Behind the Courtesan(38)
Emotions battered his already fragile thoughts. All this time he’d blamed her for leaving. Blamed her for overreacting, for never saying a word to him, for taking so long to write to Matthew and let him know she was alive. All that time, she would have been terrified the duke would find her and bring her back.
“Why?”
Blake’s question was rhetorical, but Daemon replied. “Before I was born, when my father paid no attention to his new bride, Blakiston fell in love with her. The fact that I stand here proves their affair. Blakiston fell in love and begged Mother to marry him, to be with him and live the kind of life she deserved but she said no. Mind, that’s only Blakiston’s side of the story. He kept journals in those days. All the dukes of Blakiston did. Instead of farming figures and weather facts, his were full of entries of despair about the child he would never get to claim, of the happiness he would never feel again. I think the fact that she rejected him cracked him in a way. Next came your mother and she reminded him of mine. The journal entries are sporadic for a time, sometimes ranting, sometimes coherent but all lead back to my mother.”
“Did he love her? My mother?”
“I don’t think he didn’t love her. He always had a temper difficult to leash and drinking fueled the fury. By the time he took Sophia, he was more often drunk than not. It is the only explanation for what he did.”
Blake groaned again. “Do you think he took her to get back at me? Did he know how much I loved her?”
Daemon didn’t react for a few moments. “I suppose that could have had something to do with it, but as far as I can tell, things only went so far wrong when she refused to say ‘I do.’”
Blake’s intake of breath echoed in the room. “He wanted to marry her?”
Daemon nodded again. “He looked for a bride who would make him happier than he thought my mother ever could. This was a way to get back at her.”
“Did he write all of this down?” Blake asked. Did he need to burn that damned mansion to the ground to be rid of yet more evidence of depravity and betrayal?
“Like I said earlier, he thought I was the vicar come to take his deathbed confession.”
Sophie had already been a duchess. His mother had been the first, but by the time he did the same with Sophie, his mother was dead. Sophie was the dowager duchess of Blakiston. Now he almost wished he had the title.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Blake asked his brother.
“I did offer to tell you.”
“Only yesterday.”
“I guess sometimes the ugliness of the truth can hurt so many more people, you keep it to yourself and spin a pretty tale instead. She wouldn’t be the first and she won’t be the last.”
What would life have been like for her? His own mother had fled the old duke after he’d wrapped his hands around her throat in a fit of rage. Would Sophie have been better off living on the streets in London than as the child bride of an angry drunkard? They would never know. He did know one thing. He would have been forced to watch from the sidelines as his childhood love swelled with another man’s child. His father’s child. If the man hadn’t killed her first.
Suddenly her reactions made sense. When he touched her to remove the straw in her hair and she tensed as if he was going to throw her down on the floor then and there. It all made perfect sense. Why didn’t she despise him more for being the spawn of that man? How could she lie with him when she had been through so much?
“You have to let it all go,” Daemon said. “You have to forget about the past and think to the future. Yours and hers.”
“We have no future together.”
“I never said together. You and Sophie are already entwined through Matthew, Violet and their child. You will always have to suffer her presence as long as you and Matthew are friends. She needs to be in contact with her family.”
What had he done? Once again he’d let his out-of-control emotions rule the day rather than stepping back from the carnage-to-be to consider the angles. “Could I be more selfish or thoughtless?”
His brother, the mind reader, said, “No, but you could start by apologizing and telling her what she means to you.”
“I don’t know what she means to me.”
“Well, I know how much you mean to her. For that woman to have shared your bed means she cares a great deal.”
“How long has it been since she shared your bed?” Why had he asked that? He didn’t want to know, but he had to. He had to know if he could live with the knowledge that she liked Daemon more. Especially since he hadn’t called her an ambitious slut. This question had nothing to do with titles at all.
“Months. Several months. We are more friends than anything else.”
“I don’t really think she would have me after everything that has happened.”
“True, she turned me down,” Daemon helpfully pointed out.
“I think she would still turn you down if you were to suddenly inherit the kingdom and become a prince,” Matthew said.
“I will have to convince her.”
“How?” both men asked.
“I will have to show her how much I need her and pray she believes me.”
* * *
A string of violent and extraordinarily vile curses dropped from Sophie’s lips as she trudged through the mud in her favorite boots, her shawl dripping from her shoulders and her hat dangling from numb fingertips. She directed another curse over her shoulder in the direction of the inn. If Blake had already been duke, the bridge would have been strong enough to carry the horse and carriage over safely and she would have already made it to Violet’s to say her goodbyes.
For that’s what she was doing. Only she did it on foot with the rain still falling in sheets across the countryside. No sooner had she made it across the bridge on her own two feet, had there been a roar of water carrying half an uprooted tree in its current. She’d only just gotten to the slippery, grassy banks before the bridge had literally floated away before her eyes.
She prayed Matthew had a good horse in his barn that she could borrow. She’d made it to London from the house once before in the dead of night, she was sure she could do it again. From the city she would send the horse back and have her things collected. She never wanted to lay eyes on Blake again as long as she lived. But before she could leave, she had to say goodbye and tell Violet all about Blake’s claim to the title so someone else could harass him in her stead. She had no doubt the women of the village could talk some sense into his thick head. Once Charles fled, they would be on their own until the land reverted back to the crown and a new man could either buy or earn the title.
If she knew anything about the King, he would already have a man in mind. She wondered if that new man would find his place here, the place that she couldn’t.
“Stupid, pigheaded, stubborn idiot,” she mumbled. As if the heavens agreed with her, lightning lit the afternoon’s darkness and a crack of thunder made her jump. Within two steps, her nerves heightened from anger to apprehension.
Taking off in the storm hadn’t been the smartest of her latest moves and when Matthew’s farmhouse, the home of her somewhat happy childhood, came into view, she sighed and lengthened her stride. Her skirts pulled this way and that in the wind and her teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Why did he have to be so rude? Did the man not know how to bite his tongue and keep his opinions to himself? He certainly wouldn’t last long as a duke in the capital if he couldn’t learn to think before he spoke. Someone would call him out at the very first slight.
Lightning lit the sky again followed a split second later by another deafening crack of thunder. This time the sound was so loud, Sophie felt her entire body rumble. She ran the last twenty or so steps to Matthew’s front door, arriving breathless and terrified of the elements. Even if Matthew did have a horse, she wouldn’t be going anywhere until the weather eased a little.
She shook the excess water from her hands before knocking on the door first once, then twice then a third time with no answer. Sophie bit her lip as she turned her back to the door and peered into the distance. Matthew should be back from the village and Violet wouldn’t be anywhere else but the farmhouse.
She knocked again. Still no answer.
Thunder boomed in the sky again and with a little squeal, Sophie pushed her way in, all sense of good manners gone with the howling wind.
At first she only registered that the main room of the farmhouse had changed spectacularly in fourteen years. It was hard to believe she walked into the same room. The hot glow of coals in the hearth lent the space a glow that touched on a mismatch of rugs, throws and cushions. Fresh flowers with tiny pink buds erupted from a pot on one side of the huge, curtained window and to the other side, a table overflowed with well-loved books. Everywhere her gaze touched looked cozy and inviting, so different from her father’s limited, rustic taste. Trailing her fingers over the back of an old day bed that appeared to double as a sofa of sorts, Sophie moved farther into the house.