her breasts, the tips stiffening beneath his gleaming gaze. “This will do nicely.”
Her cheeks burned, her pussy fluttered, but she would not be deterred.
“Go on, then,” she said.
“My sire summoned me to his deathbed around a year ago. He told me that I was his legitimate son, that he’d met my mama in London when she was working as a seamstress in a shop. They fell in love, and he married her in secret. He was the youngest of the duke’s three sons, not even the spare to the heir, and he thought he could convince his parents to accept his marriage. He was wrong. His parents threatened to disown him if he didn’t seek an annulment. To make their point, they cut off his allowance, his only source of income.”
“’Ow did ’e and your mama survive?” Fancy asked softly.
“Barely. He’d never worked a day in his life and was used to a life of luxury. After a few months, he’d had enough of poverty. My mama’s pleading did no good, and he left her to go back to his old life in Mayfair. After he abandoned her, she must have discovered that she was with child.”
Fancy’s throat tightened. “Why didn’t she go to him then?”
“Since my maman died when I was twenty and never spoke a word of this, I can only make a conjecture. Being a woman of great pride, she must have been furious at my sire for his desertion. She most likely thought he did not deserve to know he had a son; I think her taking “Knight” as our surname was her way of thumbing her nose at the Knightons.” Knight’s mouth formed a tight line. “My father had an additional theory. His parents were not kind to my mother. They accused her of tainting the family line and issued threats, trying to scare her into leaving my father. It’s possible she thought they might force her to end the pregnancy if they found out about it.”
“What sort o’ people would do such a ’orrible thing?” Fancy burst out.
“According to my sire, there was no love lost between him and his parents,” Knight said grimly. “But he was too cowardly to cut the ties of their purse strings. After his parents secured the annulment, my father rebelled by living the life of a libertine. He left England and dwelled in France, fathering my four half-siblings with two different mistresses. His parents didn’t care as long as he didn’t marry his lightskirts; by this point, they’d already secured their legacy via their older sons, both of whom had married and produced offspring.
“Two years ago, however, my sire’s parents were aboard a ship that capsized. They died, along with their two older sons and grandchildren who were also on board.”
Horrified at such a tragedy, she whispered, “Sweet Jaysus.”
“That left my father as the sole remaining heir of the Knighton duchy. Since he had not remarried, he now had to go about finding himself a wife and producing a legitimate heir. Aging and in failing health due to decades of dissolute living, he didn’t want the trouble of doing either. And then providence struck.
“My sire discovered correspondence between his father and a solicitor dated several years earlier. Apparently, there had been a mistake, and the annulment of my parents’ marriage had never been fully codified. The solicitor had only discovered the oversight and wanted to know how to proceed. My grandfather had hired an investigator to discover what had become of my mama, which is how he found out about me. And reading those letters was how my sire discovered that he had a son.”
“Your grandfather didn’t tell your father about you?” she said incredulously.
“My grandfather wanted me kept a secret.” Lines bracketed Knight’s mouth. “Since my mama was already dead, there was no point in risking scandal in order to complete the annulment. My grandfather probably decided that the best thing to do was to hide any connection between me and the family. Even though I was legitimate, he wouldn’t have been worried about my claim to the title: after all, he had two older sons and two grandsons who had precedence over my father and me. How was he to know that a single shipwreck would change everything?”
“But it did,” she said quietly. “In the end, Fate worked everything out.”
“Yes.”
“What…what was it like seeing your father?”
“It was like meeting a stranger,” Knight said emotionlessly. “After he died, my inheritance was held up in the courts when