walking away from Niall and plucking Jessie’s doll from her seat at the table.
“I have,” Niall said without emotion. “Several.”
Blake’s heart shattered, though he had no right to be hurt. He nodded, hugging Jessie’s doll.
“None of them were serious,” Niall murmured. “None of them were you.” His voice cracked.
Blake sucked in a breath, daring to hope, and pivoted to face Niall. He couldn’t do a damned thing, though. The maid swept into the room with a full tea tray. She smiled and moved easily at first, but the second she saw the look on Blake’s face, her smile dropped. She must have sensed the tension sizzling through the room. She set the tray on the girls’ table, pushing their make-believe tea set aside, then stood and curtsied.
“Will you be needing anything else, your grace?” she asked, averting her eyes from both him and Niall.
“No, thank you, Bonnie. This is lovely.” Blake smiled at her, letting her know she could flee as far and as fast as she wanted.
Bonnie curtsied again, then did just that. As soon as she was gone, Blake moved to the table, returned Jessie’s doll to her chair, and sat in one of the ridiculously small chairs—one he’d had reinforced to hold his weight while he played with the girls—and set about pouring tea.
“When you came up here last month with Jewel and Wrexham,” he said without looking at Niall as he poured, “I didn’t know how long you’d be up north. I asked Annamarie if you could stay here for a while. I wanted you to meet the children.” He glanced up at Niall, who frowned down at him, hands behind his back. “They’re wonderful, Niall, all three of them. I didn’t know it was possible to love someone so much until I had them in my life. It’s a sort of love that I’ve never felt before. I’m their father, and they are mine. You can’t know what that feels like until you have it. But that doesn’t replace how I feel about you,” he said before he could stop himself.
Pain laced Niall’s expression for a moment before he could hide it. “I’m happy for you,” he croaked.
Blake focused on the tea once more, fixing Niall’s the way he remembered he liked it, then standing and taking the cup to him. “Annamarie didn’t want to have company. She remembered you as nothing more than a low-born playwright. I argued that you were so much more than that. I insisted you be invited to stay, that you were dear to me.” He turned back to the table to fetch his own tea. “That’s when she made the connection with the letters.”
“Niall, not Nancy or Nellie or Nora,” Niall said, face red, sipping his tea.
Blake nodded. “She put the pieces together—why I only ever came to her bed after drinking, why I didn’t care about her lovers, why there was never so much as a whisper of a rumor of me with another woman. She figured it out after ten years, and she was appalled.” He swallowed a gulp of tea that went down wrong, choking him.
“Did she leave because she was heartbroken?” Niall asked.
Blake lowered his teacup, flushing. “She left because she thought I would be a threat to the children, particularly Alan. Or so I assume, given the argument we had the evening before she left.” Saying as much out loud lashed Blake with bone-deep grief and revulsion. “I love those children with everything I have,” he managed to squeeze out, voice ragged. “It’s disgusting that she would think I would harm them in any way, especially that way. What kind of a vile mind would assume that just because—” He snapped his mouth shut, shaking his head. He had to put his teacup down. There was no way he would be able to stomach any more of it.
“I share your disgust in the way we are portrayed where children are concerned,” Niall said, a little too formally. “But from what I know, I didn’t think Annamarie was that spiteful.”
“I don’t think she is,” Blake said, forcing himself to breathe and face Niall again. “I think her mind was poisoned by whoever her current lover is.”
“And who is he?”
Blake shrugged and shook his head. “I have no idea. It was Howard Vale for a while, but they broke things off about two years ago. I suspected there was someone else, but she’s been better about hiding things for the last year or so.”
Blake sank onto