he hardly deserved that love. Lord, he did not deserve her compassion and kindness here and now. What had he ever done to deserve her? Find a list? Coerce her into ruining herself with him until she had been left with no choice but to become his wife?
What a monster he was.
He despised himself in that moment.
All the same, he sighed, unable to give voice to the tumult swirling within. “What would you have me say, bijou?”
“Will you tell me why you have such a strained relationship with your mother?” her query was tentative, still slicing into him. “It is apparent to me how very much you love her.”
He raked his fingers through his hair, exhaling slowly. “I do love her. She is a good woman who made the wrong choices. She always loved him more than she loved any of her children, however, and that is her greatest fault. He never loved her enough. Indeed, I question whether he loved her at all.”
The admission was torn from him. It felt far too personal, as if he were holding up a magnifying glass for Jo to inspect the ugliest parts of him.
“Him,” Jo repeated gently. “Do you mean your father?”
“The Earl of Graham,” he bit out, for he refused to think of that selfish bastard as his father. A father was a man who was a part of his children’s lives, and Graham had certainly never been that, either for Decker or for Lila.
Especially not for Lila. As a daughter born on the wrong side of the blanket, she did not suit Graham’s urge for vengeance. The man already had seven daughters. Decker alone had been the unfortunate beneficiary of the earl’s dubious generosity, and only inasmuch as it suited Graham’s purposes.
“Your mother was in love with him, and you did not deem him worthy of that love,” Jo said.
“Damned right he was not,” Decker confirmed. “The Earl of Graham loved himself, his money, and his pleasure, and not necessarily always in that order. He wanted his wealth to carry on in his own bloodline. But not just any bloodline. Only the male bloodline. He had eight daughters and one son. Me.”
“That is the source of your quarrel with your mother, is it not?” Jo ventured. “You told me you love her, that you would do anything for her, but that you are estranged. It was the inheritance which caused your rift.”
Once again, she was probing. Prodding him. Examining parts of himself Decker did not like to think about or to acknowledge. And yet, uncomfortable as it was, he also found her tender persistence oddly reassuring. None of the women in his past had ever deigned to see the man beneath all his rakish, devil-may-care trappings.
His Josie did.
My Josie, my wife, my love.
The thoughts emerged from nowhere, but he did not dare speak them aloud.
Instead, he swallowed down a rising lump in his throat, that same, old unwanted knot of emotion, and answered her question. “It was. I did not want to accept a penny of Graham’s wealth. I was set to deny it all. My mother told me I had to accept it for my sister Lila’s sake. You see, Lila is, like me, a bastard. But, unlike me, a daughter. Do you know what he left her, a sweet girl of five years when he died, whom he had only deigned to meet once in all her life? He left her one hundred pounds. He left more for the care of his bloody hunting dogs than he left for his own flesh and blood.”
Decker’s rage, the fury he had done his best to abate over the years with whatever distraction at hand in the moment, returned. This time, he had no faceless woman to bed, no depraved party, no bottle, no way to disappear, to forget.
This time, he was a man sitting in a carriage with his wife, on his way to see his dying mother for the last time. A man who regretted the way he had treated both of those women. His hands were balled into fists in his lap, trembling.
Jo slid onto the Moroccan leather bench at his side in a whisper of sound. She brought her sweet scent, her strength, her warmth. His need for her was so intense, it was crippling. He sat there, utterly humbled, as she embraced him. He had never felt so comforted. So cared for. Not since he had been a lad in the arms of his mother.
But this