“Hell no.”
That response came automatically because one thing I knew, Battle Talyn would never cheat.
You could never predict life. Unless you had the talents of Ravenna, you also could never tell the future.
And shit could always go south.
But deep in my heart, even if, for some crazy reason, things went that way for us, it would never be about that.
For him or for me.
The mood shifted again at my answer, his arm slid up so he could wrap it around my waist to hold me close, and he purred, “I’m gratified by your swift response, darling.”
I smiled at him.
He studied my smile then lifted his gaze to mine.
“He had other women, yes, as the whole world sadly knows,” he confirmed. “Understandably, we never spoke of it, so my conclusion as to why he did it might be incorrect. However, I think he was trying to make her jealous. Mum, that is. Or, perhaps, make her feel something. Anything.”
Something.
Anything.
“Was she that distant?” I inquired gently.
“I was fourteen when she left. After she did, I would try to recall any kind of mother-son or family moment I’d shared with her, or I’d witnessed her share with my sisters. I couldn’t recall any.”
I could not process that.
I could only process how destroyed I was for him that he experienced it.
And one could safely say, I had trouble doing it.
“Oh, baby,” I whispered, those two words being all I could get out.
“And yes, Dad was very traditional. I didn’t understand it. Our grandparents weren’t. I don’t know if he was attempting to make us live some storybook life to remind her he was duke, she was duchess, she’d birthed a marquess and three ladies, and to snap into the program of what he’d offered her when he’d offered for her hand. I don’t know if he was just strange. He had a variety of old-fashioned ideas, hence Prue toughing it out with her bullies.”
Hmm.
“I know I felt something when he was gone, and not just annoyance that I had to deal with the press frenzy of how he went,” he continued.
“Just…something?” I prodded.
He rolled into me and kept rolling until he was on me, resting some weight in a forearm under my shoulder blade so he could stroke my jaw with his thumb.
“For your book?” he asked.
I didn’t understand the change in topic, so I repeated in my own query, “For my book?”
“We’ll call it a kind of research,” he stated, then explained, “My telling you that isn’t a thing in aristocratic families. That distance. The unemotionality. That boys are hoped for to continue the line and not much else, and girls are used to form or strengthen alliances, and nothing else. Perhaps that used to be the way, but it isn’t anymore.”
I nodded.
Battle kept talking.
“Rally’s an example. He has a big family, they’re very close and loving. I have many friends in the peerage, and all of them are the same. Perhaps not always as close, or some siblings don’t get along, some parents divorce. But familial love is there.”
“And it wasn’t there from your parents?”
