“My wife is suffering from the same ailment.”
Leo stared at his brother, trying to comprehend. “Goddamn it, Clay, cease talking in riddles and tell me what is wrong.”
“You are going to be a father. Your wife is with child.”
Air fled his lungs. He could not breathe. Or speak. Joy rushed through him, chased quickly by fear. Bridget was going to have his babe. It defied logic. He could not wrap his numbed mind around such a possibility. That together they could have made a child. That he would be a father.
“Sit down,” Clay advised him, clapping him on the shoulder and leading him to a chair. “Before you fall down.”
Leo surrendered to gravity. His legs gave out, and his arse planted itself in the chair. Still, he could not seem to breathe or form coherent words. He had never been so shocked. So filled with the tender riot of happiness and awe.
“Take a deep breath, old man.”
He did at last, gasping it in, feeling like a drowning man whose head had just broken the surface of the water long enough for him to breathe. Gradually, sanity returned to him. “I am younger than you are,” he reminded his brother in a voice that sounded rusty. Thick with emotion.
“And far less wise,” Clay observed unkindly.
He frowned. “I would argue that point.”
“Yes, you would. But I would still be correct. Evidence: here you sit in London, while your lovely wife has been abandoned in Oxfordshire for the past fortnight.”
“My lovely wife betrayed me,” he bit out, “and she was hardly abandoned. She had the company of all the rest of my family.”
“She feared for her brother,” Clay said softly. “She made mistakes, but she has owned them and apologized for them all. We have forgiven her for what she did to us and to Edward. She and Ara are getting on like sisters, and they are already plotting up a Ladies Home Rule society.”
Of course they were. He was not surprised to learn his family had already fallen in love with Bridget and forgiven her. She had stolen the heart he no longer thought he possessed. She was special and she was rare, the sort of woman a man longed to unburden his secrets to, even those he had never previously fathomed saying aloud.
But she had also hurt him. She had done the one thing he did not think he could find it within him to absolve: she had lied to him and colluded with the enemy. Had told him she loved him, spent every night in his bed, welcomed him into her body, and yet she had kept the summons she’d received from John Mahoney a secret. She had gone to meet the man.
“I am grateful you forgave her,” he said honestly, staring into the carpet as if it would provide him some much-needed answers. “I am merely not certain I can do the same. This is deep, Clay. It goes not just to the bone, but to the very marrow.”
“Clearly you must have harbored some tender feelings for her at some point, else she would not be carrying your babe,” Clay observed.
Correctly, damn him.
“I love her,” he admitted, and it was also true. Her betrayal had left him angry and disillusioned, but it was not the same as Jane’s betrayal so long ago. Because he loved Bridget, and he had never loved Jane. He knew that now.
“Hell, Leo. What are you doing here in London?”
“My duty.” And he had. Finalizing the investigation into John Mahoney had been his driving force. The man had manipulated his wife and landed her brother in Kilmainham. He had also intended to abduct Edward, and he had orchestrated the slayings in Phoenix Park. He was a dangerous, murderous coward. Leo had wanted to be certain any lingering connections to him were in prison where they belonged before anyone else could be hurt.
“The League can wait, brother.” Clay rested a hand on Leo’s shoulder. “You have greater responsibilities now.”
“The League will wait forever.” He looked up from his meditation upon the carpet at last, meeting Clay’s gaze. “I resigned from my post today.”
Shock flitted over his brother’s ordinarily stoic mien. “You resigned?”
He inclined his head. “Yes.”
“You?”
A wry smile quirked his lips at Clay’s disbelief. “None other.”
“Sodding hell, Leo. The League is your life. Why did you not tell me sooner?”
It had been his life, yes. But the strange thing was, when he looked back upon the years he had devoted to service, he realized the League had been his only life. There had not been time or energy for anyone or anything else. The League had been his duty, and he had loved being at its helm. But in other ways, it had also been his anchor.
Today, he had sliced that rope, leaving the anchor on the bottom of the sea, and he did not regret it. If only the decision to move forward with Bridget could be as easy and clean.
