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“Yeah, well. That’s what you do. I had a choice. Accept what everyone said I was and what I had to be—a bastard, right? Or else fight to be what I wanted and make my own way.” He shook his head. “Some things just become habit.”
“It sounds…difficult.”
I reached out and touched his hand, which didn’t move. He was lost in some sort of memory.
“Sometimes I wonder if I can stop,” he admitted as he stared at the pool of water. “I want to. For Sof, especially.”
Something else he said was bothering me, though. “You keep calling yourself that. A bastard.”
His brow crinkled. “Yeah, so? It’s what I am.”
“I’m not saying I like it. But if it’s true, then how could you inherit your father’s title? I thought titles and things like that only pass to legitimate offspring in England.”
He peered at me with more than a little suspicion. “You looked that up? Everything about peerage inheritance laws?”
I nodded, feeling a little embarrassed. “Well…yeah. I wasn’t snooping or anything. It’s just that…I was thinking that our kid could be, what, a duchess one day, too, right?”
“Er,” Xavier said, almost amused. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
I blinked. He hadn’t thought about it? Not in the six months since we’d run into each other and he’d discovered he had a daughter? He hadn’t even considered the fact, as the holder of one of the oldest titles in England (yes, I’d looked that up too).
“But then,” I rattled on, “I found that she wouldn’t inherit anyway since you and I were never married.”
Xavier’s amusement immediately morphed into a scowl. “Sofia isnota bastard. And I’ll rip out the tongue of anyone who says so.”
It was clearly a sensitive topic.
“Well, technically, she is,” I pushed, though I didn’t particularly care for that designation myself. “That’s sort of my point.”
The scowl deepened. “What do you mean?”
I huffed. He was playing dumb. He had to know what I was getting at.
“Xavi, UK law is pretty clear, if I was researching correctly. Only legitimate offspring can inherit a title. Since Sofia can’t become a duchess, how could you become a duke if you were also a—” I cut myself off, trying to move past the word that clearly triggered Xavier so much.
“A bastard?” he supplied anyway, quite testily at that.
I heaved a great sigh but didn’t reply. Instead, I just waited him out.
It took a while. But eventually, Xavier huffed, like he had to admit something horrible.
“Technically, I suppose I’m not a bastard after all,” he said.
I frowned. “What do you mean, technically?”
His long nose wrinkled. “It’s a bit muddy, to be honest. After my mum died, and I got kicked out of uni for maybe the second time? I’m not really sure. Anyway, my uncle Henry found a marriage certificate. Apparently, my parents were married at one point. In Japan, at a Buddhist temple. Just by the time they came back, the Parkers made it clear they wouldn’t accept Mum, so they split up and never registered the marriage in the UK.” He shrugged. “So I became a duke, after all. Despite what everyone said my entire life, I was in fact the legitimate offspring of Rupert Parker, Fourteenth Duke of Kendal.” He cast me a narrow glance. “Disappointed?”
I blinked, confused. “I mean…no.”
“Well, I was.” That tenacious scowl reappeared. “I never wanted that. Any of it. Certainly don’t now. No one wanted a tattooed half-Japanese giant to hold one of the oldest titles in England, and I certainly wasn’t interested in fitting the mold for it either. It’s why I let Henry take over the estate, the family’s portfolio, all of it. He cared. Not me.”
Henry. The uncle who had hovered in the background of Xavier’s life since he was sixteen or so. I had gotten the impression that he was sort of the second fiddle of the Parker family. The spare, so to speak, both to his brother and then to his nephew.
Yeah, I knew the feeling.
“But he needs you now, doesn’t he?” I asked quietly.
Something passed through Xavier’s expression that I had never seen before. A different kind of vulnerability mixed with fear. That’s why he had come home, of course. I just wasn’t sure what he planned to do with it. Or how Sofia and I fit into the grand scheme of things.
