This boy was his.
His son.
“Robby,” she said softly. “Named after his father. Or at least, the man I thought his father to be.”
Adrian cast a glance over his shoulder, studying her. “Longleigh allowed the child to be named Robin?”
“No.” A flush crept over her cheeks. “His Christian name is Robert. A family name the duke approved of, but my way of giving my son the name I wanted for him. I prefer Robby.”
He nodded, not certain how to feel about this information. Resentful that his bastard of a sire had been involved in her life, had seen the birth of his own son, when he had not. He turned back to Robby’s crib before the old feelings of pent-up rage and frustration overwhelmed him.
He would not allow the past to ruin this precious moment.
This moment, he had waited for.
On his darkest days, when the punishments had been too severe and when the nighttime screams of his fellow prisoners echoed in the night, and when he feared for his own sanity, he had supposed he would never see this day. Had thought he would die first.
But now, here he was.
Tenderly, so tenderly, he stroked his infant son’s cheek. Robby looked nothing like Arthur had, and he supposed it made sense. Different mothers. Arthur had been blond like Amelia, his hair fine as down. Like a little cherub, he had been.
Robby was a unique blend of himself and Tilly. He had the furrow in his chin, an inherited trait Adrian and his son shared with Longleigh. But the boy had his mother’s mouth, his mother’s curls.
“He is beautiful,” Adrian said hoarsely, afraid to look away from the sight of his sleeping son, lest he wake and somehow find himself back in the prison, laboring away on the treadwheel, confined to his chute that kept him from seeing another face. Nothing more than a number.
Two thousand twenty.
That was who he had been. After so long of pretending to be someone else and then losing his identity, sometimes it was deuced difficult to remember just who the hell he was.
“He looks like you,” Tilly said, at his side.
He glanced up, for he had not heard her approach. His eyes had only been for his son. His heart was thundering. Racing. He could scarcely believe this moment was real.
Their gazes clung.
For a breath, all the emotion, dead and buried for so long inside him, reemerged, much as it had in the library with the book of poetry opened in his lap and the memories of the months he and Tilly had spent together returning with such vivid persistence.
“He has your curls,” he said, his voice raw.
Sometimes, it amazed him that he could still speak at all after such a long and painful forced silence. Another thing he would never take for granted, like fresh water.
Belatedly, he took note of the wetness on her cheeks. She was weeping.
“I dreamed of this day.” Her soft words wrapped around his heart like a vine, squeezing it hard.
“As did I.”
“This is not as I imagined it,” she added, dashing at her cheeks with a trembling hand. “You are not the man you were then. More than just your name has changed.”
He could not disagree. He was hardened. A man could not endure what he had without finding himself forever altered. That was supposed to be the very point of prison. Only, what those running it did not realize was that their concept of reforming a man was actually more likely to kill him.
“I am not him,” he said, referring to not just Robin but to his old self.
He had been lighter then, even with the losses he had experienced. He had been capable of laughter and teasing. He had been the sort of man who listened to her reading love poems rather than the hardened husk of a man who hurled the poems into the fire just to watch them burn.
“I do not know how to be with you.” Her confession startled him. “I cannot marry a stranger. I have just escaped a hated marriage, and having regained my freedom, I have no wish to surrender it to another.”
Freedom.Novel concept he had dreamed of during his incarceration. Ever elusive. He felt not a modicum of sympathy to her plight. She was the reason he had been locked inside a cell and denied his very humanity. It was her bloody turn to suffer.
