“Those consequences would have affected only you, my dear.”
“Going with him affected only me. What was the difference?”
Thatsparked his mother’s temper. “Now see here, Fletcher Pryde. Your leaving affected us all profoundly. Gwyn cried herself to sleep for a week. Little Heywood kept asking for his ‘Gwey’ while Sheridan went around stabbing things with a stick. Thorn wanted to know when you were coming back. And Maurice walked about in a fog as if he’d lost his will to live. As for me . . .” She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “For months, I couldn’t think or speak of you without bursting into tears.”
The vivid image she painted of his family mourning his absence was balm to his wounded heart. “Then why did you send me away?” he asked hoarsely. “I didn’t give a damn about learning to become a duke. I merely wanted to stay with all of you.”
“You say that now, but at the time you seemed quite content with the plan.”
He thought back to his ten-year-old selfbeforehis uncle had disillusioned him. In a flash, he remembered his excitement at going to England. He’d envisioned a world where he was important, where he wasn’t treated like a child. Unlike his parents, Uncle Eustace had treated him like a man.
Little had he realized what a façade that was. But he’d learned soon enough. “I suppose Iwaseager to go. What did I know? I was a child.”
“Exactly. Which is why you didn’t realize that if we’d broken the will, you would have lost a fortune in unentailed property and stocks to your uncle. Maurice and I couldn’t bear to cripple your financial future that way.”
As his entire world shifted sideways, he stared at her. All this time he’d focused on where and to whom they’d sent him instead ofwhythey’d sent him. He’d taken at face value their remarks that they wanted him prepared to be duke, without probing more deeply. He’d just stewed in his resentment and anger without trying to understand.
He should have tried harder to understand. “Why did you never tell me this?” he asked softly.
She shrugged. “You were ten. You wouldn’t have understood the financial particulars.”
“I might have. I certainly understood them when Uncle Eustace started trying to—” He halted too late.
“Trying to what?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He took her hand in his.
“Obviously it does, or you wouldn’t be so angry with me even after all these years.”
“I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with myself.” For not listening, not asking more questions. For hardening his heart to his parents. For letting Maurice—Father—die without mending the rift.
Uncle Eustace, who had made such a show of liking him on the trip, had proved to be a bastard. But his parents couldn’t have known that he would.
“Anyway,” Grey said, “it’s in the past. We should focus on making our present and future a happy one, don’t you think?”
When he put his arms around her, she burst into tears. He let her cry, as his penance for making her so unhappy.
“I know now y-your . . . uncle was c-cruel . . . to you,” she stammered. “Thorn t-told me he suspected it.”
Damn Thorn. “I got through it,” he said, not sure what else to say. He couldn’t deny it. She’d know he was lying. His mother had always known when he was lying.
“Y-You . . . should have . . . w-written to us about . . . whatever he . . . was doing.”
“I tried. But he was always the one to post the letters. So he read them first. And once I was away at school . . . He’d given up on forcing me into things.” Mostly, anyway. By then Grey was too proud to turn to his parents for help. He was in the thick of a battle with his uncle and determined to win.
“So it w-wasn’ttooawful for you?” she asked, gazing up at him hopefully.
“No,” he lied. She probably knew he lied, but he would bite off his tongue before he told her what his uncle had really done. “As I said, it’s all in the past now.”
Her tears began to die down at last, so he handed her his own handkerchief, since she’d soaked through her own. “I seem to have this effect on women, making them cry,” he teased. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
His mother eyed him askance as she blew her nose and blotted her eyes. “You’re breaking their hearts. Take Bea, for example. You know she’s half in love with you already—and you encouraged that, I might add. So why on earth would you hurt a feeling young woman like her by sneaking off in the night and allowing her to think you were marrying Vanessa?”
Damn. He couldn’t exactly reveal he’d bedded Beatrice—and proposed to her—the night before he’d gone to London. “Holy hell, Mother. You know how to hit a man where it hurts.”
“Well? Answer the question.”
He released a hard breath. “I did not put that announcement in the paper. My aunt did, trying to force my hand and make me marry Vanessa. But I straightened it out. I paid theTimesto say they’d made an error in printing and my true fiancée is Beatrice.”
