“Well,” the duke grumbled. “Well.” And with a scathing sniff, he turned on his heel and stormed out of the nursery.
Matthew thrust out his small chin belligerently. “I don’t like him,” he declared, as his nanny tried in vain to shush him.
Gabriel felt a laugh rumble in his chest. “That’s quite all right, my boy.”His boy. Trulyhis. “I don’t, either.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Claire had summoned up the nerve to reenter the house just as the staff had begun preparations to serve dinner. With the covert glances she received as she stepped once more into the kitchen and prepared to take up the mantle of unflappable housekeeper once again, she assumed that a good portion of them had caught wind of her earlier confrontation with Gabriel.
Thank God that it had occurred in such abstract terms. If the servants had had the slightest inkling as to the truth, then she would have had no place within the household at all. Neither lady of the manor nor housekeeper, she would have had nothing,beennothing.
Hers was not an enviable position, but still less welcome would be to be cast adrift once more. And so as the kitchen maids whispered to one another in hushed voices, no doubt full of gossip and speculation, Claire cleared her throat sharply and sent them running with orders.
To keep her hands and thoughts busy, Claire set to polishing the glassware that would soon grace the table, rubbing the precious crystal with a soft cloth until the facets carved into the glasses refracted the light of the lamps, sending stray sunbursts careening wildly around the kitchen.
She had almost prepared herself for the coming ordeal of dinner when at last Mr. Bradshaw stalked into the kitchen, the sharp click of his heels a merciless report. He extended to her a folded bit of paper.
Claire retrieved it from his fingers. It had been haphazardly folded to begin with, just a simple crimp in the paper as if its author could not be bothered to make even the feeblest attempt at securing privacy. The words contained within slashed across the paper with the force of a blade.
My son dines with me. Tonight, and every night.
No salutation, no signature. Just a concise command, autocratic and brash. She crumpled the note in her fist and slipped it into her pocket.
When she looked up to thank Mr. Bradshaw for his efforts, she found that he would not meet her eyes. He had read it, then—and drawn his own conclusions. His revulsion was written in the tense line of his jaw, the supercilious angle of his head.
And she knew that this would be the beginning of the end of her rule in the household. Whatever tenuous hold she had claimed over the staff would begin to slip through her fingers like water through a sieve, done in by this choice bit of scandal. He thought he knew—theyallthought they knew—but at the end of the day, all that would matter was their own spurious conclusions. With one rash, unthinking act, something so simple and innocuous as the disinclination to spare a bit of sealing wax for a private correspondence, Gabriel had destroyed her authority and her reputation within his household.
“Mr. Bradshaw,” she said in a clipped tone as he turned away from her. “I would remind you that gossip is cruel.”
“My dear Mrs. Hotchkiss,” he replied acidly. “Those who lead blameless lives seldom need to concern themselves with what is said of them.” He punctuated the statement with a stiff, mocking bow as he left the room.
Claire suppressed an inelegant snort as his naïveté, his willful ignorance. Did he truly think that truth had ever been an impediment to gossip? That those lily-white reputations were somehow impervious to the slings and arrows of their detractors?
But there was nothing she could say, no proof she could offer to quell the rumors that would soon begin to fly in earnest. And she wondered if it had been done through design instead of carelessness, if the cold, unfeeling man who had once so briefly been her husband had deliberately set his servants upon her like a pack of hounds after a fox.
A death sentence of a thousand cuts, one cruel jibe after another. As punishments went, it was masterful. But if he had wanted her humbled, he had failed. She had not, after all, done anything for which she ought to be ashamed.
Aside from her lie of omission. Her fingers clenched around the glass in her hand. She should have told him, should have trusted him as she had wanted him to trust her. But after so many years, they had been strangers to one another. Their relationship, such as it was, was not a comfortable winter coat that might have languished in a closet for the summer only to be slipped back into at the first snowfall.
They had become different people. She was not the girl he had married, and he was not the boy she had loved. For a few short weeks her heart had latched onto the wild hope that they might find in one another the shades of those things they had once loved. That perhaps they might have grown into love all over again, older and wiser this time, but infinitely more equipped to weather life’s travails together.
But any hope of that had died a gruesome death at the blazing fury in his eyes. Whatever fragile bond had begun to blossom between them had been vanquished, and now there was nothing between them.
Nothing but their son.
∞∞∞
Matthew sat at the edge of the bed and kicked his legs with a sort of restless energy, but his face was drawn in confusion. The nursery was empty but for the two of them; Gabriel had sent the nanny on her way with assurances that he would take Matthew down to dinner and put the boy to bed afterward.
“Matthew,” he began awkwardly, “what did your mama tell you about your father?”
Matthew shrugged his small shoulders and his lower lip thrust out in discontent. “She doesn’t like to talk about him,” he offered. “She says it hurts.”
For some godforsaken reason, it pleased Gabriel to hear it—itshouldhave hurt. Claire deserved to suffer every bit as much as he had suffered.
“But she says I look like him,” Matthew blurted out, as if uncomfortable with the silence that had fallen between them. “And that he would have loved me if he had gotten to meet me.”
“Did she tell you his name?” Gabriel asked. “Anything else? Anything at all?”
