“I have attempted to correct this misunderstanding with limited success.”
Despite everything, something that might have been amusement flickered across his face. She saw it and felt her own expression soften slightly before she caught herself.
“I will be here for their birthday,” he said. “I would not miss it.”
“Ensure that you do not.”
She walked out without looking back.
In the corridor, she stopped and pressed her hand against the wall, steadying herself. The anger was still there, but it was mixed now with other things. Confusion and recognition. A reluctant understanding of why he had done what he had done, even as she condemned the doing of it.
He was the Duke of Trevane. London’s most notorious rake. A man whose scandals filled gossip sheets and whose name was synonymous with everything that polite society found both thrilling and deplorable.
He was also the man who read bedtime stories with voices. Who let himself be buried in sand. Who looked at his daughters with such desperate affection that it made her chest ache.
He was both of these things. Both Mr. Langford and the Duke of Trevane, both the father who was learning to be present and the rake who used scandal as a shield against the world.
How was she supposed to reconcile these two people?
She did not know. She only knew that she had promised to stay, and she would keep that promise. Whatever she decided about the man, she would not abandon the children.
Back in the study, Rhys remained standing where she had left him. He did not move to follow her. He did not call out or attempt to explain further.
He simply stood there, alone, thinking about what he had seen in her face when she learned the truth.
Every woman I’ve ever known has wanted me to be a duke.
It was true: Lady Forsythe and her ilk, the fortune hunters and the social climbers, the widows looking for position and the young ladies looking for triumph. They pursued the duke, the title, the scandal, the story. They saw him as a prize to be won, a conquest to be claimed, a character in the narrative of their own advancement.
Mel had seen something else. She had seen a man struggling with fatherhood, failing at presence, trying to be better than he had been. She had seen someone worth helping, worth teaching, worth the effort of inclusion.
And now she saw the duke. The rake and the man whose reputation preceded him like a warning.
She had looked at him differently. Just as he had feared. Just as he had known she would.
The one woman I want sees the duke as the problem.
He sat back down in his chair and stared at the fire. The book he had been reading lay forgotten on the side table. The evening stretched ahead of him, empty of the conversation he had come to depend on, empty of her presence and her honesty and her almost-smiles.
She had said she needed time. She had said she would not leave the children.
She had not said she would forgive him.
He had not asked her to.
Tomorrow he would face her across the breakfast table, knowing that she knew. Tomorrow he would see her with the children, professional and competent and utterly beyond his reach. Tomorrow he would begin the work of proving, somehow, that the duke and the father were the same person, that the man she had been coming to know was real even if the name he had given her was not.
But tonight, he sat alone with the wreckage of his deception and wondered if this was what he deserved.
He thought it probably was.
CHAPTER NINE
“Your Grace, the children are ready for their morning walk.”
The words landed like shards of ice. Rhys looked up from his untouched breakfast to find Mel standing in the doorway of the dining room, her posture impeccable, her expression arranged into the professional neutrality that had characterised their earliest interactions.
She had not called him “Your Grace”since she had learned his title. She had called him Mr. Langford, and then Rhys, and the progression had felt like something earned, something precious.
