She smiled a little. “At that age, I imagine you must have been drunk on far more than just spirits.”
“Yes. We were having a fine time until I turned and my father…Willowby…he was standing there three feet away, glaring at me. He was furious I was in this club carousing, as he put it.”
She blinked. “Buthewas in the club.”
“A fine argument, but not one I could make to him when he was half-drunk and filled with indignant rage. He dragged me out by my collar in front of my friends and threw me into his carriage. It was the longest ride home of my life with him screaming and yelling about all my failures.”
“Oh, Lucas.” Her voice cracked. “I’m so sorry.”
“I had been resentful of him for years. Resentful of his coldness. I’d spent time with Tyndale’s father by then, and our friend Kit, his father is Duke of Kingsacre and also so kind. I realized not all fathers treated their sons like mine did and had begun to hate Willowby with as much strength as he despised me. It was the perfect storm. A man and a boy nearly a man, both one drink too far into their cups, with so much between them that had been unsaid for over a decade.”
“So you said it,” she whispered, and reached out to thread her fingers through his.
He stared at their interlocked hands, surrendering to the peace her touch seemed to give every time she shared it. In this moment, when he was raw, it gave him the strength to say what happened next.
“Yes.” His voice cracked. “I told him I was tired of his cruelty and his coldness. I told him I deserved his regard and his respect, if not his love.”
She nodded slowly. “That was brave of you. What did he do?”
“Hit me so hard with the back of his hand that I tasted blood,” he said. “And then he told me I deserved nothing because I wasn’t even his true son.”
Her expression gentled with deep empathy. “Oh, Lucas, he was intoxicated and cruel—it’s very possible he was just lashing out at you.”
“I thought the same in that moment. I was so stunned, I couldn’t believe it was possible. If I wasn’t his son, who was I? I couldn’t think of an answer. But what he said to me in that heated moment turned out to be very true. My mother verified it.”
She caught her breath and Lucas fought for his. There were so many memories coming back up to torment him. He recalled his mother’s face when the two of them stumbled into the foyer. How disgusted she’d been as she glared at them from the hall.
“Why would she do so?” Diana asked.
“He gave her no choice. When we arrived here, at this very house, he dragged me inside. There she was, roused by the racket. He started bellowing at her to manage her bastard, as she should have done for all these years. She wasnotdrunk, and there was a moment when all the color went out of her face. I knew then. In that moment, I knew.
“What did she say to you?” Diana asked, her hand tightening against his. “Did she explain?”
“In a way. She was enraged at first, not that he had struck me or railed at me, but that he would tell her secret. She kept asking him how could he, after all these years, how could he? It all came out then, as I watched them scream out their hate to each other like he’d screamed it out to me. It was like I wasn’t even in the room and they hashed out the whole sordid thing as I’m sure they had many times before, only in private.”
“She had strayed,” Diana whispered.
“With a servant, of all things,” Lucas said, almost laughing even though there was nothing funny about the most painful memory of his life. “My father’s valet—well, his previous valet. And that affair happened during a time where my father knew full well the child could not be his. So I am not a duke, I simply wear the costume. I suppose living a life of lies helped me with my role as spy. I should be grateful, perhaps.”
She turned farther into him and her warm hands lifted to his cheeks. She smoothed her thumbs against his skin and whispered, “That is not true.Theylived a life of lies, not you. Whatever your mother did wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t change it.”
“Neither could Willowby, though I know he wanted to,” Lucas said. “I was born during their marriage—to protest my parentage would have been fruitless and caused a scandal that would have destroyed us all, not that my father cared about anyone but himself. He spent all those years looking at me and seeing the man whose tainted seed would be carried on inhisline, and he was horrified. No wonder he despised me.”
“He was a cruel person who could lay the sins of an adult onto an innocent child, no matter how he felt about his lines or his title or his fortune,” Diana murmured. “Oh, Lucas, that is a burden to carry.”
He shrugged. “But I didn’t carry it. I ran from it, you see. I ran that very night, to our friend Hugh’s house in London. He was the only one who had inherited by then. He let me in and asked me about what had happened, but I wouldn’t tell him. I couldn’t. I was too crushed.”
“And even when that first horrible reaction faded,” she asked. “Could you have confessed to any of them, if only to ease the burden?”
“I could have,” he admitted. “Most of them have brutal pasts with their own fathers. I’m certain they would have been kind and supportive. But when they looked at me, they would have seen that I didn’t belong. At least that’s what I thought. So I never told a soul.”
She dipped her head, and her voice was far away when she said, “It ate you alive, that pain that could not be spoken. That loss that couldn’t be shared.”
He stared at her, for there was an expression on her face that told him she understood those concepts on a far deeper level than he knew. He didn’t understand what had broken her, but he was more comfortable knowing that he wasn’t alone in the kind of pain that blossomed now in his chest.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It damaged everything in my life. Like Hugh, all my other friends eventually sensed something had changed, but I pushed them back and pretended it didn’t matter. When Willowby died two years later, I entered the military rather than face the past and the future. Perhaps I wanted to die, I don’t know. I became a spy to forget what I am, but it slaps me in the face at all turns. If you think you don’t belong here, well, neither do I, Diana. Sothereis my secret. There is the truth.”
Diana was silent for a long moment. So long that he feared perhaps his secret had changed the way she viewed him, as he had once feared it would change his friends and their view. That no matter what she said, she knew what he was and that was all she could see now. Like his father had. Like his mother.
