Chapter Ten
“Brighton is none of your concern.” Lady Clarice whipped about, tearing her attention from Lucian to glare at Melissa. “This is your doing,” she said, her voice full of disdain. “I never did trust you.”
Melissa blinked. “I haven’t said a word to him about Brighton. Why should I?”
“Exactly,” her stepmother almost hissed. Her agitation caused the flush on her face to bloom as well on her neck and the top swells of her breasts.
“My father met Lady Clarice at Brighton,” Melissa told Lucian. “They were both strolling on the promenade.”
“Be still!” Lady Clarice warned her, a vein now throbbing at the base of her neck.
Melissa frowned.
She might not care for her stepmother, but she couldn’t imagine why the mention of the popular seaside resort should ignite her wrath so ferociously. Lady Clarice looked both shocked and outraged, and was even swaying a bit on her feet, as if she stood on the deck of a ship and not on the solid, unmoving floor of Cranleigh’s drawing room.
“Nae, lady, this is no’ the time for quiet.” Lucian kept his gaze on Lady Clarice and the tension between them was so palpable Melissa wondered the air didn’t catch fire.
“The Brighton promenade is no’ where you met Lady Melissa’s father,” he said then, causing two even deeper splotches of red to appear on Lady Clarice’s cheekbones. “Shall we try for the Sea Rose tavern?”
Melissa’s jaw slipped. “What?”
Lady Clarice inhaled sharply. “You heathen, skirt-wearing bastard!” She flicked a scathing glance at his kilt. “Who the devil do you think you are? How dare you storm into my home and-”
“Speak the truth?” Lucian lifted a brow. “Am I to understand that only your daughters know that you sang and danced at a Brighton dockside tavern?”
She bristled. “I did no such thing. You are mad.”
“So I am, but no’ the way you mean.”
“No one will believe such rot.” She tossed an angry look at Melissa. “Take your whore and be gone from here. Now, before I summon the authorities. This is England, not your wild hills of the north. We have laws against such villains as you.”
“A shame you do not have protections against lonely widowers seeking the wrong woman’s arms for a night’s comfort.” Lucian took a step toward her, his tone as calm as it was deadly. “I have proof.”
“You have nothing. No one will believe you against my word.”
“Perhaps.” He shrugged, appearing to consider.
Melissa looked on with her heart galloping in her chest, her mind racing to make sense of each new revelation. She already knew who she believed. But she’d also never had cause to doubt her father’s own account of how he met his second wife.
“How can this be true?” She turned to Lucian, not questioning him, but wanting knowledge. “My father loved Lady Clarice. He worshipped the ground she walks on. I know” – she wished she didn’t – “I saw how he was with her.”
“See?” Lady Clarice stood straighter, her eyes lighting with triumph. “Even she knows you’re lying.”
“She will also know her father’s own hand.” Lucian’s words made the color drain from Lady Clarice’s face. “He might have been taken in by your beauty and charm,” he said to her, “and perhaps he eventually did come to truly love you.
“But he loved his daughter more.” Lucian glanced at Melissa, then back to her stepmother. “He penned a long account of where and how the two of you met. How you came to be his wife. He secured his letter in a place known only to one soul he trusted implicitly, and that soul told me. I have the letter likewise in a place where you will never find it, so you’d be wise to listen carefully to everything I say.”
Lady Clarice stared at him, chalk white.
She said nothing.
Lucian went to a table and poured a brandy into a crystal tumbler, then returned to press the drink into her hand, urging her to take a sip, which she did.
To Melissa, he explained…
“Your stepmother’s first husband was a dock laborer in Brighton,” he said, filling two more tumblers of brandy. “Upon the birth of their third daughter, June, it became difficult to support a family of five on his earnings. He signed on as a shipmate on a merchant vessel, his new work bringing a better income, but taking him away for long stretches of time. And so-”
“She worked at a tavern to help feed my stepsisters?” Melissa stared at her stepmother, sympathy beginning to simmer inside her. “I am sorry-”
