Page 86 of The Earl’s Forbidden Temptation

“No!” She waved away whatever he had been about to say.

“I knew there could be no coincidence,” she repeated, grief sharpening into anger. “This woman must be her daughter. The daughter of the very woman who destroyed my marriage.”

Her breath caught, and she pressed a hand more firmly to her chest, as though struggling to contain the emotions threatening to overwhelm her.

“She stole my husband,” his mother said, her voice breaking beneath the weight of a hurt she had carried for years. “She took what was mine and made a mockery of the vows he had sworn to me. And now her daughter would dare set her sights upon my son?”

Her mouth tightened, grief hardening into bitter contempt. “That she has inveigled her way into your life tells me she knows precisely who her mother was to your father. She knows what that woman did to me, to our family, and still she came near you.” Her breath trembled. “I will not endure the daughter taking my son after the mother took my husband.”

The accusation lingered, raw and unyielding. What the hell could he say? Sebastian could neither absolve his father without betraying his mother’s pain nor condemn Darcy for a sin that belonged to others. The silence stretched until the truth became inescapable: this was no longer only the consequence of his father’s choices. It threatened the woman who had come to matter far more to Sebastian than he had ever intended.

“How did Miss Whitley enter your life?” his mother demanded. “Do not attempt to mislead me, Sebastian. I know she is that woman’s daughter. The one your father wrote of with such affection, doting upon her in those letters as though she were his own!”

He did not answer at once.

She continued, her gaze relentless. “Since your father’s death, I have urged you repeatedly to consider marriage. You remained indifferent. You avoided society whenever possible, attended only when necessity demanded it, and showed no inclination toward any lady.”

Her lips tightened. “Then you danced four times with the same woman and were seen walking with her in Hyde Park and Vauxhall Gardens. Such attention does not speak of indifference. It speaks of interest, perhaps even courtship.”

Sebastian’s jaw tightened. “There was no courtship.” The evasion felt thin even to him. “There was friendship.”

The words were inadequate, bordering upon dishonest, but anything truer would wound his mother beyond endurance.

“My God,” his mother whispered as a more painful understanding dawned. “Like her mother, she is your mistress? Has she no shame? No decency?”

“Miss Whitley is not my mistress,” he said sharply.

The force of his denial rang through the room, though doubt continued to shadow his mother’s expression.

Silence stretched between them before she asked, more brittlely, “Have you seen the other children?”

He dragged a hand through his hair. “Mother, there is no need for you to distress yourself further.”

“Have you seen them?” she cried, her voice raw.

“Yes.”

Her fingers tightened in her lap. “How many? I could not be certain. The letters were not always clear.”

“There are three,” he said. “Emelia is sixteen, Jane thirteen, and Sarah eleven.”

His mother closed her eyes as a visible shudder passed through her. When she opened them again, her pain was stark and unguarded, calling every protective instinct within him to attention.

Tears rolled down his mother’s cheeks, and her eyes gleamed with hurt. “He betrayed us for years.”

Sebastian wished, with a violence that shocked him, that he could drag his father from the grave and demand an accounting. Almost as fiercely, he wished he could strike the blindness from himself. He had believed secrecy would protect his mother, yet his own actions had brought fresh pain to her door. Had he mastered his desire for Darcy and kept his distance, perhaps she might have been spared this anguish.

Yet even the thought infuriated him.

Darcy was not some inconvenient consequence to be hidden away, and neither were his sisters. None of them had asked for the circumstances of their birth, nor deserved to be punished for the choices their parents had made. Darcy and his sisters had never been meant to matter so much to him.

But they did.

And now his mother’s pain stood before him, immediate and undeniable, demanding a choice between people he cared for when he had never imagined he would be forced to choose at all.

“I do not want them in our lives,” she said hoarsely. “I could not bear to be confronted by the proof of his betrayal. And if society were to learn of his indiscretion...”

Sebastian took her hands, his grip firm, grounding.