of hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day, silky and dark. “I think you’ve downplayed your musical abilities, my lord.”
“No,” Tony said. The pain when he thought of his mother had dimmed over time, but it had never gone away. He used to dream of her, of how she’d tucked him close to her side while she taught him his scales. Mother had always smelled of lavender. “She died.”
Miss Lainscott turned to him, sympathy written across the small oval of her face. “My mother perished of fever—a sickness sweeping the mines that my father unwittingly brought home with him. He and I didn’t get sick. Not even so much as a sniffle. I was barely twelve.”
“Her name was Katherine.” Tony heard the longing in his own voice. “She fell down the stairs while heavy with child.” There had been so much blood. On the stairs. All over her dress. It had covered Tony from head to toe when he’d tried to pick her up. His mother had been on her way to confront her lecherous prick of a husband over his audacity in thinking it within his rights to fuck both Tony’s mother and her lady’s maid. She’d seen the duke and Molly together in the gardens from her bedroom window. Careless of them. But his mother had been virtually bed-ridden and rarely left her rooms. “She died very soon after.” His mother had whispered the truth of what she’d seen in his ear even as Tony had screamed for help. “The child was stillborn.” The doctor had been summoned, but far too late.
Tony had adored his mother. He still did. She’d been brilliant and educated, well-bred, and musical. She’d refused to hand him over to a nursemaid as his father had wished and insisted on raising Tony herself. He’d promised his mother, as the life ebbed from her body, that he would make sure the Duke of Averell was punished.
Miss Lainscott’s hand fell against the sleeve of his coat, plucking at the material with her fingers. “I am so very sorry, my lord. I, too, still miss my mother, no matter the years that have passed.”
Tony looked down at those slender fingers gently squeezing his arm, and he found himself wishing to bury his head against the nape of her neck. There was no guile or pity in her gaze. No artifice. Miss Lainscott regarded him as if Tony was worthy of her concern. He’d spent so many years living without a care for anyone, taking women as he pleased, doing as he wished. Running a club barely a step above a bordello. He’d promised himself he’d never marry. Never have a child.
“Is that why you don’t play the Broadwood?”
A tremor went through him as her arrow hit its mark with remarkably little effort. “Who told you that? Let me guess,” he said before she could answer. “Phaedra?”
She said nothing, her eyes like brushed velvet, shrewd and knowing.
Miss Lainscott bloody terrified him.
“I choose not to play the Broadwood. I’ve no reason to.” Why had he told her about his mother? He never spoke of Katherine, the late Duchess of Averell. It was awful and tragic, not at all appropriate for a discussion during a garden party, especially with the woman he was trying to seduce.
“The Broadwood was a gift from my father,” he said. “And I want nothing from the Duke of Averell.”
11
Margaret inhaled sharply at the rage tingeing his words. Had she not been certain before, she was now. Welles hated his father. This was no mere disagreement, but an estrangement born of something terrible between Welles and the Duke of Averell.
His brilliant eyes grew shadowed, closing as Welles turned his head. The humid day had brought out the waves in his thick hair, giving the strands a more tousled look than usual, as if he’d been standing at the prow of a ship at sea. His anguish over his mother’s death was obvious. Margaret longed to smooth the heavy waves from his temples and hold him. She reminded herself, in the strictest of admonishments, that Welles was an unprincipled rogue. But that wasn’t all he was.
“Is that why you haven’t married?”
The blue eyes turned to chips of ice and Margaret could almost see the wall he raised around himself as protection.
There are ways to breach walls.
Heir to a duke, Welles should have been married years ago, but he remained unwed in complete defiance of his duty. Every gentleman, especially a superbly titled one like Welles, had a