Billionaire Flawed 1(317)

“What happened to him? He is not my father.”

Anna’s mother nodded, and a small smile curled upon her lips, but it was one that was bittersweet and sad looking. “He died.”

Anna couldn’t help but think of her deceased colonel. “How?” she asked, hoping it wasn’t too painful for her to speak of.

“He became ill,” her mother said simply, and for a moment, Anna thought that was all she was going to say. But then she opened her mouth and more came out, and once she was talking it didn’t seem as though she would stop. “He was a strong young man, so tall, so handsome. Not as handsome as your father, I will say, but handsome. His hair was the color of a strawberry not quite ripe. A hint of red. I’ve never seen a shade like it. I loved it. He kept it long, so I could run my fingers through it as we walked together, or lay together,” she added, with a slight glance to her daughter. “When he was twenty-one he became ill. A cough at first, nothing more, but then it simply kept growing worse. A cough became sweating, and it was a hoarse hacking sound in his chest. He grew so thin in those few months. By the end, he didn’t look like the man I had once known and loved. He wasted away, and he died, and I was inconsolable.”

Anna watched her mother as she spoke, and she wondered if this was the first time she had ever spoken of such things since they had happened. Surely she had never said any of this to her husband, and it was doubtful she had told her sons.

“A couple of years passed, and I had other suitors, but I would not let myself forget that man, the man I had watched die. I couldn’t. I saw him in my dreams. Even awake, when I closed my eyes, I saw him. And then your father came for me. In the years since I had seen him last, he had moved away and built his business. It wasn’t even a half of what it is now, of course, but it was enough. He was in better standing socially, my father thought it would be a good match, and we were married. I was excited. He was the man who helped me forget about what I had lost.”

Anna felt a warmth growing through her. Hearing her mother speak of lost loves and her husband, it made Anna excited for her own future.

Shortly Mrs. Clack returned with a platter of tea, and after serving everyone she sat.

“Mother was telling me about daddy, and the man she loved before him. Have you any such stories?” Anna asked the woman who was like her second mother.

Mrs. Clack laughed, and then glanced over her shoulder as if to check that her husband wasn’t loitering nearby. “I have three,” she said, and the other two women laughed.

“Three, Rebecca?” Annabelle’s mother asked, using Mrs. Clack’s first name.

“Yes,” she replied, nodding. “Well, one was a childhood yearning I must admit.”

“Who was he?” Anna asked.

“David Rothschild,” Mrs. Clack said. “I met him when I was just a girl, ten or so. He moved next door to my mother. She raised me alone you know, my father died when I was quite young. She never had more children, it was just her and I. She never had many suitors that I can remember, and we grew quite close, with no one to come between us. But David arrived, and I was drawn to him. Davey I called him.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. He was a handsome boy and grew to be a handsome man, and though I loved him, he never loved me. He married the baker’s daughter and moved away with her.”

Anna glanced at Mrs. Clack, trying to find a hint of sadness in her eyes, but it didn’t look as though there was any. Sometimes, though something may hurt when it happens, it works out in the end for the better. If Mrs. Clack would have married David Rothschild, she wouldn’t have been able to marry Mr. Clack, and Anna knew she loved her husband very much.

“Second and third were two brothers,” Mrs. Clack said, speaking quickly and quietly, and she couldn’t help but grin when both Anna and her mother gasped.

“Scandalous,” Anna’s mother said, and the three women tittered.

“It was at different times. The first was Martin O’Riley. Their father was Irish, though he had married a woman from here. Martin was nineteen when I was seventeen. His brother was Seamus. He was three years older than Martin. I met Martin first, and we had a bit of a fling. Martin was trouble, though, and he liked to fight and he liked to gamble. One day he gambled and lost. He tried to fight instead of paying and was killed in a duel. I was devastated, and it brought me closer to Seamus. I thought we might be married, but one day he told me every time he looked at me, it made him think of how much his brother had loved me, and he left.”

Now Mrs. Clack did tear up. She sighed deeply and shook her head. “But then I met my husband, and it’s been better than it ever would have been with one of the other men.”