“Why don’t you?” he asked. “Why don’t you trust me? I would have—had I known that you—that Anna—that none of it was true, I would have—” He stopped. Regrouped. “I would have taken more care.”
She’d never in her life felt more cared for than in the last hour, in his arms. And she wanted to give him something for it. Something that she’d never given another person. Her darkest secret, kept only in her deepest thoughts. “Caroline’s father,” she whispered. “He was the last.”
He was silent for a long moment, before he asked, “When?”
He still did not understand. “Ten years ago.”
He sucked in a breath, and she wondered at the sound, at the way he seemed pained by her truth. “The only time?”
He knew the answer to the question, but she replied nonetheless. “Until now.”
His hands came to her face, lifting her chin, forcing her to look at him. “He was a fool.”
“He was not. He was a boy who wanted a girl. But not forever.” She smiled. “Not even a second time.”
“Who was he?”
She blushed at the question, hating the answer. “He worked in the stables at my brother’s country estate. He saddled my horse a few times, rode out with me on one occasion.” She looked away, wrapping her arms tight around herself. “I was . . . bewitched by his smile. His flirt.”
He nodded. “So you took a risk.”
“Except it wasn’t a risk. I thought I loved him. I’d spent my young, entitled life without a care in the world. I wanted for nothing. And, in the great error made by every entitled child since the beginning of time, I searched for the thing that I did not have instead of celebrating the things that I did.”
“What was that?”
“Love,” she said simply. “I did not have love. My mother was cold. My brother was distant. My father was dead. Caroline’s father was warm, and near, and alive. And I thought he loved me. I thought he would marry me.” She shrugged the memory away with a smile. “Foolish girl.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his handsome brow furrowed. “What is his name?”
“Jonathan.”
“That’s not the part I want.”
She shook her head. “It’s the part I will give you. It does not matter who he is. He left, and Caroline was born, and that is that.”
“He should pay for what he has done.”
“How? By marrying me? By becoming Caroline’s father in name as well as deed?”
“Hell, no.”
Her brow furrowed. Everyone with whom she’d ever discussed Caroline’s birth had agreed that if only she would name the man, all would be well. Her brother had threatened her with marriage, as had half a dozen women who lived with her in Yorkshire, after she’d birthed Caroline and raised her into childhood. “You don’t think he should be forced to marry me?”
“I think he should be forced to hang by his thumbs from the nearest tree.” Her eyes widened, and he continued. “I think he should be stripped bare and made to walk down Piccadilly. I think he should meet me in the ring in the heart of this place, so I can tear him apart for what he did to you.”
She would be lying if she did not say she enjoyed the threats. “You would do that for me?”
“And more,” he said, the words not boastful, but quick and honest. “I hate that you protect him.”
“It is not protection,” she said, trying to explain. “It is that I don’t wish him relevance. I don’t wish him the power men hold over women. I don’t wish him to be a part of me. Of who I am. Of who Caroline is. Of who she might become.”
“He is none of those things.”
She watched him for a long moment, wanting to believe him. Knowing the truth. “Maybe not to me . . . but to them . . . to you . . . of course he is. And he will be, until there is another.”
“A husband. With a title.”
She did not reply. Did not have to.
“Tell me the rest.”
She lifted one shoulder. Let it fall. “There is not much to say.”
“You loved him.”
“I thought I loved him,” she corrected. And she’d believed it. But now . . .
Love. She turned the word over and over in her mind, considering its meaning, her experience with it. She had thought she had loved Jonathan. She’d been so sure of it. But now . . . here . . . with this man, she realized that what she had felt for Jonathan was minuscule. A thimbleful.
What she felt for Duncan West was the wide sea.
But she would not put a name to it. That way lay danger.
Because, for all her secrets, for all the lies—he had them, too.
She shook her head and looked down at her lap, where his long, bronzed arm crossed her pale legs. She placed her hand on that arm, playing with the golden hairs there. Repeated herself. “I thought I loved him.”
“And?”
She smiled. “I told you, a tale as old as the hills.”
“And after?”
“You know that, newspaperman.”
“I know what they say. I wish to hear what you say.”
“I went to Yorkshire. I ran away to Yorkshire.”
“They say you ran with him.”
She laughed, the sound humorless even to her ears. “He was long disappeared from my life by then. Gone before daybreak the morning after we—”