Page 55 of His Forgotten Bride
Matthew shook his head. “No,” he said. “Just that.” His shoulders hunched forward, and he dropped his hands into his lap. “Sometimes she cried when I asked,” he said, as if it were a guilty confession. “I didn’t want to make Mama cry.”
Gabriel ignored the tiny stab of guilt into his conscience. “That’s very noble of you,” he said, through a throat that felt tight and sore.
Again Matthew shrugged, and his little feet drummed against the heavy wooden frame of the bed. “I guess…I guess you’re not going to marry Mama after all,” he said. “Since you shouted at her.”
Wincing, Gabriel shoved himself to his feet and took a seat beside Matthew on the narrow bed. “I shouldn’t have done,” he said. Certainly not in front of their child. “I was very angry.”
Matthew ducked his head and swiped at his face with one hand. His chest heaved in a fractured sob. “I wanted—I really wanted—”
What was he to do? His own father had never been moved to comfort him, preferring to leave that disagreeable task to nannies. Gabriel reached out and draped his arm around Matthew’s shoulders, surprised by how quickly the boy shuffled over to tuck his face against Gabriel’s side.
“Do you remember,” he said, “when I told you that with my memories I had also lost my wife and child?”
He felt Matthew’s head bob, along with a sniffle that sounded wet and unpleasant.
“I thought they had died,” he said. “Because I could not remember, I relied upon a report given to me by a Runner I had hired to investigate. The things he had found aligned with what little I could recollect, and I assumed, as did he, that they had to be true, that it was the most plausible explanation. But they weren’t true. They weren’t true at all.” He ducked his head to rest his chin upon Matthew’s rumpled hair.
Matthew’s small fingers caught in his shirt. “What happened to them, then?” he inquired.
“My wife went on to become a housekeeper,” Gabriel said. “And my son eventually came to live in my house. Matthew, youaremy son. You always have been.”
Those small fingers gripped him still tighter. “You are my papa? Really myrealpapa?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said, pressing a kiss into his son’s dark, disordered locks. “Yes. I am.”
Hesitantly, Matthew ventured, “Does Mama know?”
Gabriel stifled the harsh bark of laughter that clawed at his throat. “Yes, I imagine she does,” he said at last.
And therein lay the problem. She hadalwaysknown—but she had kept it from him, from their son. Already there had been so much wasted time. So much of it was simply gone, and it could never be recovered. How was he meant to forgive a betrayal like that?
∞∞∞
Claire had made herself scarce at dinner. Just occasionally Gabriel had caught a glimpse of her here and there, fetching and carrying beyond the borders of the dining room, but not once had she breeched the boundary to step within, where he and Matthew had taken their meal.
Neither had she come up to say goodnight to Matthew while he had been present, though he did not doubt that she would have slipped in after he had left. For all her mendaciousness otherwise, at least he had no doubt that she sincerely loved their son.
But in the doing she had deniedhimthat opportunity, and that was unforgivable.
The wound was still too new, too fresh to merit thinking on, the fury too scalding. He had been abed for some hours now, certainly, and yet sleep still would not come. It was as if her betrayal burned too brightly in his brain to allow for something so mundane as sleep to intrude upon it.
Over the dull roar of his own condemning thoughts, incredibly he heard the twist of a key in the lock.
Bolting upright, newly livid, he grabbed for his robe and slung it on just as Claire slipped into the room. For a week she had denied him andnowwas the evening she chose to invade his bedroom? On the very heels of her duplicity?No.
She jerked as he snarled out a foul word, turning to face him. The door shut with a bit more force than she had no doubt intended, pushed roughly into its frame with the advent of her back against it.
Her eyes were red-rimmed. Though she did not seem to be in imminent danger of tears, the evidence of them was left there in her face. Why this knowledge did not satisfy him, he didn’t know.
“Get out,” he said, his voice a gritty rumble.
“Gabriel. Please.” She whispered the words, but she did not move. “Please,” she said again, low and raspy. “If I could speak with you—”
“You could have spoken with me at any point over the last few months,Mrs. Hotchkiss,” he seethed. “You had every opportunity.”
“I know,” she gasped. “I know. I should have done.” She twisted her fingers before her, wringing her hands like a despairing maiden preparing to cast herself at his feet and beg for mercy. As ifhewere the villain in this farce.
“How many times did I ask you?” he bit out, fisting his hands at his sides. “How many times did I ask you to marry me? How many times did you refuse me?”
