“I feel like I know everything else about you now. I want to know this.”
He shifted to face her. Her brow was furrowed, and her kissable lips were stubbornly pursed. There was no escaping this conversation.
“She was beautiful. Almost as beautiful as you.”
Amelia colored, and the seriousness of her expression softened.
“She’d tell me stories of her life in London, of how she had dozens of different beaus and how even Prince Henry read her poetry. She promised we would travel there for the Season. One day. We would have an orangery and greenhouse and garden maze. One day. She would introduce us to the king. One day. There were a lot of ‘one days’ in my childhood.”
It had been almost thirteen years since his mother had died. Two decades since she’d left. The twisting in his gut never went away.
“She sounds—”
“Unhappy,” he interrupted. “You can’t be happy while you’re wishing you were somewhere else.”
“Why didn’t she move back to London?”
“My grandfather wouldn’t allow it.” Because the marquess was an unfeeling bastard.
“Short of hiring a thug to tie her to the furniture, I don’t see how he could have stopped it.”
“She went. For a few weeks. No one would see her—not her friends, not her mother. What little money she’d scraped together wasn’t accepted anywhere. She’d been blackballed. At his request, I’m sure of it.”
“And so she went to France.”
“No. She wasted away here until she was barely a shadow. Then she moved to France.”
A crease formed between her eyebrows. She tapped on his chest distractedly, her nail stabbing at his skin just a little.
He caught her hand with his and eased it away.
“I’m not the most sentimental person, but it does seem rather cold, even to me, to abandon your child.”
He released her hand, preferring the pain of her prodding to this. He turned his attention to a crack in the wall in the corner of the room.
“I was a disappointment. She wanted a son like her—fine, graceful, and well-spoken. I was big, gangly, could barely move without knocking something over. ‘My son, the gigantic clod,’ she said. I just…wasn’t what she wanted.”
Amelia cupped his cheek with her hand, gently turning him to face her. “That must have been very painful.”
“When I was younger, I thought that if I could just be less oafish then she’d get well. Once she left, I thought that if I could just make my fortune in time, she’d come home.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. They gave me my first patent a year after she died.”
She brushed a lock of hair from his eyes. “I’m not your mother. I like…this.” She ran her hand across his chest, her cheeks flushing as she did. “And I’m not wasting away.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” she whispered. “Because I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter17
As far as Amelia was concerned, the firm was running with authoritarian precision—the kind usually achieved only by His Majesty’s army, navy, and any household she ran. Benedict had given her free rein to contribute to his business however she saw fit, and in the space of two weeks, she’d used a lifetime’s experience managing a large household to increase efficiencies in the firm’s operations—from adjusting the workers’ timetables, to overhauling their inventory processes, to implementing a filing system so he could actually find his test results.
Now she leaned against the mezzanine railing and watched the workers do their jobs.
“You haven’t moved for an hour,” Benedict said, coming up behind her. He encircled her within his arms, nuzzling into her neck.
