Page 75 of As the Earl Likes
The duke swallowed a bite, then sat back in his chair, surveying Sheff for a moment. “You presume I have regrets.”
“Don’t you?” Sheff couldn’t help gaping at him.
“Plenty, and if I were a stronger man, I would stop doing things I regret almost daily, but alas, I am not. I have made peace with who I am.”
“A drunken, carousing, selfish libertine?”
The duke dabbed at his mouth with his serviette before returning it to his lap and taking another bite of toast.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Sheff said. “I was only speaking the truth.”
“You are right to describe me in that way.” The duke shrugged, but there was a sadness etched into his features that Sheff hadn’t ever seen before. “It is what makes me happy.”
“You don’t seem happy,” Sheff observed softly, though he had appeared happier here in Weston. Perhaps it was London—or more accurately, who was in London—that provoked him to misbehave. “I am often left with the impression that you are seeking something you can’t have. But then I remember that you had it and tossed it aside in favor of your appetites.”
“You mean your mother?” The duke laughed, but it was hollow. “If you think I had happiness with your mother, you are mistaken.”
“I should have said you had the chance for it. Instead, you chose to continue your rakish ways after you wed.”
The duke pushed what little food was left around his plate. “Not at first. I was a rake when I wed your mother, but I fell so deeply in love with her that no other woman could compare.” He scowled briefly. “I was a fool, for though she’d played the coquette and charmed me during our courtship, she did not love me. It was my title she coveted.”
Sheff’s chest tightened. What was his father saying? His whole life, Sheff had understood the divide between his parents. His father had been a horrible rogue and had continued as one after marrying Sheff’s mother. And she struggled with being married to him.
“You loved her? And she did not love you?” Sheff could scarcely wrap his mind around that. He wasn’t sure he could believe his father.
“The duchess would rather you not know that. Just as she would rather you not know that she is the reason I am the way I am. Not entirely—I fully acknowledge that I have made my own choices.” His jaw quivered, and he looked away for a moment. When his gaze found Sheff’s again, his eyes were damp. “When I fell in love with her, she saw her opportunity to be a duchess. That was her goal. She didn’t want me as a person.”
There was truth in his words. Sheff had seen firsthand that social status and position were more important to his mother than anything else when forging a union. She hated that he’d chosen Jo because she wasn’t appropriate. It made sense that she would choose her own husband with calculation. Cold calculation, apparently. Sheff could hear the pain in his father’s voice.
“I’m sorry,” Sheff murmured.
“Her rejection was devastating. I wanted to find solace—even love—elsewhere. I’m still looking.” The duke smiled sadly.
“Did you not even have that with Ellis’s mother?” Sheff asked, deciding that as long as his father was sharing secrets, they could address the most obvious one.
His father’s brows rose sharply then his lips flattened. “I did want that with Ellis’s mother, which I’ve explained. Your mother is Ellis’s mother.”
Sheff gripped the edge of the table. “What?”
“I know you and countless other people think Ellis is my daughter, but she is not.” Sheff recalled what Jo had told him, that Ellis had insisted she was not the duke’s daughter.
“Does Ellis know?”
He shook his head. “Only that she isn’t my daughter. She asked me a year or two after she came to live with us, and I swore to her that I was not. But I could not tell her the truth. That was a condition your mother made when I convinced her to allow Ellis to live with us.”
Sheff tried to make sense of this incredible revelation and could not. “I don’t understand. Who were Ellis’s parents, then?”
“When your mother fell pregnant the second time—you were a few years old—I knew the child could not be mine. We did not share a bed once she was carrying you. I don’t know who Ellis’s father is, nor do I care. I offered to raise the child as mine, but your mother refused. She was furious to have been caught in her infidelity, and she wanted to give the child away. I arranged for friends of the family who hadn’t been able to have a child of their own to adopt her.”
“You arranged?” For his wife’s illegitimate child to have a family. To say Sheff was shocked by all this was an understatement of massive proportions.
“I wanted to make sure this poor child would be loved, and though I would have loved her—I actually do love Ellis as a parent ought, I think—your mother refused to even try.”
Poor Ellis. “And then Ellis’s adoptive parents died,” Sheff whispered.
“Yes, and I insisted we take her in,” the duke said firmly. “Your mother fought me on that as well, but I was adamant. Sometimes, I think it was the wrong decision given the way your mother treats her, but she and Min have such a close bond. Even you do too.”
“I think of her as a sister,” Sheff said. “Because I assumed she was.”
