father to catch up. “This is rather early for you, is it not?”
“Quite,” his father said dryly, with a telling glance at the less-than-crowded park around him. “I’ve never understood your fascination with these morning rides.”
“It’s after noon,” James felt compelled to point out.
“Regardless.” His father waved a dismissive hand.
“Riding clears my head.”
“Judging by what I’ve heard, it needs clearing.”
James clenched his jaw. “What, precisely, does that mean?” he asked, though he was fairly certain he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“I heard some rather interesting talk last night at my club,” the duke said casually as he spurred his horse into a gentle trot. “The general impression I received was that you and your wife have been making a spectacle of yourselves.”
“And that is your concern . . . how?” James asked tightly.
“You are my son,” the duke said, clearly enunciating each word, his voice taking on a sharp staccato rhythm. “If your brother is as . . . troubled as he claims, you will be responsible for providing an heir to the dukedom. What you do reflects on me.”
“Then perhaps,” James said, trying to keep the fury surging through him absent from his voice, “you should have considered that when you ignored me every single day for years.” The duke opened his mouth to respond, but James wasn’t finished yet. “Perhaps you should have considered that when you meddled in my life and hand-selected me a bride, assuming, I suppose, that I was too much of an idiot to accomplish the task myself.”
“And yet I heard no complaints from you about my selection,” his father said, his eyes on the path before them. “I rather think a thank-you is in order, all things considered.” He paused pointedly, then added, “Though I understand your marriage has been less than happy of late. But that is a fact, my boy, that has nothing to do with me.”
“It has everything to do with you!” James said, the resentment of all of his previous eight-and-twenty years—and most particularly the past four—boiling up within him. “My marriage—which is none of your concern, for the record—has had its rough spots only because of your interference. It is always you.”
The duke reined his horse in hard, causing the animal to buck before settling. When James followed in kind and looked at his father head-on, he saw the duke’s eyes were sparkling with anger, even as his countenance remained calm. Like father, like son.
“I have never understood, James, why it is that you think I have wronged you so terribly.” Even if James had not already been paying attention, his father’s rare use of his Christian name would certainly have attracted his notice. His father had called him Audley, just like everyone else, for as long as James could remember. “I am a duke. You are my son. You know precisely what that entails, what a reputation we have to uphold, and everything I have ever done to and for you has been in pursuit of that aim.
“You say I ignored you as a child. You might be correct. West is my heir; it was my duty to guide him to manhood, to make him understand the responsibility that would one day fall on his shoulders. I gave you tutors and riding lessons, I sent you to Eton and Oxford, and, when the time came and I realized the question of your marriage and children might have a rather greater bearing on the future of the dukedom than I had originally thought, I arranged them to my satisfaction. Although”—and here the duke smiled briefly—“I do not imagine how you think I possibly could have induced you to marry Violet Grey if she had not suited you. You are unlike me in many ways, but you do seem to have inherited my stubborn streak.”
James felt rather as though the ground were shifting beneath his feet. He had known—had always known—that his father did not favor West out of any greater sense of camaraderie with his brother, but to hear him state it so baldly did something strange to James.
He and West were the sons of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the land; nothing could change that fact, or negate the numerous advantages it had always given James from the moment he had drawn his first breath. And yet, somehow, his entire life he had thought that his father’s disinterest in him, his refusal to see him as anything other than a spare, had