whatever ill-timed response the child might make. Emma looked back swiftly, and Charles hastily disguised that motion, scratching at his throat instead.
She narrowed her eyes, the suspicion there so very different from the unrestrained warmth and openness with which she and Seamus conversed. And Charles proved the miserable rotter Emma and society believed him to be, because he found himself envying his nephew the closeness he’d found with her. “And . . . you know one another,” she stated, when Charles failed to own his connection to Seamus.
“Seamus is my son.” He’d breathed the lie so much it had become truth to the world.
He braced for Emma to tense. To leave. As would be her right, given that to her knowledge, he’d been unfaithful to her, and in other ways Charles had been. It didn’t matter that he’d done so to maintain a lie to spare his sister’s reputation. Because she didn’t know those details.
Because you never told her . . . But what if you had . . .
Perhaps then she wouldn’t have looked upon him with wary mistrust . . .
What he was unprepared for was the warmth of the smile . . . this time, directed at Charles. “Your son is a clever young man.”
Charles’s heart filled.
The little boy grew several inches under that praise, beaming and proud.
And damn it all if Charles didn’t fall in love with her for a second time that day. “He is,” he said hoarsely.
Sitting up, Seamus sat with his ankles crossed and his knees folded close to him. He urged Charles to join them, but Charles hesitated, not wanting to infringe upon their meeting, and not wanting the brief moment he’d shared with Emma to end, and for them to find themselves in the place they always did . . . at odds and battling.
Seamus’s smile wavered.
Emma waved Charles over.
And he would have followed her wherever she led in that moment.
Venturing deeper down the aisle, Charles joined Emma and Seamus, lowering himself to the floor.
“Miss Gately,” the child began as soon as Charles had taken up a spot between Emma and Seamus.
“Emma,” she corrected, tendering that use of her Christian name.
“Emma knows ever so much about the Enlightened thinkers. So. Much.” Seamus lifted his hands and held them apart to signify the breadth of his new idol’s knowledge. “And do you know what she said?” The boy didn’t wait. “Le Rond was a bastard, Scarsdale. A bastard. And he was left on a hospital’s steps and . . .”
While the child launched into a near word-for-word recitation of everything Emma had shared on the philosopher, Charles caught her eye.
They shared a smile, and he felt a buoyant lightness fill every corner of his being at the warmth there. At the connection between them.
This is what it could have been . . .
As she looked back to Seamus, the smile froze on Charles’s face, tense and tight and painful. For this was what it could have been if he hadn’t resisted a future with her. If he hadn’t directed undeserved anger her way, over decisions their parents had made. Their parents, who had known better than Charles what he needed.
If he’d just taken the time to know her.
Nearly breathless, Seamus concluded speaking. “Scarsdale insists that Locke is the most clever.”
Emma whipped another startled gaze up Charles’s way. “You read the Enlightened thinkers?”
And his fingers twitched with the need to yank at a suddenly uncomfortably tight cravat. “I . . .”
“Oh, yes!” Seamus happily supplied for him.
He felt Emma’s stare, the interest in her pretty blue eyes deepening. “Indeed?”
No one had looked to him for any form of intellectual discourse. They’d taken him for an athlete. A fellow given to a good jest. In fact, he’d been laughed at for his academic attempts at university. But with Emma . . . for the first time, he felt free in discussing topics previously denied him.
“I’m not nearly as versed or even half as intelligent in the topic as Seamus,” he explained. Academics had never come easy and, as such, had never been any remotely strong suit of Charles. But proud as he was—nay . . . embarrassed as he was—he couldn’t bring himself to admit any of that aloud. “Everything I’ve learned has been from this one.” Leaning over, he ruffled his nephew’s golden locks. “I wouldn’t have even known anything of it, hadn’t it been for him.”
“Bahhh.” Seamus swatted at his hand. “Tell Emma what you told me about Locke and why you