Page 105 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

“Safe, for the present.” The man spread his hands, palms up. “I would not have harmed a hair on her head before we had spoken, whatever else you may think of me by the time this conversation ends. She is sleeping, or was when I left her. Children have a remarkable talent for sleeping through terror, have you noticed? I confess I found it rather humbling to watch.”

Something in Ronan’s chest twisted violently at that, at the image of his daughter asleep and frightened in some stranger’s keeping, and it took every ounce of the discipline his father had drilled into him since boyhood not to close the distance between them and put a bullet through the man’s smiling face there and then.

“You have five minutes,” he said instead, “before I stop being interested in conversation.”

“Five minutes.” The man laughed. “Do you know, I have waited a great deal longer than five minutes to stand in front of you. Years, in fact. I confess I find myself rather at a loss now that the moment has finally arrived. You are precisely as I imagined you, and yet nothing at all as I imagined you. Is that not peculiar? I built you into such a monster in my head, all these years, and here you stand looking at me as though I am the monster instead.” He tilted his head, considering. “Perhaps we are both a little right.”

“I do not know you.”

“No,” the man agreed, and something flickered behind his eyes. “That has rather been the trouble, hasn’t it?”

It was then that Ronan’s gaze, sweeping over the man in search of some weapon, some sign of Sarah, some clue as to where in this ruin his daughter might be hidden, fell upon the cane resting against the man’s leg.

For one long, suspended moment, Ronan forgot entirely how to breathe.

It was his own cane, the same dark, close-grained wood, the same length, the same silver head shaped into the outstretched wings and curved beak of a raven.

“You are staring at my cane,” the man observed, and there was something almost fond in the way he said it, the way one might speak to a child who had finally noticed something long hidden in plain sight.

Ronan’s mind, usually so disciplined, so ordered, seemed to have scattered entirely, and he could summon nothing more coherent than the thought that this could not be, that there was some trick to it.

He thought of the smith in the village who had made his own cane’s twin once, years ago, when the head had cracked after a fall, and dismissed the thought almost as soon as it arrived. That man was long dead, and would in any case have remembered so singular a commission.

“Where did you get that?” Ronan’s voice had gone very low, “Tell me now.”

“The same place you got yours, I imagine.” The man lifted it, turned it once in the grey light so the silver caught what little sun had begun to break through the mist. “Our father had it made for me the year I turned twenty.”

Our father? The words sounded too ridiculous to Ronan, who hadn’t ever thought such a possibility to exist.

His eyes widened at the admission, but the man didn’t stop. He seemed to smile at the reaction before continuing on.

“He was rather proud of the design. Said no other family in England could claim a bird so fine.” He looked up, and his smile had gone thin now. “Did he never mention me, Ronan? In all these years? Not once?”

“I do not know what you are speaking of.” Ronan was immediately defensive. Surely, whatever he was saying had little truth to it.

“No,” the man said again, softer this time. “No, I don’t imagine you would. Forgive me, I ought to introduce myself properly, oughtn’t I, before I go asking after brotherly affection I have no right to expect.” He inclined his head in a small, mocking bow.

Ronan waited for him to continue. He was running out of patience with each passing second.

“Jonathan. Jonathan Birgin, as I was raised. Jonathan Parson, as I have every legal right to be called now, though it has taken me the better part of my adult life to prove it.” His dark eyes held Ronan’s. “Your elder brother, in point of fact, though the law has never once cared to notice the distinction.”

Elder brother? Such a thing was not possible. He began to shake his head immediately. “You are making a fool of yourself. That is not possible.”

“I assure you it is entirely possible. It is, in fact, precisely what happened.” Jonathan settled himself against the broken wall, as though they were two old friends met for an idle chat rather than two strangers.

“It is your statement against what I’ve known to be true all of my life,” Ronan said through gritted teeth. “I am sure that my mother or my father would have mentioned if such a thing was true.”

It wasn’t an ordinary thing to discover, and there was no proof, as far as Ronan was concerned.

“Our father had an affair a number of years before he married your mother with my mother,” he went on. “Does that surprise you?”

“It doesn’t because I know you are not telling the truth,” Ronan said. It had to be a lie; there was no other possibility.

“Oh, brother. I’d urge you to listen on. Perhaps you can make some sense of the situation then,” he went on. “She was nothing so grand as a duchess, you understand. A gentleman’s daughter, well enough bred, but not the sort of match a future duke was permitted to make when there was a title and a fortune to be considered. So, he did what men of his sort generally do. He loved her in secret, got a son on her, and then, when the time came for him to be sensible, he married elsewhere and paid handsomely to ensure my mother and I were never spoken of again.”

“You are lying.” Ronan could not believe a word that he was hearing.

“I wish that I were.” For the first time, something genuine cracked through the composure, a flash of old, old bitterness that Ronan almost believed despite himself. “I grew up three counties away in a house he paid for, with a mother who wept over his letters until the day she died, waiting for a man who never once came back to see the son he had made. Do you know what that is like, Ronan? To grow up knowing precisely who your father is, knowing he is alive and wealthy and titled, and knowing you will never in your life be permitted to say so?”