Page 92 of Marriage Most Scandalous
Sebastian stiffened. “No. Maggie and I were just leaving.”
“Why?”
Sebastian closed his eyes. Just a few more seconds, and he wouldn’t have had to deal with this.
“Because this,” he waved a hand toward Giles, “changes nothing.”
“I agree,” Douglas surprised him by saying. “I was already displeased with Cecil back then for his weakness and lack of restraint. He was gambling with money he didn’t have anymore. He’d already lost everything. I took the deed to his home with the hope that it would make him step back and realize what he was doing and stop it. Of course I would have helped him one more time, if he’d come to me and told me his life was in danger. But Giles was right. I sensed he’d begun to resent me, resent that I had so much more than he did. I’m not surprised he’d rather trick me into canceling his debt than simply ask for my help again. But I never dreamed that he could perpetrate something this destructive. I had ended our friendship when he came here after Giles’s supposed death to force even more guilt on me, as if I wasn’t already carrying enough. I never did quite understand how he had the gall to do that, but you’ve cleared up the mystery. You don’t take any credit for that?”
“For what? Bringing Giles back from the dead? He could have done that. For getting the shackle off of Denton’s neck? He could have done that.”
“But neither of them would have. It took you to end this nightmare.”
“So I’m the hero? Funny, it doesn’t feel that way, Father. Still feels like I’m the dead son.”
He said it lightly, but the pain was still there and rising fast to choke him. He gripped Margaret’s hand and walked away with her. She was trying to stop him, but nothing could. He had to get out of there....
“Sebastian!”
That tone again that had always worked, and it still did. He stopped, but he didn’t turn around.
“You never gave me an opportunity to say this,” Douglas continued. “You still aren’t, but I’m not letting you walk out of here again without hearing it.”
“Don’t,” Sebastian whispered.
Douglas didn’t hear him. “What was said that day, my rage, was for your pain. Your pain. I never meant it. Cecil had been wrong in that, when he promised Juliette that the husband she wanted would end up being my only heir. He thought he knew me so well that that would be my reaction, and while it did happen, it wasn’t for the reason he assumed. I would have corrected that before the day was done, if I could have found you. But you’d left immediately.”
Sebastian dropped his head back, stared at the ceiling. Grasp the lie and—no, it would grow like a canker between them and never let go. There was no resolution to this. Giles had returned from the dead. Sebastian hadn’t.
He said nothing. The room had grown quiet waiting for his reply, but anything he said would rip him apart.
“I told you he wouldn’t believe me, Maggie,” Douglas said.
“Yes, you did,” she replied, then poked Sebastian in the ribs. “Are you listening, you dratted man? Your father told me this last week, when Giles was still dead.”
“Cor!” Timothy exclaimed from across the room. “He’s your father? But he’s not the man I spoke to in the stable, who said his son was dead.”
Sebastian turned incredulously to the boy to catch his furious blush. John came up behind Timothy and gently yanked a lock of his hair.
“No more reconnaissance for you, my lad,” John said.
“It was just one mistake!” Timothy complained.
“But a whopper.”
“Have you figured it out yet?” Margaret asked sternly beside Sebastian.
“That I let assumptions cripple me and never did anything about it?”
“Sort of what happened to Giles, eh?”
“Leave that blighter out of this.”
She sighed. “One step at a time, I suppose. But if you don’t hug your father and forgive him right now, I may have to divorce you after all.”
“You lost that chance, m’dear.”
“Don’t lose yours.”
