Lady Forsythe appeared at his elbow within moments, as she always did. She was a handsome widow of perhaps five and thirty, well-connected and well-funded, who had made ither particular project to secure the Duke of Trevane as either a conquest or a husband, whichever he proved willing to provide.
“Your Grace.” Her smile was practiced and warm, her fan moving in the complex signals that society women used to communicate interest.
“We missed you dreadfully at Lady Hartington’s card party. Lord Bexley was quite bereft without you to fleece.”
“Lord Bexley should learn to read his own tells before attempting to read others.” Rhys offered his arm with the automatic courtesy he had perfected over fifteen years.
“Shall we take a turn about the room?”
They walked, and Lady Forsythe chattered, and Rhys responded with the appropriate murmurs of interest while his mind wandered elsewhere entirely.
He thought about the schoolroom at Hartfell, with its neatly organised books and its wall of Viola’s drawings. He thought about the nature collection, each specimen labelled in Miss Grace’s precise handwriting. He thought about the way she had stood in that study, unflinching and unapologetic, telling him truths he had spent three years refusing to face.
Either be present or be honest about your absence. Children can survive distance. They cannot survive uncertainty.
Lady Forsythe was saying something about a musicale next week, and would he be attending, and she did so hope he would attend because the tenor from Vienna was saidto be extraordinary. Rhys heard himself making appropriate responses, agreeing to consider it, complimenting her taste in musical entertainment. The words came automatically, drawn from a well of social performance that never seemed to run dry.
But beneath the performance, something was shifting.
He had felt it on the ride back to London, the growing sense that the life he had built was somehow less substantial than it had been before. The cards, the balls, the endless round of society engagements that filled his days and emptied his nights of meaning. It had all seemed necessary once, a fortress of scandal and charm that protected him from questions he could not answer.
Now it seemed like what it actually was: a performance staged for an audience that did not deserve to know him, while the people who did know him waited in Cornwall for his next brief appearance.
“You seem distracted this evening, Your Grace.” Lady Forsythe’s voice had taken on a note of genuine curiosity beneath its practiced warmth.
“Is everything quite all right?”
“Perfectly.” He summoned the charming smile that had always worked before.
“Merely contemplating the weighty matter of which quadrille to claim first.”
She laughed, as she was meant to laugh, and the conversation moved on to safer topics. But Rhys found himself watching her with new eyes, seeing for the first time the careful construction of her interest, the performance within the performance. Lady Forsythe was not pursuing him because she held him in her affections or even particularly liked him. She was pursuing him because he was the Duke of Trevane, because capturing his attention would elevate her standing, because the game of pursuit was itself a form of entertainment.
She did not see him as a person, but the title, the fortune, the scandal, the story.
No woman has ever looked at him like this, he thought, remembering Miss Grace’s steady gaze across the study desk.As though he is simply a person.
The realisation settled into his chest with uncomfortable weight. He had built his life around being seen in precisely the way Lady Forsythe saw him, as a role rather than a person, a character rather than a man. It had been safer that way and it had been easier. The Duke of Trevane could do things that Rhys Langford, father of three illegitimate daughters, could never do.
But Miss Grace had looked at him and seen Rhys Langford anyway. She had watched him read bedtime stories and climb trees with Thistle and hold Viola’s small hand in his, and she had drawn conclusions that cut through fifteen years of careful construction.
They don’t adore you like a benefactor. They adore you like a father.
He excused himself from Lady Forsythe’s company with practiced grace and made his way to the terrace, where the cool night air provided relief from the press of bodies and the weight of social obligation. The city stretched out before him, a thousand lit windows and dark shadows, the distant rumble of carriages and the closer murmur of conversations drifting through open doors.
He stood alone in the darkness and thought about choices.
Three years ago, when Celeste had passed and left him with three infant daughters he had no idea how to raise, he had made a choice. He had chosen to hide them, to protect them, to build a wall of secrecy and deception that would keep the world from discovering his shame. He had told himself it was for their benefit, that society would destroy them if it learned the truth, that illegitimate children of a duke and an actress would face cruelties he could not allow them to experience.
But the truth, as Miss Grace had so precisely identified, was that he had been protecting himself as much as them. Protecting himself from the judgment of his peers, from the dismantling of his carefully constructed persona, from the vulnerability of being known as a man who had given is heart unwisely and lost.
You are too afraid to be a full-time father, she had said.You’re too afraid to stop being a rake because then you’d have to be real.
She was right, she was devastatingly, unarguably right.
And for the first time in three years, Rhys found himself considering what it might mean to be real instead.
The terrace doors opened behind him, and he turned to find Benedict approaching with two glasses of brandy.
