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‘That does not give you the right to denigrate my father.’
‘I let him off lightly.’
‘You destroyed him.’
‘He still can sit at a fine table and drink fine wine. I feel no pity for him.’
‘You do not even tell yourself the truth.’
He turned from her, shaking his head, and then faced her again. ‘If someone strikes at me, Bellona, they can expect me to strike back. It is the nature of the world. It is how one survives.’
‘Revenge. That is what you did.’
Her words rasped against the inside of his skin. ‘I make the heritage I will pass on to my children. With that in mind you can understand why it is so important I uphold the beliefs I hold close to me.’
He had upheld them. Most of them. Until his world had become fodder for the tongues of the ton. But he could trace his madness back one step further than that. When a woman had put an arrow tip to his stomach. ‘I had thought to make amends to you by holding your father responsible for his actions,’ he said.
She merely shook her head. ‘You took away his belief in what he loves most.’
He whispered, ‘What he loves most should be—you.’ He walked forward. He grasped her arms. ‘We have both abandoned you, Bellona. He and I.’
‘No. I only thought I needed him. I did not. My life is better without him. I did not need his love. I did not. I did not need his presence in my childhood. I only needed food. The funds he did give us came from coin his wife had given him, though I did not know it at the time. When I had nothing, she agreed to give me a dowry, which I now have. She has been my friend even though she could view me with distaste. I do not want her hurt. And you have added to her disgrace. The woman who gave me all she could and asked for nothing. She has treated me with the same kindness as my own mana.’
Just like the chimes of the clock sounded too loud in his ears, Rhys heard the pounding of regret in his body.
He loved the woman who had taken away every part of him he believed in and put a mirror in front of his soul.
‘I did not tell you all the truth either. My father could hurt me even more and I did not want him to decide to tell you everything.’ She stood in front of him and when she moved, the shoulder of her dress drooped. She pulled it back into place. ‘My father came to Melos to paint my mother,’ she said. ‘He had heard tales of her beauty and of the island’s. My mother had no funds and had been forced to sell her body so when my father decided to keep her she insisted he marry her. He did not mind the fact that he was already married. As far as he was concerned it was just words.’
Unthinkable.
The old duke would not even have welcomed Bellona as a guest in the house once he discovered her origins were so tainted. Her mother, selling her body, and her father a bigamist.
The tousled goddess stood in front of him and, like the shattered statue recovered from her homeland by the French, she was indeed more marred than only a dent on the bridge of her nose. But also perfect in a way he’d never seen.
‘I don’t care about your mother, your father or your grandmother.’ Rhys reached out, his forefinger looped under a lock of her hair which barely remained constrained. He slipped the brown strands free. They fell to her shoulders. ‘I wish I could be perfect for you. I’m not. Who your father married, or what your mother did to survive, does not matter to me.’
‘Rhys, your mother told me how angry you were when a servant did not wear the proper livery once.’
‘I was very young when that happened. I was trying to... I don’t know what I was trying to do, but I was not acting as I should. That was not the correct way to handle it. I was in error. As I have been many times.’
He held out his left hand. ‘Forgive me?’
She didn’t step forward right away, but when her body swayed in his direction he moved to her.
‘It is not idle words,’ he said. ‘I do not do that. It is not who I am. It is not what I believe in.’
He rested his forehead against hers. ‘I am sorting out who am I to be. What I am to think. All I believed about myself has been a lie. I thought I could forgive myself anything. I was the second son. A second son did not have the responsibility of the first. I am still the second son by birth. I will always be, and yet I am the duke. The thing I wanted most of all, but knew I could not have. Knew I was not worthy of. If I married the perfect duchess, she would hide my flaws. Instead I found the woman who would show me my weakness. You hold it to my face, Bellona.’
‘I do not. I would not do such a thing.’
He moved back. His eyebrows rose.
‘I could be wrong on that,’ she muttered. ‘Before you met me, you imagined yourself too grand.’
