Page 50 of A Baby for the Duke

“That is not the same as forgiving him.”

“No. It is not.” He folded the letter along its own creases. “He got a woman with child and left the country, and she has lost her daughter over it and he has lost nothing at all, and I will not pretend to you that the two of them come out even. I am angry with him. I have been angry with him since January and I expect to go on being angry with him for years.”

“Then why did you smile?”

“Because I am also the man who made him,” said Colin. “I taught him at six years old that there would always be somebody behind him with a bank draft, and he learned it, and he has never had one single reason to learn anything else. I can be angry with him and know whose doing it is at the same time. They are not in competition.”

“He left his daughter on your doorstep.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“And you deserve a happy life too. Or does that only apply to Walfords who are somewhere else?”

“Not many killers do,” Colin muttered.

Leonora went cold from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say a thing like that in that voice, as though you were telling me the time.”

“Oh, come now, Duchess.” He was not looking at her. “Don’t pretend you haven’t heard the stories. Your friends were telling them to each other before you ever wrote that letter. A single growl, and grown men run. He killed his father and bought his way out of it.” He turned his head to her. “You must have heard them in a drawing room with your feet on a fender.”

“I heard them,” Leonora admitted. “But I didn’t believe them.”

“You should have.”

“They’re rumors. People say what they like about a man who never comes out of his house; it’s the only way they can go on having opinions about him⁠—”

“I am responsible for my father’s death.”

The treehouse went very quiet.

Leonora looked at him. He was sitting against the wall with his knee against hers and the letter from his brother in his coat and his one blue eye on the middle distance, and he had said it in the flat unhurried voice of a man reading out a price.

She had heard him do it once before, in a corridor, on the night they met. She knew the trick now, and knowing it did not make it hurt any less.

He does this, she thought. He hands me the worst thing he can find and waits to see whether it works.

It is meant to make me leave.

He does this. He hands me the worst thing he can find, like a man throwing a coat over a fire.

She lifted her hand and reached toward the black silk eyepatch. He turned his face away so fast that her hand closed on air. She let it fall to her lap.

“Did it happen to you that day?” she asked quietly.

Colin got up. There was not enough room in the treehouse to pace, but he did it anyway, three steps and turn, three steps and turn, with his fists opening and closing.

“Time’s up, Duchess. Go down.”

“No.”

He stopped in front of her. “Go. Down.”

“And if I don’t?” Leonora challenged, scrambling to her feet.

“You have no idea what you’re doing.”