Page 77 of Duke of Wickedness
“Tell me about you,” she urged, feeling bashful at speaking so much about herself. “You know about my family; everyone knows about my family. What about yours?”
Even in the candlelight, she could see how his jaw tightened. There was a long enough pause that she thought he might not respond at all, but then he sighed and set down his glass.
“My father was a bastard,” he said.
She felt her face go slack with shock.
“No, not literally,” he explained. “In the long list of things that’s wrong with me—” Ariadne wanted to quibble with this, but she didn’t dare interrupt. “—anxiety about my lineage is not part of it. But my father…” He let out a humorless chuckle. “He did all the things you might expect of a duke. He had mistresses and dallied with actresses. And, in public, he pretended as though he was a perfect saint.”
“Ah.”
This time, Ariadne was the one who felt the puzzle coming together.
“And your mother?” she asked gently.
He looked out over the side of the veranda, his gaze distant as he stared at the garden below.
“She also pretended that he was a perfect saint,” he said quietly. “She made it absolutely clear that she saw nothing, heard nothing. No laughter, no snide comments, no gossip. And it wore her until she was…a ghost.”
“Oh, David,” she said quietly.
“For a long time, I thought everything they said was true,” he admitted. “I thought the gossip was just the usual kind oftontalk. And then I saw my father. With a woman.In my mother’s house.”
It was hard to breathe around the lump in Ariadne’s throat.
“I followed him to a brothel. I asked around. And they told me…” He wiped an arm over his face hastily, like he was trying to brush away an excess of feeling. “They told me he was cruel. Vicious. The kind who hurt the girls who worked there and thought that it made up for it when he tossed another coin their direction.”
“Bastard,” Ariadne breathed.
David shot her a fragile smile. “Just so. I confronted him about it?—”
God, how her heart swelled at that; of course he had confronted his father. David wouldn’t let such an injustice go unaddressed, not even when he’d been a boy.
“—and he told me that he only let that side of himself out around peoplewho didn’t matter.” The pain in his voice was obvious now. “As if I was worried about his fuckingreputationand not that he—” He cut himself off, and when he spoke again, his tone was more controlled.
“So, I left.”
Ariadne blinked. “You…left?”
David gave her a grim nod. “I wasn’t achild; I was nearly old enough to be at university. So, when I wasn’t at school, I spent my time at a property that traditionally went with the marquisate, not the dukedom. I asked my mother to go with me, but she refused. Said that she’d taken vows before God and she would not forsake them. She’d always been religious, so perhaps it wasn’t a surprise, but I thought if I asked, if I begged her to leave with me, she might?—”
Again, he cut himself off.
“She didn’t,” he continued after a moment in which Ariadne didn’t dare do anything other than hold her breath. “She stayed. I only went back after my father was dead, and by then, she was sick, too. She died a few months later, never having said a bad word about my father. Not one.”
“And so you did better,” Ariadne said, unable to keep silent any longer.
He huffed a breath out through his nose. “I tried, at least.”
“No.” She had held her tongue through much of this, but this was a bridge too far. “You did. I know not everyone in Society might approve of the way you do things, but I don’t think even your most aggressive detractors would call you ahypocrite. And don’t forget,” she continued when he seemed as though he might argue with her, “that you donottake advantage of people who have less power than you. No, David—you open your home so that they have a safe place to be. A place where they don’t need to be afraid. So if you try to tell me that you aren’t better thanyour father, I will hit you. Don’t press me, David. I will physically strike you.”
This was a frankly mad reaction to his admission, but she was boiling with anger on his behalf. She couldn’t think of anything more sensible, since what she really wanted to do—deliver a swift kick to his father’s bollocks—was impossible, given that the late duke was, well, late.
And maybe it wasn’t a hideous misstep, because David smiled. It wasn’t his rakish smile, his daring smile, or his playful smile. It was…full of gratitude. It made her feel as though the table between them was gone, that they were as close as people could be.
As though, for a moment or two, they were the only two people in the world.
But then there was a bark of laughter from below; people were beginning to arrive at the party. Ariadne urged herself to be pleased by the distraction.
