Sins of a Duke(63)

The depth of fury surging through Lucan rendered him speechless for a few seconds. “You fucking liar,” he snarled.

Lady Calydon jerked as if she had been slapped, and her eyes widened.

He took a step toward Calydon. “Marissa had not been self-inflicting her bruises. You think I did not corroborate her assertions with the servants? Stanhope beat her brutally for days before and after you and he fought. She did not lie to me. She is dead. Because of your actions.”

Calydon paled, disbelief dawning across his features. “It cannot be so. Marissa confessed—”

“You ruined my most cherished sister, and you stand here and defile her memory with such vicious lies? So I may think you are not as culpable?” The need for violence tore through Lucan and his resolve to forgive Calydon trembled.

Lady Calydon stiffened and her eyes flashed. “My husband did not ruin your sister, Mondvale. Sebastian and Marissa were both young and foolish, but my husband did not force ruin upon her. Yet you try to condemn him after you have hurt Constance in the most abominable way? Yes, we are aware you were the one to reveal her circumstances to society, and we are aware you must have only courted her to hurt her. It is your actions that are unforgivable, for Connie is innocent in all of this.” Lady Calydon’s chest heaved and she visibly shook, her gray eyes brewing with rage.

Lucan was unmoved. In fact, she stoked his anger with her defense of Calydon. As if the matter of his sister’s death was inconsequential. The crack in his resolve widened, and Lucan battled against the pain closing in on him. Where was the remorse for Calydon’s actions toward Marissa?

“I easily condemned your husband because he abandoned Marissa.” Lucan’s eyes bored into Calydon’s. “She was good enough for you to rut with, but not to understand. You did not care enough to delve deep inside and see the scared, lonely woman. She was only a means to you, Calydon. A means for pleasure. Her husband had been abusing her. Marissa would never have lied to me about that. Never. She came to you in her despair and instead of protecting her, you abandoned her though you had been her lover for years. I find your actions insupportable. She was not just a mistress, she was my most beloved sister. And we both failed her,” Lucan said into the painful silence that gripped the library.

He felt shattered. He had never admitted feelings of his own failure to anyone. They had boiled in him for months. His failure of providing enough for her, of being there for her when she needed him. If he had been at home, instead of seeking wealth, she would have been alive. If he had sought the connection he sensed his mother had hidden, he would have found the previous duke of Mondvale and Marissa would have been alive. But these were recriminations he had been over so many times, and dragging them up did not change the situation that Constance had been injured by his anger.

Calydon’s voice was regretful, “I was young and stupid, but I was in love with Marissa. My parents’ disaster of a marriage had given me a very poor opinion of the state. I saw Marissa’s infidelity as proof her feelings had not gone deep. I assure you when we were involved she was not being abused. When she demanded I kill Stanhope, she seemed so unhinged I could no longer see in her the woman I had fallen in love with. She was like a mad thing.”

“Yet you abandoned her,” Lucan snarled. He jerked back and started to pace the library. The confines of the walls pressed in on him. Murder? He could not credit it. But he knew Marissa had been desperate. Her letters had been infused with hopelessness, begging him to return and remove her from Stanhope’s clutches. The pain of what she must have suffered almost felled Lucan in that moment.

Calydon rubbed a hand over his face. “Many times I have wondered if I had returned to Marissa, even as a friend, whether she would have come to her senses and things might have turned out differently,” Calydon said at Lucan’s silence.

He glanced at the man, and he was not sure what Calydon saw in his face, but he tugged his duchess to him and whispered something to her. Lady Calydon gave Lucan a fulminating glare, then with a regal tilt of her head walked out the door.

He could not dismiss the possibility that Calydon was telling the truth. His sister had always been changeable, so he could almost put himself in Calydon’s place and understand why he had turned away. Murder? The circumstance would have been shocking to anyone. For the first time Lucan wondered whether even if he had been in England, would his presence have made any difference to the tragic ending of Marissa’s life? He had argued with her so much via letters to end her affair with Calydon. Lucan had given her wealth and had worked hard to ensure she was situated financially, and she had still been unhappy.