“I cherished her with all my heart,” Rhys said, the words coming out raw and unpolished.
“I was too afraid of what it would cost me to take her as my wife, and then she passed and …I lost everything.”
“And the rake?” Mel’s voice was quiet now, stripped of its earlier coldness.
“The gambling, the women, the scandals that fill the gossip sheets. That’s your penance?”
“It’s my distraction.” He heard the distinction he was drawing and knew how hollow it sounded.
“I couldn’t face the grief. I couldn’t face the guilt. So I buried both under a performance that required so much energy there was nothing left for feeling.”
“From my vantage, the matter appears in a vastly different aspect.”
He met her eyes, accepting the judgment.
“It may be so.”
She was quiet for several seconds. Then, slowly, she moved to the chair across from his and sat down. The movement was deliberate and significant. She was choosing to stay.
“You are a deeply frustrating man,” she said.
“I’ve been told.”
“You make choices that are clearly wrong and then suffer for them in ways that are almost impressive in their thoroughness.”
“I have a talent for self-destruction.”
“You also have three daughters who adore you despite your absences, a household that runs efficiently in your service, and a capacity for affection that you have systematically buried under fifteen years of scandal and distraction.” She tilted her head slightly, that assessing gaze that had unsettled him from their first meeting.
“You are a better father than you believe you are, and a worse duke than you should be.”
“That’s the most balanced assessment anyone has ever given me.”
“I’m a governess. Balance is my profession.”
A ghost of a smile crossed her face. Not the almost-smile he had been catching glimpses of over the past weeks, but something clearer, more visible. A genuine expression of something that might have been amusement or might have been the beginning of forgiveness.
He saw it clearly this time. He allowed himself to see it.
“You still haven’t told them,” she said. “The children. About their mother, about any of it.”
“I didn’t know how.”
“You knew how tonight. You told me.”
“You’re not five years old.”
“No. But Viola asked you about her mother. Anna has questions she’s too proud to voice. Even Thistle, in her own way, wonders why she has a papa who visits and not parents who stay.” Mel’s voice was gentle now, but firm.
“They deserve to know. Not everything, not all at once, but something. Some piece of who they are and where they come from.”
“Your assessment is entirely just.”
“I usually am.” She rose from the chair, but she did not move toward the door. Instead, she stood looking down at him with an expression he could not quite read.
“The birthday celebration is in three days. I suggest you use that time to think about what you want to tell them, about their mother, about yourself, about the future you’re trying to build.”
“And what about us?”
