Shock rendered him silent for a moment. King knew? But that was impossible. No one knew. No one except himself,Rhiannon, the servants, and Perdita. But he had been certain that Perdita hadn’t recognized Rhiannon…
He grappled with what his friend had just revealed, knowing he could deny it or hold his tongue. Or he could concede the truth.
“How?” he asked instead.
King shrugged. “I have my ways. And no, I haven’t told Whitby you defiled his sister.”
The breath hissed from his lungs. He wanted to deny that he had dishonored Rhiannon, but that wasn’t true. He had. He had taken her innocence. And he would do so again if given the chance. Because that was how black his soul was. What a selfish bastard.
“Are you going to tell him?” Aubrey asked at last.
“No,” King said simply. “Becauseyouare going to tell Whit what you’ve done.”
“It will end our friendship.”
“You should have thought of that before you touched her. But youdidtouch her, and what’s more, unless I miss my guess, you have feelings for her.”
“I don’t have feelings for her,” he denied harshly, longing to break something.
To send the contents of his desk flying to the floor. He wanted to destroy.
He didn’t have feelings for anyone. Love was a fiction. A dangerous delusion.
“She ought to marry Carnis,” he said, the words poisonous and bitter.
He didn’t mean them. Rhiannon marrying the earl had been indistinct in his mind, some future occurrence he hadn’t had to face because he had been in a self-induced gin stupor for the last month. But now King had come with recriminations and the truth, making him face what would happen if he continued to rotaway in the country, drinking himself into oblivion and trying his damnedest to forget Rhiannon.
She was going to become another man’s wife.
Rhiannon was marrying Carnis.
He ought to be relieved.
That was what he wanted for her, was it not? He couldn’t marry her himself.
She would take the earl’s name. Lie in his bed. Give him children. Love him.
Aubrey couldn’t bear it. He was too bloody selfish.
“Is that what you truly want?” King asked. “You want Lady Rhiannon to wed Carnis?”
“Of course it’s not,” he admitted, slamming his fist down on the desk and sending papers and cutlery raining to the Axminster. “You already know it isn’t, or you wouldn’t have come to me with the news.”
“If you want to marry her yourself, then why are you hiding in the countryside, swilling gin and living in filth?”
“Because I didn’t want to hurt her,” he blurted, the deepest, darkest parts of him unleashed. “Because I held my mother in my arms as she lay there covered in blood after my devil of a father stabbed her to death, all in the name of love.”
“Your father went mad,” King told him quietly.
There it was, the terrible truth. The last Duke of Richford had murdered his duchess. He had been so caught in the maelstrom of his own jealousy that he had believed she had taken a lover. His father had stabbed his mother to death and then shot himself in his study.
All in the name of supposed love.
“I know he went mad,” Aubrey allowed hoarsely. “But who is to say that I wouldn’t suffer the same fate? That is why I stayed away from her, why I resisted her for so long, until…”
“Until the house party,” King finished for him. “Richford, you’re not your father. Indeed, I am persuaded you’re nothing like him. What happened was horrific, but you cannot let it keep you from living.”
“I was living well enough until her,” he pointed out wryly.
