Undressed with the Marquess (Lost Lords of London #3) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,119
a window—one of the parlors. My mother was playing pianoforte, and my brother was waltzing a little girl . . . a stranger to me.” Lady Kinsley. “My . . . sister,” he made himself say. “About the empty parlor. They were smiling and laughing, and it was when I knew.”
“What?” she asked quietly.
“That I’d been forgotten,” he said so matter-of-factly. “Replaced with this new person. That night, I left and swore never to return, because I knew it was what was best . . . for all,” he added.
And here she’d believed her heart could break no further where this man was concerned. Tears stung her lashes. “Oh, Dare,” she whispered. Every sliver of her soul ached and hurt for the boy who’d stood outside, looking in. Filled with a restiveness, she worked her gaze over the corridor . . . halls he should have been running along throughout his boyhood, and then continued walking through as the rightful heir and marquess. How very close he’d been to escaping the hell of the Rookeries. If only he’d trusted that he’d been missed . . . loved. If only he’d trusted that a mother’s love was a bond that could not be broken, even by death.
And once more, he made sense in ways he never had before. She understood him, this man who couldn’t truly bring himself to commit to loving and had instead devoted himself to looking after everyone else the way he had needed someone to look after and care for him. He had become . . . what he’d needed. What if he’d stumbled upon every other memory his sister remembered of her heartbroken parents? How would his life . . . How would their lives all have been different?
Color suffused Dare’s cheeks. “It is fine,” he said, clasping his hands at his back, his gaze still on that family he’d lost.
But it wasn’t. No matter the assurances he gave her or himself. He’d been indelibly shaped by those darkest days, and more . . . by what had happened when he’d returned—the father who’d rejected him.
And where his father had been evil, there had been a mother who had missed her son. Who had loved him. And she would have Dare know that.
“Your mother loved you, Dare.”
“I know that,” he said automatically. “I left when I was ten. Just as I knew my mother loved me was the same way I knew my father hated me . . . But she loved me as I’d been . . . not what I became.”
He’d doubted she could love who he’d become . . .
God, how she despised what his father had done to him, the insecurity and doubt he’d placed in Dare’s perception of self-worth. He made sense in every way now.
Temperance drifted closer. “You worried she could not separate what you did on the streets,” she said, at last with an understanding of why he’d chosen to stay in the Rookeries. “Because your father made you believe that.” Taking his hands, she squeezed them, forcing his eyes to her own. “What you did, Dare? You did it in the name of survival. Your parents would have understood that.”
“My parents would have had a child who was an oddity, who’d committed horrible acts, scandalous ones that no nobleman could accept from his son.”
He’d been so afraid to bring shame upon them, he’d not been able to see . . . His mother would have cared only that he’d returned. Temperance knew, however, to say as much would neither sway his mind nor undo the fate that he and his mother had suffered.
He brushed his knuckles under her chin, and she lifted her gaze up. “Come now, Temperance, you never understood my thievery. Now, you’d make excuses for my actions.”
“That isn’t true,” she protested. “When you were a boy, and I a young girl . . . I understood, Dare. And then even when you were a young man? That made sense to me, too.” She shook her head, that action dislodging his touch. “It is that you continued on which I couldn’t understand. I saw that you had the ability to do more and be more. It doesn’t mean I don’t understand why you did what you did as a boy and then as a young man trying to survive.” Temperance took his hands once more. “But that is behind you.” Her eyes went to his bruised knuckles, and she frowned. “Wylie?”