Page 27 of The Scottish Duke
“The child is yours, of course,” she said, skewering him with a look.
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
She tilted her head slightly and regarded him in that way of hers.
“Do you believe the child is yours?”
He stood and walked to the sideboard, where he poured himself a whiskey, the first since that night. Instead of sitting, he walked to the window.
The view was of the north approach to the castle and beyond to Loch Gerry. Everything he could see belonged to the Russell clan and to him as its laird and the Duke of Kinross.
The ownership and the responsibility had never been a burden. From the moment he was born he’d been groomed and trained to manage Blackhall and its lands. Every lesson he’d learned from his tutors and later at school had been to further his understanding of what it meant to be duke. He was educated in mathematics in order to understand the wealth that was his to use and grow. He’d learned about Highland cattle and sheep, how to farm those properties owned in the south of Scotland. He could recite, by rote, all the various tracts and buildings owned in England and all the accounts under his name. He knew, down to a few decimal points, how much his investments had accumulated, what his working capital was, and how much he’d added to the Russell coffers.
He knew his place in the world, what was expected of him, and how he could best achieve his goals.
Lorna Gordon had shifted all that.
Perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame her for his sudden disorientation. He was as responsible. He’d been an idiot that night, ridden by lust.
“Is there a possibility it could be your child, Alex?”
“I’ve never heard of...” He stumbled to a halt. He’d been about to say something personal and private to his mother, for the love of God.
She grabbed the frame for her embroidery, picked up the needle and began stabbing at the fabric.
He wondered what she would do with this project. More than one had been completed and then carefully slashed.
“I hate needlework,” she told him when he’d first seen her do it. “But it’s either that or whiskey.”
He wondered if she still felt the same. Perhaps he should pour her a glass and urge her away from the bright flowered pattern on a beige background. Would she destroy this one, too, or would it become another cover for a footstool?
“Well?” she asked, glancing up at him. “You never heard of what?”
“I can’t say.”
“You must.” She pursed her lips, an expression of impatience he’d seen since he was a boy. “We must discuss this issue. Now is not the time for you to be reticent.”
Reticent? That word was hardly fair. It wasn’t being reticent to refrain from talking about intercourse with his mother.
He only shook his head.
“Why can’t the baby be yours? Did you not have an affair with the woman?”
“No,” he said, glancing at her. “I did not. It was only the once.”
Her eyebrows rose. “And? It only takes the once, Alex. Surely you know that.”
“She’s taking advantage of the situation,” he said.
“How so? Did she demand money from you?”
“No, she ordered me out of her lodgings.”
She’d sat there, stubborn and proud, his recollection of her gaze not unlike that memory of seven months earlier when she’d called him a mouse.
“Your picture of Lorna is not one that I have,” she said. “Does she have a delightful smile? And the loveliest brown eyes?”
“Yes.”
