He was mooning again, rubbing his throbbing eye socket and thinking of her. This simply would not do.
“Clayton?”
His mother’s voice hit him then, soft and familiar and deceptively sweet.
Sodding, bloody hell.
“Do not concern yourself, Farleigh,” he managed hastily. “Perhaps you have at long last managed to retain something I have taught you.”
Farleigh grinned. “Or perhaps you are distracted just as I thought.”
“Perhaps you would like me to feed you your teeth?” Clay gritted in a deceptively pleasant tone. The man was trusted and formidable, but by God, he was wearing on Clay’s patience something fierce.
“Clayton Ludlow,” his mother admonished, reaching his side in a blaze of swirling green skirts.
His mother certainly did have an affinity for bright colors. And intruding when she was least wanted. Not to mention being far too perceptive. She had been attempting to get him alone ever since his arrival at Harlton Hall, and he had been doing his damnedest to avoid it. She knew too much. Saw too much. And he had no wish to be dissected by her today.
Or any other day for that matter.
“You may return to your post, Farleigh,” he ordered his man before his mother made a complete fool out of him before his subordinate.
Farleigh wisely bowed out of the tête-à-tête, stalking away across the expanse of early spring lawn and leaving Clay alone to face his mother. He loved his mother. But he could not help but feel this interview would require some answers he was not entirely prepared to give. Some answers he was not prepared to face himself. For how was he to know where he stood with Ara?
His mother waited just until Farleigh was beyond earshot.
“When were you going to tell me I have a grandson?” she asked.
He clenched his jaw, wondering if Leo had been in her ear or if Edward’s paternity was so bloody apparent to everyone who looked upon the lad except for Clay. “Has my brother been writing to you?”
His mother shook her head with a slow, tender smile. “Leo has not written in at least a week, and I shall take him to task for it at the first possible opportunity.”
Her words caught him off guard. “He writes you regularly, then?”
“Oh yes.” Her smile changed, her voice tinged with undisguised fondness. “And visits whenever he can, unlike another son of mine.”
His ears went hot.Damn it, since when did the heartless Duke of Carlisle send letters and visit Mother? As they had grown to manhood together, he had been keenly aware that his mother—who possessed the heart and tolerance of an angel—treated Leo as if he were her own son. She considered him her son. Leo’s mother the duchess was a cold and uncaring sort of female, the kind who considered her child an inconvenience rather than an extension of herself to be cherished and loved. She had borne him for the sake of her marital duty.
But still, he had not realized Leo and Mother remained in such close contact.
“I would visit if he did not forever have me assigned to his missions,” he griped without heat, rubbing a hand over his scarred cheek.
“He could not have assigned you to a better mission than this one,” his mother said softly, touching his shirtsleeve, for he had stripped off his coat and his waistcoat.
He stiffened, not ready to examine his feelings for Ara any more than he was eager to recall that the danger facing her had not been vanquished. Word had come from London just that morning of a failed Fenian bomb attack on the Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of the city. This hell was far from over, if indeed it would ever completely be eradicated.
“This is the last mission I would have ever hoped to serve.” The hoarse admission was torn from him. He scrubbed a hand over his face, wishing for clarity. Wishing for answers and reassurance where none could be had.
“You still love her, don’t you?”
It had begun the moment he had first seen her again in the drawing room of Burghly House, and last night, it had culminated in a crashing crescendo.
His Ara.
The feisty flame-haired sylph with the blue-violet eyes and the full pink lips he could never kiss enough. The first woman who had ever looked upon him and seen him as a man, nothing less. The only woman who had ever owned his heart. It had always been hers. Would forever be in her keeping.
Lies and betrayals had taken them from each other.
But the time had come to grasp what was theirs.
