book, into a fist. “I presume you’re asking why I never told you about Amelia. Well, Miss Dunne, I never told you she was my daughter because I didn’t want you to know.”
“You didn’t want me to know?” Rachel’s pulse thudded in her chest, pounded in her head, hammer falls of pain. “All the while you were cajoling me to be honest with you, scolding me for keeping secrets, you were hiding such a thing from me?”
“You aren’t alone in not knowing about Amelia. I didn’t tell you, and those others, because I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed of your daughter?” He was heartless. Truly, he was.
“I would never be ashamed of Amelia.” His eyes turned cool and dark, gray as the stones lining the stream that gurgled down from the hills near Rachel’s house in Carlow Devoid of the warmth she had seen just a scant hour ago. He was ever changeable, unpredictable as clouds scudding before a storm—bright one moment, black as coal dust the next. “I was ashamed of myself.”
“You should be.” Rachel gripped the locket’s chain, pressing the metal into her palm. “You have neglected her. Do you ever see her? In the weeks I have been here, she has never visited until now. When there was desperate need.”
“Amelia has not been neglected. Sophia loves the girl like a mother would and has taken very good care of her. Believe me.”
“But how could you . . .” My storybook hero, the man whose embrace brought me peace and calm. The man I thought I loved. “You were so tender with that apple girl when she was injured by the carriage, so sympathetic after Molly’s death. How does a man with that sort of compassion ignore his own child? Bear to be apart from her? Your very flesh and blood. My father would never, even in the worst of times, have sent a child of his away.”
“Then he was a better man than I am,” he replied, flatly, as if his words were truth that merely needed a signature and a seal to become law. “When my wife passed on, permitting Sophia to take Amelia seemed the best and most sensible course. Sophia’s husband was still alive then and they had no children of their own. Besides, sisters often step in to replace a lost mother. Even in Ireland, I’m sure.”
“In Ireland, only fathers who do not care or are good-for-nothing let those sisters raise their children away from their house.” He made his actions sound utterly logical; Rachel refused to be swayed.
“Then maybe I am good-for-nothing, because I wasn’t fit to be Amelia’s father. Not at that moment, maybe ever.” His fist clenched and unclenched. “Right before my father died, though, he made a request that Amelia be brought to Finchingfield House and raised there. Sophia will be living with us, to help me, so you should be happy to learn we’ll all be together and my daughter will no longer be neglected.”
Rachel dragged in a breath, which shuddered through her chest and failed to calm the whirling of her emotions. She had fallen in love with him, a man she had completely misjudged. How much of who he seemed to be was actually a lie?
“You claimed I understood you, and I confess I thought I did. A little.” She was proud that her voice shook only a trifle. “But I see I was wrong. You are so full of contradictions, you’re impossible to understand. You act as though you are happy to become a gentleman farmer, when anyone with eyes in their heads can see you have no more than a passing interest in it. You want me to believe you are finally going to play the role of good father, when it took the request of a dying man to force you to reunite with Amelia. And then only belatedly.”
His face had gone very pale, but Rachel pressed on. “Worst of all, you tried to get me to believe you cared for me, when I wonder that you know how to truly care for anyone.” Rachel’s fingernails dug into her skin. “I wanted to believe in you, but how can I after this?”
The locket swung as she thrust it toward him. He stared at it, a blood vessel visibly throbbing in his temple. Rachel held her breath and waited for him to profess how much he did care and that she could still believe in him. Waited for him to prove he wasn’t a lie.