Chapter Five
M ichael heard the long, forthright footsteps and turned to face the door. Seconds later, his father commanded the frame, stopping as if sitting for a picture, and marched into his study. “My dear boy,” he exclaimed, stopping in front of Michael. For a moment, Michael thought his father would hug him as he used to. The older man raised his arms as if to embrace him, but they abruptly fell. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I wasn’t sure if you were coming.”
Michael noted a bitterness in the man’s tone. He gave it right back. “I said I would in my letter.”
Lord Arthur Conroy, the seventh Earl of Waverly, clucked his tongue and skirted past his only son, picking up a letter from a stack on his desk. Making high drama, he held it right up to his eyes. “It says here that I wasn’t to expect you until tomorrow.” He let the paper fall from his fingers back to the pile. “I have a distinct feeling that you weren’t in a hurry to see me, so why the rush?”
Michael grimaced and ventured to the bar cart his father kept in the corner of his study. He took his time, pouring himself a brandy before continuing. “Can’t I just want the pleasure of your company?”
Arthur laughed. It wasn’t mean-spirited, but it lacked warmth. “Of course you can. I only wish you wanted the pleasure more.”
Michael twisted his amber drink around in his hand, taking another sip before answering. “You know how Mother is. She keeps me busy, always asking me to accompany her to this party and that. I can’t leave everything to come to Leicester every weekend. You chose to live here, Father, not me. If you want to see me more, you should come to Town. I’m sure your wife wouldn’t mind.”
Arthur laughed again, and this time there was no mistaking the sourness. He followed his son to the cart and poured himself a matching glass. “Your mother and I have a beautiful arrangement,” he replied dryly. “We see each other as little as possible, and we stay blissfully happy.” He clinked glasses with Michael and swallowed his liquor in one gulp. “We are a match made in heaven. But I didn’t ask you to meet me here to discuss my love life. It’s yours I’m interested in.”
Michael dropped his head and instantly moved away. He tried to make his movement casual, but he knew his father rarely missed a thing—especially a perceived slight. All discussions of his father’s “love life,” as he put it, were always off the table. Michael once believed that he would be open to the topic if his father wished to confide in him, but the chance never presented itself. Arthur liked his distance—both the literal and figurative kinds. The country gave him the space—and privacy—he valued. He wasn’t hiding in Leicester, but his lifestyle still had a whiff of secrecy that always grabbed people’s attention and spurred their wagging tongues.
Michael flopped on the leather couch, careful not to upset his brandy, and lay supine on the cushions. “I don’t have a love life,” he said, hooking one foot over the other.
Arthur regarded him shrewdly. “That’s precisely the problem, my son, and it’s why your mother asked me to speak to you.”
Michael’s ears perked up. “Mother? She wrote you?” That couldn’t be true. Michael was almost thirty and only retained a few memories of his parents even being in the same room together. They conversed via middlemen. It was their “beautiful arrangement,” and it worked for them.
“Don’t be so surprised,” Arthur said, following him to the couch. He peered down at his son, startling Michael with their similarities. It was almost like looking in a mirror. They each shared the same dark-brown hair and sharp blue eyes. Their cleft chins were identical, along with the high forehead and curls that covered the tips of their overly large ears. Though they never spoke of it, Michael assumed that his father wore his hair a little longer like him because of those ears.
Perhaps if Michael visited his father more, their resemblance wouldn’t always hit him like an anvil to the chest.
“She’s worried about you,” Arthur explained, dragging Michael from his thoughts. “And I am too, for that matter. You should be married. My heir should have an heir by now. However, I hear stories about you with a different—I’ll use the word lady , although we both know I don’t want to—lady on your arm each night. And when you’re not cavorting with… ladies , you’re getting your face beaten in. Are you trying to punish me? Are you doing this to prove something?”
“Prove?” Michael came back to sitting and finished his drink, slamming it on the table next to him. “What the hell do I have to prove? I am a boxer. It’s what I do.”
“You are a viscount. And you will be an earl soon enough. That is what you do!”
Michael raked a hand through his hair. “I can be all of those things. Who says I can only be one?”
“This!” Arthur cried, throwing his hands out around him. “This place, this Society, this world we live in. It dictates. It says who you are and what you are, and you are my heir. I’m sorry that you got the notion in your head that you would be able to change all that or that you had some sort of power over it. I’m sure I didn’t put it there.”
“Oh yes,” Michael growled. “How could you when I never see you, when you’re playing house here?”
Arthur blanched, and Michael almost wished he could take the nasty comment back. But it was too late.
When Arthur spoke again, his voice was softer, as if Michael’s rudeness had sucked the energy out of it. “I’m sorry, my boy, truly I am,” the earl started, blinking much too quickly, “but there’s no use arguing. You are what you are and that’s that. So stop this foolishness now and get married. Start a proper life like everyone else.”
The resentment stirred inside Michael once more. Even though his father was like a wounded animal before him, Michael still had the desire to strike. “Like you?” he spat. “You want me to be married like you?”
Arthur jerked as if his son had punched him in the face. Michael had a hell of a fist, but even he wondered if it would have hurt half as much. “My marriage is wonderful. Your mother is the perfect wife. She is everything a man like me could have ever wanted.”
Michael stretched his long fingers over his knee, admiring the scars and why they were there.
His mother was a wife in name only.
He told himself to stay quiet, told himself to let it go, but he was exhausted. He hadn’t been able to sleep in Manchester, which was why he’d decided to leave so early. He couldn’t stay in that house, not after his time with Maggie. What the hell had he been thinking?
He hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem. He’d been feeling . And that was the same thing his father was now warning him about. Their world had no place for emotions, only duty. And hypocrisy. Because Michael apparently couldn’t be a boxer and a viscount, but he could lead two lives in the ton —one in the light with his wife, and the other in the dark with a mistress. Just like every other man. Just like his father.
Michael ran a hand over his haggard face. He was tired of juggling two lives, tired of analyzing the repercussions. That was one of the things he loved most about the boxing ring. There was no time for all of that. It was all instinct and reaction. One could plan, one could train, but in the end, all that mattered was the will of the body.
The words lashed out of him, free and terrifying. “If mother is so perfect for you, why do you treat her with such disrespect?”
“You don’t know what you’re speaking of.”
Michael wouldn’t back down. Tommy Jones had trained that weakness out of him. “I do know. Do you think she was silent all those years? Who do you think she spoke to when you weren’t around? Who do you think she cried to? Me. I heard it all. And I fixed everything. Even when I was a boy, I was the man by her side that you never were.”
“Stop it!” Arthur yelled. His top lip curled back, his eyes as dark as night. Michael never could fathom why his peers teased him when he was younger, picked on him and raised their fists as they’d called his father so many things—an Aunt Nancy, a buggerer, an invert. They’d never known him. They’d never seen him like this, like he could dig up a mountain and throw it into the ocean without breaking a sweat.
His classmates had only heard the stories bandied about in their circles, whispered in dark corners, and laughed at over cigars and brandies in dining rooms. That the Earl of Waverly wasn’t welcome in his own home in London. That the Countess of Waverly was finished being embarrassed by her husband’s vulgar scandals and loose morals.
That the weak-wristed earl had given up everything—even his young son—to live with his male lover in the country.
Michael couldn’t blame his peers entirely. The salacious stories were more entertaining. And the earl was never around to defend himself or his family—which was why Michael had to. And when his words continued to fall on deaf ears, he found his fists made for a more persuasive alternative.
Fighting was so very effective, and Michael liked doing it so very much, that he didn’t stop even after the taunts died out. And now his father was asking him to leave it behind. How could he?
Boxing had been there for Michael when his father had not.
Just as quickly as the fury overtook the earl, it relented. Arthur released a ragged sigh and walked to the opposite wall, leaning the back of his head against the wood paneling. “I didn’t ask you here to argue,” he said gently, staring at the ceiling. “Believe it or not, I wanted to spend time with you, enjoy your company… and dare to hope that you would enjoy mine.”
Michael inflated his lungs and allowed the anger to filter out of his body with his breath. He answered with a chuckle. “Enjoy my company and then order me to get married to the first girl who bats her eyelashes at me.”
“Not the first girl,” Arthur joked. “But maybe the first girl with a decent dowry.”
Michael groaned. “Father—”
“You’re just being stubborn. And there’s no reason for it. Not much has to change. Marriage is a business. You will have your life, and your wife will have hers. Just make sure you both understand that. A man has his private life and his public one. It takes some balancing at first, but things eventually settle down.”
Michael yearned to ask Father how he had fumbled it. If it were all so easy and expected, how had he managed to wreck his entire life? Or perhaps he hadn’t. Michael wondered if his father was actually leading the one that he wanted, the one where his son played a minuscule part. At school, he’d smashed in every boy’s face who’d dared to say the earl had deserted his son without a backward glance. But sometimes, only sometimes, Michael questioned if it had been true.
He opened his mouth and closed it. There was so much he wanted to say, so much he wanted to ask, but he didn’t have a clue on where to start. Arthur straightened away from the wall, watching his son. His eyes were large and intense. Michael thought he saw a trace of yearning.
“I… I…” Michael focused on the carpet, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to speak if he were looking at his father. “I don’t want to live two lives,” he said. Not like you. Not like Mother. Not like every other man he knew. “It doesn’t seem right.”
Michael wanted one life. His . He’d seen his father live in the shadows for so long; he’d seen the effect it had on him even in the snippets of life he’d been privy to. Shadows always felt safe at first, but they had a way of keeping out so much sun that one’s very soul paled and shriveled into nothing.
Michael heard his father’s footsteps and felt his large hand on his shoulder. He didn’t see it coming, which was why he didn’t flinch at the touch. It was tentative, ill-fitting and foreign, like wearing someone else’s clothes. “Listen to me, my son. You have the girl in your grasp. She wants you; it’s what everyone tells me. Why didn’t you just do it and get it over with when you had the chance?”
Michael’s gaze snapped up to his father. “When I had the chance? I couldn’t even kiss her.” The words tripped out of his mouth like drunken sailors. “She would never… Maggie would never…”
How had his father known about Maggie? Who could have told him? He recounted their conversation. Had he let something slip?
It wouldn’t have been that difficult to believe. Michael’s mind had been on the lovely, troublesome woman all day. His conscious tortured him with pictures of her sultry eyes when they’d sat next to each other on her bed, the way her laughter tickled his chest whenever he teased. He loved that sound, which was why he teased her so much.
But he could never consider marrying Maggie. Michael couldn’t imagine putting her through that arrangement, nor did he think she would ever stand for it. Maggie needed a man who would give her the kind of love and passion that would make her toes curl in her slippers. The man that could kiss the frown from her face, who could taste the ardor on her lips despite her cutting words. She needed a man who lived as freely and fearlessly as she did. Surrounded by her damn yapping dogs.
Now, why did that odd, tumultuous picture make Michael want to laugh and cry? Why did it make his chest light and his head dizzy?
His father chuckled in his drink. “Maggie? Who’s Maggie? Are you talking about the Marquis of Amesbury’s daughter? The odd one? No, I meant… Lady Wendy. My friends tell me that she follows you around like a lovestruck kitten at all the events. Just ask her to be your bride and get on with it. You know what her answer will be.”
Michael fumed from his blunder.
The earl went on. “The Marquis of Amesbury,” he mused, “I haven’t talked to him in ages. I wonder if he’s still traveling all over Christendom with his wife. Such a lively couple—too lively. Maggie, that’s right—the little girl. They used to drop her off with the old Lady Emma whenever they went abroad. Now that was a woman. Insane. Incredibly forthright. I once caught her smoking a pipe at Sullivan’s, and she wouldn’t leave the table until she’d cleaned out every man’s pockets.” He laughed at the memory. “Lord knows, the girl must be positively feral if she spent most of her childhood with that one.”
“Sh-she’s not.” Michael cleared his throat. “And Lady Emma died last year.”
His father frowned. “Ah, damn, how did I not know that? I should have sent a card. That’s the problem with living in the country. You’re always the last to know things.”
Michael sniffed. “That’s the only problem?”
“Never mind that,” his father huffed. “Let’s get back to Lady Wendy.”
With one ear, Michael listened to his father drone on about responsibility and duty, but it was fruitless. He wasn’t in the listening mood. Something felt off, uncentered, and he knew it had everything to do with that kiss—or almost -kiss.
Why hadn’t Michael done it? He’d wanted to—his body had made that more than evident—and the scary thing was that Maggie had wanted it as well. Michael had recognized the passion in her gaze, had felt the electricity sparking between them. She had mesmerized him, and all he could think about was staying with her. When she’d told him to leave, he couldn’t stop himself—he had to touch her, had to feel her silky skin beneath his fingertips one more time.
But then his conscience took over. Nothing about that night was normal. Maggie wasn’t normal. And kissing her like she was seemed wrong. There was a spark inside Maggie that needed more, wanted more from life. She was outspoken and spontaneous, quick to anger and even quicker to smile. She deserved someone who lived just as freely, just as wantonly with their affection.
Michael could never be that man. His father had been that man—with the wrong person—and now his son was paying the price for it. If Michael wanted to toe the line in his fights, he’d have to toe the line in the ton and be the future earl that his parents wanted. He would be stern and passionless in the light of day with his wife by his side and let out all of his frustrations and inhibitions at night in the ring. His father declared he should have a mistress; Michael’s mistress would be boxing.
And he and Maggie would cross paths from time to time and never have to wonder about what might have been. Maggie had boasted that she would never marry, but Michael didn’t believe that for one second. She would never marry a lackluster, bloodless man of the ton . She would marry a man who gave her his soul along with the world. Because a woman like Maggie asked for nothing less.
If Michael had allowed himself to kiss Maggie, his life as he knew it would be in jeopardy. He had a sinking suspicion that loving Maggie had the power to transform a person, and he couldn’t have that. He was already trying to juggle being two different people as it was. He couldn’t handle being another.
No. He’d made a good decision. A sound decision.
But then why did he keep wishing he had done the exact opposite?
Arthur pounded his son on the shoulder. “Why the scowl? I don’t know why you’re making this difficult. It’s not. All you have to do is make one choice and then everything will lay itself out for you neatly. You won’t even have to think. Talk to the girl. Get it done.”
Michael eventually nodded and got up to pour himself another drink. In the end, his father knew what to say.
Michael didn’t want to think. As always, his body would be his guide.
But then why did it feel like he’d just gone twenty rounds and couldn’t find his feet to save his life?
His father moved to stand in front of him now, commanding his attention. Michael watched him shuffle his feet. He recognized reluctance in the man’s expression, the hesitation on his lips as he grew increasingly uncomfortable. “I…” Arthur closed his eyes and tried once more. “I’m not trying to be a tyrant with your life. But I know how cruel this world can be for… some people. Things are less complicated when you fall in line, behave like everyone else. I don’t want you to have a difficult time. I need you to understand that. I love you. You’re my only son. I just want what’s best for you. I want your life to be easy.”
Michael’s limbs were impossibly weary. He couldn’t have defended himself if he tried.
“But does an easier life mean a happier one, Father?”
The earl’s smile was packed with sorrow. He shrugged his wide shoulders, the ones he shared with his son. “Who can say for sure?”