the hours I’d spent poring over other texts and novels, it was something which should have occurred to me sooner. Of course, I’d been examining sentence structure and phrasing, not character arcs and themes. “What’s done is done,” I conceded with as much grace as I could muster. “Now we can hope your efforts have borne fruit.”
“And sooner rather than later,” he agreed, his gaze dipping to my rounded abdomen. A tender light entered his eyes. “It would be nice to have all this resolved before the birth of our child.”
I couldn’t argue with that. A gentle smile curled my mouth. One which flattened at his next words.
“Did I tell you I received a letter from my father earlier today?”
The warmth spreading through me abruptly turned to cold. Lord Gage and I didn’t have the most congenial of relationships, and while we had seemed to find a new common ground before my and Gage’s departure from London in December, my subsequent discoveries at Sunlaws Castle had changed that. “Did he?”
But rather than darkening as I’d anticipated, my husband’s brow seemed to lighten. “As you know, I expected a tirade,” he told me. “But he was remarkably understanding about the allusion to us in the book.”
I blinked in shock. “He was?” A shock I could be excused for feeling, given the amount of contempt my father-in-law had heaped over me in the past for my scandalous reputation.
“He was.” One corner of Gage’s mouth quirked upward. “I think it helps that he can count.”
Meaning that Lord Gage was well aware I hadn’t conceived until long after we’d departed Edinburgh. I wasn’t certain I was comfortable with my father-in-law contemplating such things, but in this case at least, I was glad of it.
“Then . . . he didn’t berate you for your poor choices?” I asked. A familiar refrain from his father.
The corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that. He is my father, after all. He definitely bemoaned the situation. But he seemed to direct most of his hostility toward the people foolish enough to give any credence to such a tale about the extreme level of our supposed involvement with Bonnie Brock.”
I nodded, still feeling bemused by Lord Gage’s measured response and my husband’s reaction to it. Since I’d met Gage, there had been a significant strain in his relationship with his father. One that I’d gathered had been there almost since birth. But since our time in London, matters had improved. The shadows that lingered in Gage’s eyes when he spoke about his father were not so deep, their depths no longer fathomless. His lips no longer constricted into a grimace. I had even seen him smile over an anecdote shared in his letters.
All of which would have made me overjoyed, but for the secret I was keeping from him. I felt the weight of it settle in my gut like a lump of coal—black and fetid and combustible.
Just like dozens of times before, I ordered myself to tell him. I summoned the words to the back of my mouth, but then I couldn’t force them out. Instead they sat there, crowded in my throat, choking me.
If only I hadn’t promised Lord Henry I would let him tell Gage. If only I’d ignored that promise the moment Lord Henry had departed with his brother. Then I wouldn’t be stuck in this impossible situation.
From the moment I’d discovered that Lord Henry was Gage’s half brother, I’d known my husband would be tremendously hurt by it. At the time Lord Gage would have slept with the Duchess of Bowmont, conceiving Henry, he would have been wed to Gage’s mother. And Emma Gage had been in love with her husband, even though she only saw him for about a fortnight each year, as he was off captaining a ship in the Royal Navy during the wars with Napoleonic France. Perhaps because of that.
Gage had adored his mother, stoutly defending and protecting her from a very young age, even from her own family. When he learned that his father had betrayed her in such a manner, he would be devastated, and the reconciliation that had begun between father and son would be utterly blighted.
All of this had been running through my mind when I initially hesitated to tell Gage the truth he rightly deserved to hear, and so I had sought to soften the blow, waiting for the right moment to tell him. Except there was no