I was not certain when I left, but I am now. I am going to be a mother. Our love for each other has gifted us with a child. Again, I should have told you of my suspicions, but I know if I did, you’d have asked me to stay and I would have said yes. But in my heart, I’ve no wish to be a countess. That life is not for me, and I wouldn’t have it for this child.
Jacob has agreed to marry me and raise the babe as our own. He is a good man. He will provide us with a good life. When the child comes of age, perhaps they can visit England as I did. And please know your invitation here is forever open. I wouldn’t keep you from your own child, if that is your wish. But neither would I have them raised in an environment that I found so intolerable. I pray you can understand my decision and, some day, find it in yourself to forgive me.
All of my care,
Anne
Once, twice, a dozen times, Weston read the letter.
He kept waiting for it to change. For the words to magically rearrange themselves into something that made sense. But they never did.
What he’d hoped was a hidden letter from his mother had actually been a love note from his father’s mistress. A mistress the Marquess of Dorchester had taken almost immediately after his wife died giving birth to Weston and Brynne. A mistress that had born him a child!
For five months, Weston kept what he’d learned to himself.
He hadn’t even told Brynne the truth.
There was no reason to dig up old skeletons. No reason to burden his ailing grandfather, the Duke of Caldwell, with a decades-old scandal. No reason to drag the family name through the gossip pages.
But then he had met Lady Martha Smethwick and, finding her a suitable prospect for a wife (if a bit dull), had made the decision to propose. But when he went to ask his father for the family ring, a ring that had been passed down via the eldest son through five generations of carefully planned (if generally unhappy) Weston marriages, he was informed, in no uncertain terms, that it was…
“Gone,” said Jason Weston, Marquess of Dorchester, without glancing up from his accounting ledger.
“What the hell do you mean, it’s gone?” Weston had said in disbelief.
Jason tapped his pen on the edge of his desk. “I gave it away.”
“To whom?” Weston had demanded, although the sinking pit in his stomach told him he already knew the answer. “You gave it toher, didn’t you? Your mistress. Anne.”
His father’s head snapped up. “How do you know that name?”
“Does it matter?”
Jason was quiet for a long while. Then he slumped in his chair, and shook his head. “I suppose not. Except Anne was never my mistress. She was…she was the love of my life.”
Weston snorted. “You’ve never loved anyone.”
“That’s not true. I love you, and your sister.”
“Then you’ve a damned interesting way of showing it,” said Weston, thinking of all the years he’d spent at boarding school. All the times he’d reached out for affection, or acknowledgement, or anything, really, other than indifference. Only to be shoved aside, time and time again. Until, at long last, he stopped reaching out.
There was a reason Weston was cold. A reason he was described as heartless.
And that reason was sitting right in front of him.
The marquess stood up. “If I’ve been demanding of you over the years, it’s because—”
“This isn’t about me,” Weston said curtly. “It’s about the ring. And what you did with it.”
A muscle tensed in Jason’s jaw. A tall man, like his son, he still cut an intimidating figure at seven and fifty. “Purchase another. As I said, the ring is gone.”
Weston met his father’s gaze without flinching. “It wasn’t yours to give away.”
“Are you questioning my decision?”
“You mean your decision to give a two-hundred-year-old family heirloom away to your American mistress? Yes, I bloody well am.” Unable to look his father in the eyes for all of the disgust bubbling up inside of him, Weston turned and strode to the window. Dorchester Park was a magnificent estate of over three thousand acres with the study overlooking a large, manmade pond. Focusing on a pair of swans swimming in lazy circles, he said tersely, “Did you ever bother to meet your bastard child?”
“Don’t call her that,” Jason said.
