrepancy. Fourteen pounds, six shillings. The drainage assessment for the lower fields at Ashford Hall did not match the surveyor’s estimate, and neither figure agreed with the sum his steward had sent by express two days ago. He put his pen down on the desk with a scoff.

He did not care about the drainage.

Louisa was engaged to Frederick Langley, and Oliver was sitting in his club writing letters about drainage because drainage was a problem he could solve. Drainage did not laugh until its eyes watered or press its forehead against a book or stand in a walled garden smelling of lavender and say his name in a voice that made every room he had ever entered feel inadequate by comparison.

“You are here. Again.”

Sebastian did not phrase it as a question. He dropped into the chair across from Oliver.

Oliver did not look up. “I have work.”

“You had work yesterday. And the day before. And every day this week. Benton tells me you have now spent more consecutive hours at that desk than any member in the club’s recorded history, including Lord Pratchett, who died in that very chair in 1793 and was not discovered until supper.”

“Benton exaggerates.”

“Benton is concerned. As am I.” Sebastian’s voice carried none of the dry amusement he usually wore like a second coat. “I told you she was unhappy, and I assumed you might, in the intervening days, have arrived at a thought.”

Oliver closed the ledger. “I have arrived at several. None of them useful.”

“Then allow me to supply one.” Sebastian leaned forward. “You love her.”

The words fell into the room the way a stone falls into still water. The surface broke, and the disturbance spread outward in every direction, reaching walls, corners, the edges of Oliver’s composure.

He said nothing.

“You love her, and you are letting her marry another man because you are afraid.”

Oliver picked the pen up and set it back in its tray. He aligned it parallel to the ledger’s edge.

“I have told you. She chose Frederick. The arrangement is finished. I fulfilled my end.”

“You have told me. It was not true then, and it is less true now.” Sebastian’s gaze did not waver. “I have known you since we were fourteen years old. I have watched you charm ballrooms and manage estates and talk your way out of every corner life has put you in. I have never, in all those years, seen you lie to yourself this badly.”

Oliver rose and crossed to the window. “You already told me I am not my father,” he said simply. “I heard you.”

“Perhaps you heard me. You did not believe me.”

“I believed the argument. I did not believe it applied.”

Sebastian was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped.

“Help me understand. I have replayed that conversation every day since, and I do not think I reached you at all.” He paused. “What are you not telling me?”

Oliver pressed his fingertips against the windowpane. The glass was cool. Below, a boy swept the crossing at the corner, his broom moving in quick, efficient arcs through the puddles.

“When I hit Dacre,” he said, “I was not angry.”

Sebastian waited.

“Anger would have been bearable. Anger passes. It flares, and it subsides, and afterward a man can examine what he did and call it a lapse. A moment of poor judgement. A failure of discipline.” He watched the boy finish the crossing and lean his broom against the lamppost. “I was not angry, Sebastian. I was glad.”

Sebastian waited. Oliver let out a deep breath.

“In the fraction of a second between my fist leaving my side and connecting with his face, I felt a clarity I have never felt in my life. The absolute, undeniable certainty that I was going to hurt him, and the knowledge that it would feel good.” He turned from the window. “And it did. It felt good. His head snapped back, and I watched him fall, and for one breath I understood my father perfectly. As a man who discovered that violence answered a need, and who stopped asking whether the need was justified.”

Sebastian’s face had gone very still.

“That is what I have not told you,” Oliver said. “Not that I lost control. That I enjoyed it. That for one heartbeat, standing over Dacre in that corridor, I felt more like myself than I have felt in nine years, and the thought makes me sick, and I cannot go near her while that is true. Because if I love her, and I am capable of that, then I am capable of becoming exactly what destroyed my mother.”