He hugged me tightly, apologizing with his chin against the top of my head. “I am no a good man, Grace. I dinna know what to think when wee Cooper and Jeffrey walked up on us, but I should have allowed ye to explain. ’Tis only that I’d no felt as happy as I did when I held ye in me arms for ages. When I saw them, believing that ye’d lied to me…it hurt me more deeply than I’d like to admit. I dinna behave as I should have.”
I rubbed his back gently with my hand, speaking against his chest. “I’m sorry, too. It just seemed a bit early to explain everything, and I never thought Jeffrey would show up here. He talked to you, I guess?”
He nodded, and his chin felt much more boney against my head than it truly was.
“What did he tell you?”
I couldn’t see Jeffrey getting into too deep of an explanation. While he spoke to me about everything, he wasn’t that way with most people. I imagined he would have told Eoghanan only what was necessary to convince him to let me explain.
Eoghanan released me and paced around the room a bit, confirming what I’d already guessed. Jeffrey had told him little. Eoghanan still appeared quite confused by the entire situation.
“No verra much. He said that ’twas yer story to tell, and he’s right. I should have allowed ye to do so. All Jeffrey told me was that ye are no married to him, which is what I thought when Cooper called him Da.”
“Well…” I moved to sit on the end of my bed, patting the mattress so that he would join me. Before last night, I would have worried about Cooper walking in and seeing a man in his mother’s room but, now that his father was here, Coop had gleefully moved into his dad’s bedroom to spend his nights there. “I almost was. Just last week, actually.”
“Ah.” I watched as Eoghanan’s body tensed slightly, but he still moved to sit next to me. “So ye are no married to him, but ye are his?”
Placing Jeffrey inside any sort of context where I belonged to him made me squirm internally. I shook my head, reaching for both of Eoghanan’s hands. “No. If you don’t hear anything else I say, hear that. Jeffrey and I are not an item and we never have been.”
His thick brows pulled in tight. He was trying to see, to understand what I meant, but understandably, he was having trouble. “But ye have a child together?”
“Yes, but we didn’t…Jeffrey isn’t Cooper’s real father.” I looked down at our hands, mine squeezing his tightly, his thumb moving back and forth as he’d done last night.
He exhaled loudly, as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time. We sat there, each of us avoiding the other’s gaze, our heart rates slowly escalating, the tension between us building once again.
Eventually, he pulled one of his hands away, moving it to my chin as he lifted my face to make me look at him. “I still doona think I understand all there is to know, but ye are saying that ye and Jeffrey are no married and willna ever be. That ye are no spoken for by anyone else, aye?”
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘Spoken for?’ It seemed archaic language. Why didn’t he just say, ‘Are you dating anyone else?’ Regardless, Eoghanan said many things in such a way, and he made it sound charming every time. “Yes, that is what I’m saying.” I held eye contact, determined not to break it so that he would understand that point. “I am entirely single.”
“I am pleased to hear it, lass.”
“Do you want to hear the rest?” I pulled away a bit so that I could kick off my shoes, standing so that I could pull my legs beneath me, settling into a more comfortable position.
“Aye. Verra much so.”
“Okay. Settle in.”
And so I began. I told him about my father’s job, the old money that he came from, not to mention the mounds of money he made on his own, all of it combining to create our family’s New York estate. How I’d grown up around unimaginable, disgusting wealth and that Jeffrey, along with his father, had been the primary grounding force throughout my entire life.
“I met Jeffrey when I was four. My father hired both his parents, his mother to work as a maid in our household and his father to manage our grounds. The family moved into one of the small cottages on our estate and, since Jeffrey and I were the same age, we just took to each other.” I paused, checking out Eoghanan, to see if he grew bored. It wasn’t the shortest of stories. He couldn’t have appeared more attentive.
He patted my hand gently. “Go on, lass. I wish to hear everything.”
So I continued. “I fell in love with Jeffrey and his family, spending more time in their cottage than our mansion because I felt wanted there. I was close to my sisters, and to a lesser degree, my mom, but we were a house divided. All of us girls versus my dad. It made for a cold, stressed, disingenuous environment.
“Jeffrey’s family did everything under a canopy of the love they felt for one another and it was contagious. Jeffrey’s mother died when we were eight, and it was the most devastating event of my childhood. I remember thinking that I was more heartbroken at her death than I would have been at my own father’s because I knew that Maggie loved me. To this day, I don’t know that about my father.”