She didn’t answer.
“My father had been dead nearly four years by this time, but my mother’s sorrow hadn’t faded. She never would have taken up with such a man if she hadn’t been so lonely, so wretched. The moment she did, of course, my uncle discovered it, and he wasted no time in tossing us out.”
“Did she . . . do you suppose she loved him? The aristocrat?”
He shook his head. She hadn’t loved him, but in the end it didn’t matter, because Hart Sutherland had broken her nonetheless, as surely as Ellie would break him if he let her walk away. “No. She couldn’t love anyone else, not after my father. One doesn’t ever get over a love like that, do they?”
She jerked her gaze from her lap to his face. “No. No, they don’t.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Cam broke the silence. “However she may have felt about him, you can be sure he never loved her. He kept her for three years, right up until she told him she carried his child. He was furious. He accused her of trying to squeeze money of out him for her brat, though she’d never asked him for a shilling, and he’d certainly never been generous with her.”
Eleanor released a long, shaky breath. “What . . . what did he do? What happened?”
“Come now, Eleanor.” His laugh was short, bitter. “You know what happened. He left her, without warning, and without a word. Amelia was born seven months later. My mother held her for a little while, but then she started to bleed. She died within the hour.”
His mother, pale and lifeless, the white sheets soaked withher blood . . .
The old misery clawed at him. He gulped in air to loosen the fist clenched inside his chest, but it only squeezed harder. Why should Ellie be spared? No one else had been. His mother. Amelia. Himself.
“This is the child you thought to toss to theton, Ellie, an innocent to ravenous wolves. A child without a mother, whose father abandoned her while she was yet in the womb.”
She choked back a sob, and the small sound cleaved Cam’s heart in two. Pain poured into his chest from the wound, but he grabbed the raw edges of his flesh with both hands and held them together, determined to finish this before he bled to death.
“Do you think thetonwill find her angelic, Eleanor? Or will they simply see a bastard when they look at her?”
Tears rushed to Eleanor’s eyes. “I never wanted to hurt Amelia. I didn’t have a choice.”
Her tears slashed at his open wound, but when his mouth opened, more hurtful words poured out. “Choice is a luxury. Amelia never had one. I was kind to you, Eleanor, when I made you admit you could never hurt her. I kept you from doing something unworthy of you.”
“Unworthy of me,” she said dully. “Not of you, though.”
He snorted. “Lady Charlotte is hardly a defenseless, illegitimate orphan, is she? She’s had every advantage of money and birth, just as you have.”
Her dark eyes flashed. “So we deserve it? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes,” he shot back. “Not because of your advantages, but for another reason altogether.”
“I find myself weary of your reasons, Cam. I don’t want to hear any more.”
But she would hear it, whether she wanted to or not.
Cam stalked over to the settee and loomed over her, his legs thrown wide, his body rigid. “Oh, you’ll hear it, my lady, and right through to the finish.”
In some dim part of his mind he knew he’d lost control, but the realization came too late, and from too great a distance. The weight had crushed him for so long he’d had to heave it off his chest with a mighty shove, and now it tore free with a vengeance, gained momentum, and flattened everything in its path.
Eleanor looked up at him, her eyes stained with tears. “We’ve had some advantages. I don’t deny it. But we’ve had difficulties too. Do you suppose we haven’t? It may shock you to hear it, but aristocrats aren’t exempt from pain, any more than anyone is. We’ve overcome obstacles you know nothing about.”
Oh, but he did know, and it was time she did, as well. “What, you mean your father? Yes, he was rather a challenging obstacle, wasn’t he?”
She stared at him, open-mouthed. “He—what do you know about my father?”
“Quite a lot, as it happens. Perhaps as much as you do.”
Her face went so white he knelt down in front of her and took hold of her upper arms. He looked down at his hands, clutching at her, and watched his fingers tighten as if they weren’t a part of his body at all.
“No, you don’t,” she whispered. “You can’t know anything about him.”
A deep, frozen calm crept over him. He saw his hands fall away from her, heard his own voice, polite and distant, as if he asked if she took sugar in her tea, or observed the weather was unseasonably warm. “But I do, my lady. I knew him. He was the type of man who preyed on other’s vulnerabilities, wasn’t he? The type of man concerned only with his own gratification.”
