knew she didn’t look the closest thing to well. Lack of sleep had produced unbecoming circles under her eyes and she was pale. But she wouldn’t argue the point.
“Have you come to take me home?” she asked casually, as she walked over to the fireplace.
“Do you want to come home?”
Amelia shot him a look over her shoulder. When had her father ever asked her … well anything really?
“Do I have a choice in the matter?”
“Lady Armstrong would very much like you to remain until after her winter ball.”
Grateful, she nodded and said nothing. She wanted to remain until Thomas returned home.
“I saw Thomas yesterday,” he said in an abrupt change of topics. The gravity of his tone indicated it hadn’t been a happy encounter.
Amelia’s pulse leapt at the mention of Thomas’s name. She quickly schooled her expression and said, “Yes, I imagined you would.”
“He seems to believe I have neglected you over the years.”
This time Amelia whipped around to face him. “He told you that?”
Her father, the Marquess of Bradford, an aristocrat among aristocrats, briefly shifted his gaze as if he found it hard to look her directly in the eye.
“He insinuated something of the sort and then gave me a dressing-down for neglecting to inform him you had scarlet fever as a child.” He raised his gaze to hers, and she could see from the stern set of his jaw, he’d been offended by the charge. “That is why I am here. Why I had to come.”
Amelia stood silently reeling over the notion that Thomas had dressed down the marquess because of her. But in the same time it took hope to flicker in her heart again, it was snuffed out just as quickly.
Over the course of the last few months, she had learned many things about Thomas Armstrong: he could be a formidable foe, was fiercely loyal to those lucky enough to have gained his affection, and possessed a streak of integrity the breadth, depth, and length of the Atlantic Ocean itself. Undoubtedly, the latter trait had prompted his outburst. He’d been advocating for the thirteen-year-old girl she’d been then, not the woman she had become. The woman he now despised.
“… and it was only when I wrote to Reese did I learn the truth. He admitted he and Mrs. Smith kept your illness from me. Although I understand why they doubted that I could deal with it so soon after the loss of your mother, I should have been consulted.”
He emitted a dark, harsh laugh and shook his head in bewilderment. “I would have only learned about it if they thought you were going to die. How could they imagine I wouldn’t have suffered a thousand deaths to know you died alone … without me?” His voice was rife with emotion as the final two words caught in his throat.
With her ears now attuned to his every utterance, Amelia had long gone motionless. The seeds of everything she’d believed about her father had grown and flourished from that one incident. And over the years, she’d watered and tended them, creating roots so strong and entrenched, nothing short of a tornado would dislodge her mind from the fallacy.
“But—but …” Words as well as coherent thought failed her.
“I may be many things, that I will admit, but I pray you don’t believe me capable of leaving you to fight scarlet fever without me. I implore you to write to Reese if you’re not convinced. He can substantiate everything I’ve said.”
Amelia shook her head slowly. She didn’t need to write to Reese. Her father had that desperate look in his eyes, as if her belief in him was the culmination of a year’s dream. He wasn’t lying.
“I believe you,” she said softly.
His shoulders rose and fell as he heaved a long, ragged sigh of relief. For several seconds, he gazed upon her with a tenderness in his eyes she’d never seen. Reaching out, he placed his hand on her arm. She didn’t pull away but received his touch like poultice on a long-festering sore.
“A girl needs her mother and you were no exception. When she died, I-I was a wholly inadequate substitute. Looking back now, I can see I acted selfishly, too locked in my own prison of misery. There was hardly enough room in there for me, much less you. You needed—deserved much better than me.”
“I needed my one remaining parent, and that was you.” For years she’d suppressed the truth, but now she wanted to stop hiding and