“Also aware.”
“Miss Grace does it much better.”
“Miss Grace does everything much better. I am merely a novice attempting to learn.”
Anna considered this for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, she reached back and squeezed his hand.
“You’re improving,” she said. “Slowly. But improvement is improvement regardless of pace.”
He was still thinking about that small gesture of encouragement when the knock came at the study door that evening.
“Enter.”
Mel stepped into the room. She was dressed in the same grey dress she had worn all day, but something about her posture had shifted. The rigid formality was still there, but beneath it he could sense something else. Resolution, perhaps. Or the readiness to hear truths that had been too long withheld.
“I have questions,” she said.
“Ask.”
She moved into the room but did not sit. She stood near the fireplace, her hands clasped before her in that familiar position of professional composure.
“Who was their mother?”
The question lodged in his chest, demanding an answer that encompassed far more than a name. It demanded the whole story, the affection, the cowardice and the loss.
Rhys set down the book he had been pretending to read and met her eyes directly.
“Her name was Celeste Laurent. She was a French actress. She came to London in 1815, after Waterloo, seeking work and escape from the chaos of France.” He paused, gathering the memories that still ached after all these years.
“I met her at a party. She was performing excerpts from Molière, and she was magnificent. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”
“An actress.” Mel’s voice was carefully neutral.
“The ton would not have approved.”
“The ton would have been apoplectic. A duke pursuing an actress was scandal enough. For a Duke to bestow his affections upon such a person was an unpardonable breach of his station.”
“You surrendered your heart to her keeping.”
“Completely.” He heard the roughness in his own voice and did not try to smooth it.
“She was everything I had never known I wanted. Brilliant and fierce and unafraid to tell me when I was being a simpleton, which was frequently. She saw through every performance I had ever constructed and cherished the man she found underneath.”
“And you didn’t wed her.”
It was not a question, but he answered it anyway.
“I didn’t wed her. I told myself I was protecting her. That if I made her a duchess, society would destroy her. That she wouldbe happier remaining my mistress than becoming my wife.” He paused, the old shame pressing against his chest.
“It was a falsehood. I was protecting myself. I was afraid of what my peers would say, what my family would think, what it would cost me in position and reputation.”
“And then she passed away.”
“From a fever. When the triplets were two years old. I was in London when it happened. I had been in London for weeks, attending to ‘duties’that could have waited, avoiding the reality of my situation because confronting it was too difficult.” His voice cracked slightly, but he pressed on.
“She passed before I could get there. She left this world alone, except for the servants and the children who were too young to understand what was happening.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Mel had gone very still, her expression unreadable.
