Say Yes to the Marquess(74)
When she opened them, she caught him staring at her.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“Doing what?” she asked, her mouth still partly full.
“Cake sounds.”
“Sorry.” She swallowed. “I didn’t even notice.”
“I noticed. I always noticed. I’m a bastard that way.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that.” She set down her fork and stacked her arms on the table. “No, I mean this, Rafe. You throw that word about so casually, and I’ve been wrong not to object before now. I think a great deal of you, and . . . And it hurts to hear you disparaged that way, by anyone.”
Sweet girl.
“It fits, though. I always felt fatherless. From boyhood, I was always the odd one out. Piers was cast from my father’s mold, and I . . . I just wasn’t. I was a miserable student. I didn’t excel at their gentlemanly pursuits. I didn’t have the right upper-crust friends. I was big and rough, not handsome and refined.” He took a draught of his porter. “Piers could sneeze, and the old man would beam with pride. I was always the mistake. Sometimes I wondered if I was even his natural son.”
“Of course you were his son. How could you doubt it?”
“Because he doubted it. He didn’t even want to claim me. I must be the Devil’s own boy, he always said.”
“Your own father gave you that name?”
He tapped his fork against the table. “ ‘No son of mine.’ I can’t count how many times I heard that growing up. He was always after me for one thing or another. ‘No son of mine will run with the common boys.’ ‘No son of mine will be sent down from Eton.’ ‘No son of mine will engage in fisticuffs.’ ”
With each sentence, he jabbed deeper into the cake.
“He couldn’t understand me. Hell, I couldn’t understand me. As a boy, I wanted, more than anything, to be the son he could love. To do well in my studies. To make him proud, as Piers did. To cease fighting with everyone. But I never could manage it.” He gestured vaguely toward his chest. “I’m too damned restless and impulsive. By now I’ve learned to check my punches. But I’ve always had a habit of blurting out words I wish I hadn’t.”
“Words like, ‘Clio, I think I’ll die of wanting you’?”
“No. Words like, ‘I don’t want to be your son, I don’t want a penny of your money, and I hope to never see you again.’ ”
Her fork paused in midair, and she sucked in her breath. “Those words would be more difficult to retract.”
“Where my father was concerned? Not merely difficult. Impossible.”
“What happened?”
“I asked to purchase a commission in the Army. My father wouldn’t hear of it, with Piers already overseas. He’d decided I should have a living instead. In, of all things, the Church. Perhaps God could save me where he’d failed.” He cracked his knuckles. “That notion didn’t sit so well with me.”
She laughed. “I can imagine it wouldn’t.”
“I refused. He raged. We argued, worse than ever before.”
This is the family legacy. No son of mine will be an aimless wastrel. No son of mine will squander his potential.
That was when Rafe had thrown the wildest, most ill-considered blow of his life.
I don’t want to be your son.
“I knew at once,” he told Clio. “So did he. As soon as the words were out, I could see it in those cold eyes. I’d crossed a line, and there would be no going back. He told me to leave his house. From that day forward, we were estranged. No inheritance. No home. No family.”
“That’s a harsh punishment for being youthful and brash.”
Rafe shrugged. No more harsh than starvation. After what Clio had endured, he wasn’t going to cry to her for sympathy. “I did ask for it. And at the time, I was happy to go. You know how it is. When you’ve been denied something long enough, you start telling yourself you didn’t want it anyway.”
She took a healthy bite of cake. “So you left. And turned to prizefighting to support yourself.”
“Aye. Best thing that could have happened to me, really. Gave me discipline and a chance to find my own success. And I can’t deny it made for delicious revenge. He was such a snob, you know. I took joy in fighting under the name he’d given me, engaged in such vulgar sport for money.”
Rafe sipped at his porter. Clio took bites of her cake. She didn’t press him for more. Only waited.
“He came to my fights.”
She swallowed. “The marquess?”
He nodded.