“Do you love her?” she asked quietly.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I do. I’m quite hopelessly, disgustingly besotted with the woman, and there is no one I want to spend the rest of my life with other than her.”
Grandmother’s stern mouth turned upward into a small smile. “Do you know who else was a horse’s ass, Brandon?”
“Myself, on innumerable occasions,” he admitted wryly, preparing himself for a richly deserved scold.
Christ knew he had earned his rakish reputation. He wasn’t proud of it now, but he wasn’t precisely ashamed either. His past had made him the man he was, and that man was a far cry from the wild, reckless youth he’d once been.
“I shan’t argue with you on that account,” Grandmother said. “However, there is a greater horse’s ass I am thinking of presently, and your admittedly ill-advised foibles pale in comparison to his sins.”
Brandon clenched his jaw. “I believe I know to whom you refer.”
“Your father,” his grandmother confirmed. “He was incapable of knowing the treasure he held in his grasp. He was arrogant and cold, and his first and only concern was for himself. Your mother fell in love with him when she was a girl newly come out. He wanted her for her youthful beauty and family fortune, of course. I knew it then, for our bloodlines yet remain too close to the stink of trade. Watching her give her heart to a man so undeserving, one who slowly, day by day, crushed not just her love for him, but also her spirit, was one of the most painful tragedies I have witnessed.”
Brandon swallowed against a rush of emotion and grief. His memories of his mother were precious but indistinct. Her perfume, her smile, her arms wrapped around him, soothing him after he had fallen off a horse once, just before his father had stormed into the room, telling him that men didn’t cry like puling girls. They had argued that day, his mother’s voice rising until there had been the stinging sound of a slap. Brandon had hidden his face in his mother’s voluminous skirts, and he’d been too afraid to look.
But he had known. Even as a lad, he’d understood that his father was a violent brute. He wondered if his grandmother knew the full extent of his sire’s viciousness.
“He did her violence,” he said hoarsely. “Did you know it?”
His grandmother’s nostrils flared. “I suspected. Diana would never confirm when I asked her. She hid a great deal from me, some of which I only learned after her death. It is one of my greatest regrets that I didn’t try harder to dissuade her from marrying Brandon.”
His gut clenched. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about his mother or what she had endured at the brutal hands of his sire for some time now. He wished that he had been older, stronger. That he might have protected her instead of her protecting him.
“I always hated him,” he managed past the emotion tightening his throat. “He was cruel and he was a bully, but it wasn’t until the day I heard him slap her that I realized the true depths of his cruelty.”
He understood now why his father had been so hell-bent upon keeping him away from his mother’s family for so many years, the void that had been driven between them.
“He was a vile man,” Grandmother agreed. “And I feared he had made you in his mold.”
“Never,” he vowed. “I am nothing like him. I would not raise my hand against a woman.”
She nodded, still stroking the sleeping pug in her lap. “I can see that now. Fortunately, you’ve far more of my darling Diana in you than you do of your father. I think that becoming a father yourself has brought out the very best in you, Brandon.”
The pug at his feet licked his boots, so he bent down and offered the fellow a scratch between the ears before straightening in his seat. “Thank you for bringing her to me that day.”
She gave him a pointed look. “I trust there are no opera singers beneath your roof now?”
He winced. “No.”
Grandmother nodded. “Good. Is there something else you would like to tell me? Anything about Wingfield Hall, perchance?”
The last thing he wanted to do was reveal the truth of Wingfield Hall to her. But there was freedom in honesty, and if the last few weeks had taught him anything, it was that he was ready to relinquish his position as the unofficial leader of the Wicked Dukes Society.
“I suppose you know about the Society,” he said.
“As I told you before, I know something of it from those dreadful whispers, though I don’t wish to know all.” Hisgrandmother frowned. “I also know what you’ve been doing with the funds you earn from it.”
“How?” he asked.
She gave him a secretive smile. “I have my ways. I don’t approve of what you’ve been doing beneath my nose, mind you.” She punctuated her words with a regal thump of her cane.
“Of course not.” The pug at his feet placed his front paws on Brandon’s knee, gazing up at him adoringly, his tongue lolling. “I must beg your forgiveness.”
“Yes,” his grandmother said archly. “You must. However, I have decided to reconsider my decision concerning Wingfield Hall and your cousin Horace.”
“You have?”
