Page 59 of The Lady’s Deception

Surprise flickered into her expression, but she nodded. “Papa mentioned how hard you’ve been working of late.”

He couldn’t bear what sounded suspiciously like praise. “I have. But I see now I was a fool to think I could ever make amends.” The confession came out as a whisper, hardly audible over the noise of even the quiet Mayfair streets.

She heard him, though. “Amends?” Pausing in the middle of a crossing, she fixed him with a stare. “Amends for what?”

Erica did not merely march to her own beat. She danced her own steps to music no one else ever heard. In childhood, she had been the earliest source of his discontent, the annoying, interrupting, pestering little sister with whom he’d thought he had nothing in common. Except, of course, Henry Edgeworth.

Quickly he dragged her out of the street. “Let’s not have you run down by some dandy in a high perch phaeton. I don’t need yet another stain on my conscience.”

“Another…?” She stared up at him, sudden comprehension in her eyes. “Oh. I should have known…”

He expected her to rail at him on the spot. Instead, they walked the next two blocks in stony silence. But at soon as the butler had shown them into Laurens House—a double-front brownstone that might have passed for unassuming beside the extravagance of Finch House—she turned on him with that familiar flash of fire in her eyes and said, “How dare you?”

He let himself be half-led, half-pushed into a nearby salon. The footman’s face betrayed not one whit of surprise as he pulled the door closed behind the duchess.

With four fingers planted against Paris’s chest, she gave him an easy shove onto a brocaded sofa. He supposed he ought to be grateful it wasn’t the floor. He might have resisted her—though a life spent half outdoors had made her surprisingly strong. But he was tired, and he knew he’d had this coming for a very long time. “How dare I what?”

“Make all of this—any of this—about you?” Her arm flailed out in a wide arc; if he had not leaned back, she would have struck him across the face. He tried to convince himself it would not have been deliberate. “Henry and Galen and… A Thiarna Dia,” she muttered, borrowing one of Molly’s favored Gaelic epithets. “The failure of the uprising does not rest on your shoulders.”

He could not help but wince. “Not on mine alone, no. But I have my share to bear. Whose fault was it that Henry and Galen got involved? Whose fault that Galen will be a cripple for the rest of his life and Henry—? God, Erica.” He drove his fist into the cushion beside him, wanting pain and feeling nothing. “Henry’s dead. I was supposed to be there with him. But because I was careless and let Galen out of my sight, I had to rescue my little brother first. And when I finally got to Henry…” He could feel the tremors start deep within him as the memory rose like a gory specter. “I wish I could tell you his last words were of you. But I don’t know what they were. I was too late. Afterward, I sat in our kitchen with his blood on my hands—his actual blood—and heard you tell me that I was the reason for your misery.”

Erica flopped down beside him and circled his balled fist with her hands. “In more than twenty years you’d never listened to me. Why did you have to start then?” Chidingly, she shook her head. “I was frightened. Furious. With you. With…the universe. I adored Henry. I begged him not to risk his life.”

“While I urged him on.” He shook his head. “Can you forgive me?”

“No. I can’t.” When he would have pulled away, Erica’s fingertips dug into his knuckles. “Don’t you see? I can’t forgive you because I don’t blame you. Henry believed in the cause of a free Ireland. He died for it. Don’t diminish his death by making it about something else—by making it about you.”

“Even though he—?” He bit off the words. The truth that was not his to tell.

“Loved you?” she finished in a whisper. “I didn’t realize you knew.”

Guilt will destroy you, people said. If only it were true. If only the guilt and the grief he felt had been capable of truly devouring him. Then surely, surely he wouldn’t still feel this much pain…

He managed to nod. “Yet I would have let you marry him—let him marry you—”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her toss her head. “That’s just what I mean, Paris. Let him? Let me? You take responsibility for things that have very little to do with you. You assume you know best. Henry was honest with me. He genuinely wanted my happiness. I accepted his proposal knowing he desired men. Knowing that, for a time, he fancied you—despite the fact that you’re a selfish ass, as he used to say.”

He flinched at the truth of those words, then absurdly found himself fighting a laugh. Henry would indeed have said just that. Erica smiled too through the tears welling in her eyes. Her voice was softer when she continued. “That doesn’t mean he let you exploit his love. It doesn’t mean he didn’t love Ireland too.”

Oh, there was balm in her words, and he wanted desperately to be soothed by it. Healed by it. But surely, surely, the wound was too deep…

“I’m your brother, Erica. The eldest son. I was…I was supposed to watch over you. Take care of you. And Galen and Daphne and Bell, too. Instead, Cami had to come all the way from London, with that—that English devil, and—”

“Are you referring to her husband?” Abruptly, Erica released his hand. Her voice held a very Cami-ish note, and if she too had worn spectacles, she would have been peering over them disapprovingly.

“Her husband now.” He made no effort to keep the sneer from his voice. He’d tolerate the man, for both his sister’s and Rosamund’s sake, but he didn’t have to like him. “I suppose we can be grateful he married her at all.”

For a moment, his sister simply stared at him. “What are you implying, dear brother?”

Heat spread above his collar. “I think you know. Cami’s been wed just seven months. Yet she looks as if she’s going to bring that rake’s child into the world tomorrow.”

Twice she parted her lips to answer him, then stopped the words from coming—an uncommon response from the sister who had always been inclined to speak first and think later. “Do you know what I think?” she said at last. “I think your hatred for Lord Ashborough has nothing to do with him being a rake. Or an Englishman. I think you hate him because he had the audacity to save you—at a moment when you weren’t sure you wanted to be saved.”

He let his gaze wander the room, though he could take in nothing of its finery. His mind had returned to that night in the kitchen at Merrion Square, Ashborough risking his neck to help an enemy—because Cami, the woman he loved, had asked it of him.

When had Erica grown so wise?

“It’s not about you, Paris,” Erica said again, as if she intended to go on saying it until he believed her. “Our sister is incandescently happy. It would be hard to imagine a more perfect match. She’s found a man as clever as she is. He supports her writing unconditionally.” With one fingernail, she traced the flower pattern beneath her hand. “And as to the other…well, I’m sure you know as well as I what might happen between a man and woman on a long journey by carriage.” He was grateful not to have to meet her eye. “But the fact of the matter is, Cami’s as big as a barn not because the baby is coming too early for propriety’s sake, but because there are two babies.” She paused. “Gabriel’s beside himself with worry about it. His mother died in childbirth.”