Page 38 of The Duke and the Darkness

“My mother canneverlearn the truth about that night,” he warned, his voice low but firm. “Neither can my sisters.”

The harsh realization hit her. “Your family knows nothing about what your father did, do they?”

“No, and I plan on keeping it that way.”

“How…?” The word emerged as a breathless rasp. “How can she not have known what your father was doing? She lived with him. How could she not have suspected what he…?” Her voice trailed off beneath his grim gaze.

“Because my parents stopped having a true marriage long before that. They lived under the same roof but led separate lives.” He finished off the cognac with a long swallow. “They did the best they could to have nothing to do with each other.”

A typical society marriage, then, except…was thatpainshe saw in the hazel depths of his eyes? “Where did you fit into a home like that?”

“I didn’t.” He stared into the empty glass. “I was sent to Eton when I was thirteen. I stayed away at school as much as possible and spent holidays with friends whenever I could, then kept to myself whenever I had to return home, either here in London or at Wrentham Hall, our family’s estate in Oxfordshire.” He paused and turned the glass, as if imagining golden liquid against the crystal. “Oxfordshire,” he mused, half to himself. “Which is why I went to Cambridge.”

“But you didn’t stay.”

“University life was not for me.”

She studied him closely. “But you thought being a mercenary for the Prussians was?”

“Well, when you put it like that…” With a grimace, he set the empty glass onto a nearby table. “My three best friends wanted me to go with them, and we all thought fighting in the wars would give us purpose.”

“Did it?”

“Not all of us.” He glanced at his glass as if considering whether to refill it. “Some of us realized we were needed moreback here at home.” He shrugged, although whether at the empty glass or at the past, she couldn’t have said. “That’s why I returned to London. My mother and sisters wanted me here.”

Remorse tightened her chest. All this time, she had assumed he’d left the wars because he was too soft and spoiled to succeed at a military career. She’d been wrong about him in that, too.

She murmured, “That’s why you were here at Dartmoor House that night.”

“Mother made me attend her musicale. I think she was still attempting to hold together the last tendrils of what she thought a family should be.”

“Yet you left with the opera singer.”

He quirked a stiff grin. “She was beautiful and accommodating.” When she started to give him the cutting reply that deserved, he interjected, “I was twenty-two, remember? Show me a bored, self-entitled twenty-two-year-old man who wouldn’t have done the same, and I’ll show you a priest.”

She blinked at his blunt audacity. Then a small bubble of laughter fell from her lips, and her shoulders relaxed as part of the unease of being here ebbed away.

“I was nervous about tonight,” she confided, slowly circling her finger around the rim of her glass. “For the first time since…” Her voice trailed off.

“I know,” he said quietly.

She took a deep breath and nodded, then exhaled slowly as she looked around her. “But the house is different from what I remember.”

“Because my mother redecorated it from top to bottom when Father died. She wanted to purge his presence from the place.” He leaned against the sofa back and glanced around the room, as if attempting to see it through her eyes. Then he drawled, “Exorcism by wallpaper and chintz.”

Her hand flew to her lips to stop the burst of laughter, but she couldn’t help it. It also felt too good to suppress. She smiled at him from behind her fingers, only for her smile to fade.

She set her drink aside and took a hesitant step forward. “Tell me exactly what your father and the Duke of Crewe were—”

“Devlin!”

A high-pitched cry echoed through the ground floor rooms, followed by running footsteps. Moments later, a young girl bounced into the room, her long blond hair flowing loose around her slender shoulders, and her pink dress accentuating the excited flush in her fair cheeks. In her hand, she carried a notecard.

She saw Peyton and halted, and her eyes—the same dark brown as Devlin’s—grew round like saucers.

“Oh—apologies!” the girl said, a bit breathless from racing through the house. “I was looking for my brother. I didn’t realize you’d already arrived.”

A strong urge to flee pulsed through Peyton. She might have done exactly that if Devlin hadn’t stepped to her side and taken her arm. Margaret and Teddy had never met her before. Although Peyton had heard stories about the two girls from her mother, who had been close friends with theirs, they had been too young when the attack happened to be in her social circle. But that didn’t stop fresh fear from gripping her.