Page 61 of Seductive Reprise
“I don’t need him, his house or his money. I have a father. And a home.”
“What you have,” Joseph growled, “and what you deserve are worlds apart.”
Rose stumbled backward, but he held fast onto her arms. “What do you mean?” Her heart picked up again as the weakness in her limbs returned.
He sneered. “Why are we to pay for their mistakes, their ‘indiscretions?’ And with what? Our misery? Our entire lives?”
“My life has not been a misery,” she said, anger strengthening her conviction.
“Thank God for that. But it need no longer be so—”
“So what?” she interrupted, yanking her arms free. “So poor? So… so… plain?” She was practically shouting now.
He stared at her, emotion fighting to work its way to the surface until it was defeated once again, and his mask of inscrutability slipped back into place. “The earl is your father. On the wrong side of the blanket, granted, but your father nonetheless. You need not struggle. He will support you. Promote you. Damn it, Rose, don’t you see it ought to be this way? That your life needn’t be so difficult? Ipsley will gladly launch you. You don’t need to blaze that trail on your own. Don’t climb the mountain blind, not when the footholds are already there.”
Panic washed over her as she realized the path that now lay before her: a life of leisure, devoid of meaning. Painting not with an eye for truth, but for the amusement of a bored, wealthy dilettante. What life was worth living, what beauty worth capturing, if done with the inevitability of one’s own success? Success that would be all but promised by the earl’s wealth and obligation.
“No. I refuse to do things your way. It’s dishonest, and it feels wrong.” She turned to look at the opposite wall, her lashes fluttering as she blinked back tears, feeling horrible about everything he was saying, as well as for what she was saying back to him.
“Perhaps I am dishonest. But I’m correct in this, just as I’m correct about your parentage.” His glower reminded her of that day, so many years ago, when he’d sat for her at the earl’s behest.
A cold dread crept over her, and she looked back to Joseph with another awful realization.
“You knew! From the very start!”
“Of course. Everyone did.”
A flush of embarrassment pricked at the back of her neck. “Did you only seek me out that day because…” She swallowed and closed her eyes, trying to ignore the tightening pain in her chest, the churning of her gut. “Because we’re the same?”
“I don’t see how that’s of any relevance—”
“Please!” she barked, then quieter, she repeated, “Answer, please.”
“Yes.”
There it was.
She’d been a fool to think he could care for plain, gawky Rose Verdier. It wasn’t her he saw, but who she ought to be, who he thought she’d become—Rose Driffield—were she legitimized as he had been. The floor fell out from underneath her at the revelation.
“I will never be like you. The entitlement. The snobbery,” she said, amazed at the sudden clarity and steadiness in her voice. “I will find my own way, by my own merit. I want no man’s guilt, nor his pity. I refuse to, to be… to hold my hand out because of some supposed circumstance of birth!” She spat the final words out, disquieting as they were.
Before he could reply, she spun on her heel and marched toward the door, feeling very strangely as if she were not herself, but one of the paintings on the wall, indifferently watching her exit from afar.
She halted at the threshold. Without turning, she hissed, in a tone of voice she’d never heard herself use before, “Do not write me.”
And then she left behind the person who’d occupied all her hopes and dreams for the past four years.
She fled to the ladies’ retiring room and remained there for the rest of the evening, until the dowager countess found her and dragged her back to their apartment in the manse, giving her an earful all the while.
Rose sat stonily on the edge of an armchair, staring at Joseph’s handkerchief in her hands, not listening as the elder lady harangued her. The hurt was overwhelming. She balled the handkerchief up in her fist, not wanting to see that hateful coronet.
And then the earl returned to their shared sitting room.
“Miss Verdier? Is aught amiss?”
And when she looked up and saw the concern on his weathered, freckled face, she knew for certain. It was all true.
He was her father.
