Page 13 of Obsession: The Unspoken Sin
The little girl looked up at him with the biggest, widest eyes he’d ever seen.
“Who are you?” she asked with all the truthful innocence and directness only a child could manage.
It was as though that query brought Alice alive in a war. “This is the Earl of Denbigh.” She moved quickly and made to position herself between him and the little girl.
His heart hurt. She sought to hide the girl from him? Did he believe he would judge her?
Laurence dropped to a knee and slid himself in a way that prevented Alice from hiding the girl as she would a dirty secret. Which is what society had forced her to be.
“It is very nice to meet you,” he said softly and gently.
He held out his hand. The tiny child, all too trustingly, slipped her fingers into his and gave his hand an impressively firm shake. She got that from her mother.
“Will you be painting with M—MissKilloran?” the tiny girl incorrectly surmised.
Had there been men who came to paint here with Alice? The very idea of it knifed at him. Ripe, unrivaled, unceasing jealousy threatened to eat him alive. He reigned those volatile emotions in.
“I fear not, Miss—?”
“Kill’ran,” she supplied. “We’re all Killorans here,” she explained, this time correcting her mispronunciation of the notorious family name.
Killorans.
The hell Alice and her daughter were.
Those were thoughts for a later time.
The child gave his hand a tug. “You may call me Laurel.”
Denbigh went motionless.
“Laurel,”he whispered.
He dimly registered her zealous nod. He was lost. Lost in thoughts of the past; memories of him and Alice.
“…Someday, Laurence, you must name one of your daughters, Laurel…”
“…Oh, I’m having daughters, am I?” he drawled.
“…Five of them,” an impish thirteen-year-old Alice piped in. “Laurel, Laurelia, Laurina, Laurette, Laurelei…”
A claymore to Denbigh’s chest couldn’t have inflicted more suffering.
He felt Alice’s gaze on him.
“Miss Killoran?” Laurel’s worried voice cut across anguished remembrances of simpler times, of how it once was with Alice…and how she’d wanted it to be. “Did I make His Lordship sad?” She didn’t allow Alice to answer; she swung her gaze to his. “Are you sad because you want to paint?”
Get it together, man.
Denbigh cleared his throat of emotion. “Not at all. I am thinking of how honored I’d be to call ‘Laurel’.” He leaned close to whisper. “In truth, I am not much of a painter, Laurel. That skill belongs to your m—”
Alice’s breath hitched noisily.
“Miss Killoran,” Denbigh corrected before he slipped completely.
A tremble racked Alice’s frame. He saw it and he hated it. He hated that she’d adopted a name that wasn’t her own. He hated her fear. Her uncertainty. The secrets. The outright lies. He bloody hated everythingaboutthis.
“Do you have a given name?” Laurel asked in her singsong voice. She wrinkled her cute, button, nose. “Or are you likeallthe toffs and only His Lordship, My Lordship, My Lord.”
