Chapter 6 #2
“No, you haven’t. I wanted to see how the child was faring, and the maid told me you had intended to come to the nursery.” He remained at the threshold instead of entering the room.
It was almost as if he didn’t want to come inside.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t mean for you to chase after me. I was simply trying to determine the state the nursery was in.”
His gaze dipped to the blanket she still held in her hands. “I told you to wait until tomorrow. This is the job of servants.”
His voice was colder than she had ever heard, cutting and precise.
“I’m sorry for intruding,” she offered, settling the blanket on the chair where she had found it. “I don’t know if you previously mentioned whom the nursery had been arranged for last, but I—”
“I didn’t,” he interrupted sharply. “This shall all need to be packed away. I’ll instruct Mrs. Sendall accordingly. It should have been done before now.”
“King,” she said softly. “Why did you not tell me you had a sister?”
His gaze flicked back to hers, his expression hard and unyielding. “Because I didn’t have a sister. I have no siblings.”
She wrinkled her brow, struggling to make sense of the revelation, confused. “But if you didn’t have a sister, then who was Daphne?”
“She was my daughter,” he bit out.
And then, without another word, he turned on his heel and left her standing in the nursery in shocked silence with nothing but the sound of his retreating footsteps and the hiss of the gas lamps to break the quiet.
With nothing but the multitude of questions she suddenly had for her husband churning in her mind.
King stalked into his study and headed to the sideboard, pouring himself three measures of the first bottle that was within reach. He didn’t even know what it was, and he didn’t fucking care.
He tossed back the entire thing, gulping it down.
What a bloody day.
A horrible, no-damned-good bloody day on the heels of one of the best of his life. King should have known, of course, that he was doomed. He had known far more terrible days than good, starting from when he had been a boy raised by his father’s icy rage and his mother’s angry slaps.
Still, he was shaken. He hadn’t expected to tell Verity about Daphne like this.
Or to tell her ever.
Nor had he been prepared for the impact of entering the nursery for the first time since the day he had last closed its doors to find Verity standing there in the glow of the gaslight, clutching Daphne’s blanket.
It had been as if the two halves of his life had suddenly collided.
They never should have. He had closed the door on that part of him literally and metaphorically.
Forever.
Christ. Marrying her had been a mistake. He should have known that. He should have run like Cerberus was at his heels when she had first mentioned her delusion that they were engaged to be married. And yet he hadn’t. Why not?
One day into being a married man, and he already had a brat under his roof, his new wife had brought him to his knees, and now she had invaded the nursery he had intended to never have to face.
At least not until the remnants within had been safely removed by the servants, packed away and sent to the attic where they belonged.
He poured another three measures of liquid into his tumbler. As it happened, the random poison he selected was gin. Not as mind-numbing as absinthe, but it would have to suffice. He’d drink enough of the stuff to drown himself in it if need be.
The door to his study opened behind him. He swallowed down the gin, knowing before he even turned around to face the interloper who was there.
Verity swept inside, closing the door with circumspect care. Of course she did. Every act she undertook was careful, precise perfection. She was an angel. He very much doubted she had ever made a single mistake in her life except for marrying him.
Even her face was a study in pity and consolation. She wanted to understand him. Poor fool had no inkling that he didn’t deserve her understanding.
He didn’t deserve her.
“Pray forgive me if I’m overstepping,” she began hesitantly.
“You are most definitely overstepping,” he snapped.
Hurt flashed over her face, and he hated himself anew.
But he didn’t want to talk about this now.
Didn’t want to talk about it ever.
Daphne was a part of his past he had buried deep, too deep to resurrect, tamped down with debauchery and spirits and opium and sin in the intervening years.
Until there had been nothing good left, and all that had remained had been the few pieces he had left abandoned in the nursery when she had died.
He’d been too much of a coward to face them. What a fool he was. He’d had to face them tonight, with his new wife standing there looking at him with her pale, tender eyes that saw too much.
“I’m sorry,” Verity apologized.
She didn’t owe him an apology. He was the one who was wrong. Who had lied to her. Who was lying to her still. If she only knew, she would despise him. Which was all the more selfish reason to keep the truth from her forever.
He poured gin into his tumbler again.
“Were you married previously?”
He bit out a bitter laugh. “God no. Lucinda was my mistress.”
“Oh.”
Verity’s response was small and hesitant.
He was being a bastard to her. None of this was her fault.
But he wasn’t prepared to face his own past, damn her.
Worse, he had thought he was beyond this wealth of feeling, so human and puerile.
He had thought he had drowned his grief, poisoned it with potions until nothing had remained.
How utterly humbling to discover that, apparently, he had been wrong.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Nor, he was sure, would it be the last.
King tossed back another gulp of gin and turned once again to Verity, who was watching him in the fashion he imagined she might a beast of prey in the wild, uncertain if it would attack her. Why did she have to be so bloody good and kind?
The need to explain surged, surpassing his desperation to obliterate his thoughts with spirits. A sigh left him, ragged and painful.
“It was a long time ago,” he forced out, “all of it.”
His grip on his tumbler was so forceful that it was a minor miracle it hadn’t shattered, raining glass and what remained of his gin to the floor.
Verity had moved hesitantly closer. The lamplight glinted off the golden locket at her throat, and the sight set his teeth on edge.
Her lady’s maid had fetched it from his chamber, where she had inadvertently left it earlier.
How he wished she would leave the thing off.
And how he wished he knew what she kept within it.
Some memento of her beloved Lord Leopold?
A lock of his hair? Likely not, he thought quickly, for Lord Leopold’s hair had been far lighter than his own.
If she ever deigned to open it, she would have wondered at once whose hair she carried so near to her heart.
King would replace it with something more suitable, he decided.
Diamonds or rubies or whatever she wished, shimmering and beautiful just like she was, not simple and plain, not the reminder of a dead man she wrongly believed he was.
“I didn’t mean to pry when I went to the nursery,” Verity said gently, stopping before him.
She was temptation incarnate, her heavenly curves wrapped in demure lavender silk that was likely a gown she’d worn during her coming out.
The style was flattering but no longer as popular.
It didn’t matter. She could have donned a dirty old sack, and she would have been every bit as alluring.
He wanted to take her in his arms, lose himself inside her.
But he also wanted to push her away, to leave his painful past locked away where it belonged. Where it was best kept.
“I told you to wait until tomorrow,” he reminded her sharply. “If you had but listened, all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.”
The servants would have packed away Daphne’s blanket and her doll and whatever else remained. Verity would have had no notion of her existence, and King could have continued pretending as if his daughter’s death hadn’t almost killed him.
Verity’s chin jerked up in a show of defiance. Perhaps he had pushed her too far.
“I regret that my discovery has caused you distress,” she began, “but I am not yours to command. You make me sound as if I am a dog who must obey whatever my master decrees. This is my home as well, is it not?”
“Of course it is your home.” He finished his gin and poured another.
It wasn’t acting quickly enough. He needed oblivion, and he needed it now.
“If it is my home as well as yours, then I should be capable of visiting the nursery to ascertain how best to prepare it for Emma,” she countered.
“I never suggested you couldn’t visit it, but you damned well could have waited until the servants had removed anything that was unnecessary for you to see.” He took another bracing pull of gin.
Standing at the threshold of the nursery had made him remember. It made him feel.
Daphne’s small form in his arms, so wondrous.
She’d had his nose. He hadn’t had an inkling of how he intended to raise her since she had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.
But he had been determined to do so, to give her everything he could, to be the father to her that his own had never been.
To raise her in love and tenderness instead of shouts, rages, and blows.
But then she had grown ill, and he had lost her in mere days, and whenever he’d looked at the empty blanket afterward, he had only been able to think of the babe it should have swaddled, the tiny child so still and quiet in death.
“What was unnecessary in the nursery?” she asked. “The crib? The doll? I do wish you would explain to me. What happened, King? The child…”
“She is gone, as is her mother,” he said harshly.
“Gone? Do you mean—”