Page 106 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

Ronan felt as though all that he knew about his father was being called into question at this moment. His discernment was something that he had prided himself on all these years, and so it wouldn’t be possible that he had a false image of his father.

A false image…or perhaps just an incomplete one.

“If this were true,” Ronan said, and his voice shook now despite every effort to hold it steady, “my father would have told me. He was an honorable man and taught me everything I know of honour.”

“Did he?” Something dangerous moved behind Jonathan’s eyes. “Tell me, then, brother, what honour looks like from where I stood. I used to imagine you, you know. The legitimate son. I used to lie awake as a boy wondering what I had done, what sin I had been born already guilty of, that I should be denied the very same thing simply for having arrived a few years too early and to the wrong woman’s bed.” His jaw tightened. “I do not say this to make you weep for me as I have long since given up wanting anyone’s pity. I say it so that you will understand precisely why I am not inclined to feel a great deal of sympathy for whatever this discovery is costing you this morning.”

“An honourable man does not abandon a woman and a child to spare himself embarrassment,” Ronan said slowly, as though testing whether the words could possibly be true of the father he had loved so completely.

It couldn’t be true.

“I understand why you would wish to defend him regardless. You knew a different man than I did, brother.” There was a strange sympathy in Jonathan’s voice, but one that was not appreciated in the least by Ronan.

“I do not believe you.” But even as Ronan said it, he heard the hollowness in his own voice because the cane was identical.

“Then believe this instead.” Jonathan reached into his coat and drew out a folded paper. When Ronan did not immediately take it, he simply let it drop at his feet, unwilling, it seemed, to come close enough to press it into his hand. “My father’s last letter was written not long before your mother discovered his other family existed and made him choose between us once and for all.”

Ronan bent, with some difficulty, his bad leg protesting the movement, and picked up the letter. His hands were not quite steady as he unfolded it.

He knew the handwriting at once, would have known it anywhere, in any light, on any page in the world.

My dear boy, it began, and something in Ronan’s chest went cold and small at the tenderness of those three words, a tenderness he recognised, because his father had used nearly that same phrase in a hundred letters written to him.

I have thought long on what your mother asks of me, and I find I have not the courage to give her the answer I know is right. I cannot make you my heir. I cannot give you my name while my wife lives, nor even, I fear, while I live, for the scandal would fall not upon me but upon a son I have not yet had the honour to raise, and I could not forgive myself for that. I know this is no comfort to either of you, and I know it changes nothing of what I owe you. Know only that not a day passes that I do not think of you, and grieve the life I was too great a coward to give you.

Your father, always.

“He never told me,” Ronan said, and his voice had lost all its former hardness. It came out instead like something torn.

“He never told either of us the whole truth, did he. Only enough to keep us both loyal to him. That was rather his particular talent.”

“If this is true…” Ronan’s jaw worked. “If this is true, you are still not entitled to what you are asking of me. A letter does not make you legitimate.”

“No,” Jonathan agreed, and the coldness returned to him all at once. “But the documents do, as does my mother’s testimony, sworn before witnesses before she died, God rest her, still weeping over him at the end, the foolish woman. A solicitor in London who has spent the better part of two years, at considerable expense to me, establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that I am precisely who I say I am, the natural son of the late Duke of Ravenhill, born before his marriage, acknowledged in private if never in law.” He folded his arms.

“I have spent my whole life being told what I could not have because a woman I never met happened to marry my father first. I am rather tired of it, Ronan. I expect you can understand that, being a man so very devoted to what he believes he is owed.”

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

“You said Sarah is safe,” he said at last, forcing his voice back into some semblance of order. “Where is she? I will not go on with this conversation until I have seen her.”

“You will go on with this conversation for precisely as long as I require you to,” Jonathan said. “Besides, she is closer than you think. Enough that I need only raise my voice to have her brought to us, and I promise you, brother, you do not wish me to do that until we have finished here. Let us not waste what patience I have left on threats neither of us means to act upon yet.”

Ronan forced himself to breathe. All he could think of was Augusta now, and the cane she had seen. There was no doubt now that what she had seen was correct.

“You killed a woman.” His voice had gone flat now. “The maid.”

Something like genuine irritation crossed Jonathan’s face, the first entirely unrehearsed expression Ronan had seen from him.

“That was regrettable; I will not pretend otherwise. She recognised me and saw me in the grounds that night and called out my name. I could not have her repeating it to anyone.” He said it so plainly, without apparent horror at his own words. “It was not her I went there for, you understand. It was Phillipa.”

The name struck Ronan like another blow entirely. “Why?”

“Because you were to marry her,” Jonathan said it as though it should have been obvious. “You would have been a far more difficult man to unseat once you had an heir of your own coming, and a wife’s family besides to defend you. I could not allow that marriage to proceed if I could help it. And if, in preventing it, suspicion happened to fall upon you instead of me…” he gestured, almost lazily, toward Ronan’s cane, then his own, “...well. I confess I thought that rather elegant. Two birds, if you will permit the expression.”

“You meant for me to hang for it?”

“I meant for you to be sufficiently distracted and disgraced that the dukedom would come within reach a good deal sooner than it has.” Jonathan’s mouth curved. “It did not work out entirely as I planned. Your little troublemaker of a wife saw to that, standing up in the middle of the ceremony like some avenging angel. I confess I did not anticipate her. She has been rather inconvenient to me ever since.”