There had been no love lost between him and his father.
Their relationship had always been more toxic than arsenic and more complicated than algebra: the immense chasm between them unbridgeable and ever widening. Yet he still wouldn’t have wished him dead. That the dukewasdead was almost too much to take in on top of everything else. Giles was shocked—dumbfounded, truth be told—but neither sad nor relieved by that incomprehensible fact. Only panicked. Angry.
Queasy.
He took a few moments to calm himself outside the bedchamber door, wishing he had taken up Hugh’s offer to accompany him so he didn’t have to face this hideous moment alone. He hadn’t because he didn’t want to drag his friend into a hornet’s nest, and he hadn’t made any mention of it, either, because he had no earthly idea if it even was a hornet’s nest any longer. Had the hornets died with the duke or were they swarming toward Giles with their stings at the ready? Not telling his friend had been either prudent or cowardly, and probably both, when he had gone to Hugh’s in the first place expressly to confess it all. Needing someone to know. Needing to know someone cared enough about him to still be there when all the skeletons were revealed.
A moot point now? He had no clue, but knew he needed to find out. Even if the lie seemed doomed to hold, Giles couldn’t moveforward until he properly understood the past and the full measure of what he was up against.Ifhe was up against anything.
He fisted the hand Diana had held as if harnessing her strength, blew out a measured breath, and gingerly pushed open the door. The duke lay on his bed, fully clothed in the evening dress he had died in. Carruthers had left a single lamp burning low on the nightstand, which cast a golden hue over his sire’s slack gray face. Giles forced himself to look at it as he edged forward.
The instant wave of grief surprised him.
It wasn’t so much for the man or for the end of their relationship, more for what that relationship could have been had things been different. Or had the stranger laid out on the bed been different.
It came as quite a shock to realize he actually knew nothing personal about his father at all. Not what he liked, what he thought, his hopes, his dreams, his memories, his essence. All he knew was that they had never got on and that trying to change that state of affairs was futile because the door had never swung both ways. The duke had always made no secret of the fact that he loathed him. If Giles did not dance his tune, which he could never manage to do, they argued. For as long as he could remember, those arguments were their only conversations. That gulf between them had always been there, although he was buggered if he knew why when the old man had broken the law to make him his heir.
But what a pack of lies he had now inherited. All his now, to manage or expose. Or perhaps the exposure would come from another quarter, and perhaps sooner rather than later, as his sire’s panic alluded?
“Why did you suddenly need a spare?”
That was the burning question, but of course, the duke couldn’t answer.
“What changed?” His voiced echoed in the silent bedchamber, a dark and gloomy room Giles could not ever recollect setting foot in before. “Was it money? Your sheer disappointment in me?” He had been racking his brains all day and still couldn’t fathom it. “Or is there anotherDirty Secretyou neglected to tell me—or more to the one I already know?”
That was more likely the truth.
If the duchess hadn’t spewed all her pent-up scorn and hatred for his dubious lineage when he visited her deathbed, he would still be none the wiser. Not that he was much wiser as a result. When he had confronted the duke with that shocking news, still reeling from her venom, he hit an outraged wall. NotShe’s lyingorShe’s lost her mindorIt is the laudanum talking, as he had hoped, but a curt “She shouldn’t have told you” before he fell into a stony, disapproving silence. Then she had died within hours and that had been that. Any further questions or mentions of his bastardy sent the duke into a rage and his stubborn Sinclair chin shut his mouth tighter than a clam.
Four years later and Giles still had no idea what his real mother’s name had been, or where he had been born, let alone if the woman still existed. It was all none of his business and never to be discussed, and with no trail to follow and no clues left lying around, there had been nothing to find despite the incessant ghostly rattle of the skeletons that had arrived in his cupboard that same day. Clearly the duke had now taken all the answers to his grave, too, content to leave those damn skeletons rattling forever in the background and his bastard son completely in the dark as to who he really was.
Frustration replaced the brief flash of grief. Then anger at the cruelty of it all. Lies, deceit, disappointment, disgust. He had been at war with his parents since the day he was born, yet never knew why or how it would end. Now that it had ended, and he was the last man standing, he still felt as though he had lost. Especially after this morning’s argument, which hung in the air like a putrid stench, making those damn elusive skeletons rattle so much louder than they ever had before, looming in the darkness.
“Iwillfind it all!” His growl echoed in the void as his gaze moved from the body on the bed to the ceiling and the heavens above it. “Do you hear me?” Then in case the duke really was bound for hell as Giles had always suspected, he addressed the floor, too. Stamped his foot upon it like a petulant child. “I will find the truth—no matter where that path leads!”
He had to.
The last four years had been torture. Spending a whole lifetime in the dark and constantly looking over his shoulder waiting for the ax to fall would drive him mad. Besides, it was the only bit of runt-like rebellion he had left, now the man was gone. That and doing a better job of being the Duke of Harpenden than any of the previous dukes had managed, and he’d start by spending with impunity on their neglected estate while he still legally could. Before he put the duke in the ground, he would begin undoing every wrong the man had done in Shropshire. And then he would modernize it. Spending all the skinflint’s money with the same abandon as he had poured the Veuve Clicquot.
That would really send the duke spinning in his grave like a windmill in a gale. He retired to his drawing room.
“Your port, Your Gr… um…” Carruthers bowed warily ashe proffered the glass on a shiny silver tray. Why he had bothered with the tray in the first place when the decanter was not four feet away was a mystery, but he supposed it was one of the formal rituals the duke had insisted upon to prove how much better than a servant he was. “Do you require anything else?”
“Some answers would be good.” Giles gestured to the wingback opposite by the fire. A roaring fire he had fueled and stoked himself because this dreadful house had always been as cold as its owner. “Please… sit.”
“I think I should prefer to stand, as is proper.”
“We both know I have never been one for propriety, Carruthers, and I have no desire to get a crick in my neck while we chat, so sit for goodness’ sake, as I have lots of questions.”
Wide-eyed, the butler perched on the edge of the seat. “I shall do my best to answer them but must warn you His Grace never once confided in me about anything.”
Giles toasted him with his glass. “Join the club, old boy. The duke was always as miserly with information as he was with his money. However, servants have both eyes and ears, Carruthers, and they talk to one another, so by my guess you currently know more about things than I do.” Because drinking alone felt odd, he went to the sideboard himself and poured a second glass. “For example, did you have any clue he was ill?” He held out the drink and the other man took it, clearly bemused by the informality.
“There were clues, I suppose, but none that I didn’t put down to old age.”
“Such as?”
“Some weight loss—not extensive but enough to have his trousers altered. Obviously, he blamed the chef.”
