Page 68 of When the Rogue Returns
He chuckled. “Then I hope we’ll be doing this more often.”
“We’ll see,” she said, flashing him a coy smile.
The kiss he gave her then offered promises that she prayed he could keep. Because there was still so much unsettled between them. So much to worry about.
When the kiss ended, the first of those things burst out of her. “I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience at doing this with women,” she murmured, smoothing back a lock of his hair, unable to meet his gaze.
He stilled. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been a long time since we... Surely you weren’t... celibate all that time.”
“Would you believe me if I said I was?” he asked softly.
Her gaze flew to his. “I don’t know. You did think I had abandoned you, so—”
“You thought the same ofme,” he pointed out. “Yet you remained faithful.”
“I’m a woman. It’s... different for me.”
“Is it?” A faint disappointment showed in his eyes. When he set her off of him onto the sofa so he could fasten up his drawers and trousers, she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.
But as she put her own clothing to rights, he draped his arm about her shoulders. “Perhaps it’s time I tell you about my family.” Then he drew her close. “My mother’s name was Elizabeta. She was a tavern wench in Ostend when my father, a duke’s youngest son, met her. He got her with child—me. Fortunately for her, he agreed to marry her, so that I could be born on the right side of the blanket.”
“That was fortunate indeed, for both you and her,” she murmured, astonished that he’d never told her this. “Not to mention rather surprising for a duke’s son. I would think that a man with his connections would just pay her to keep silent.”
“I wonder about that, too. But he didn’t. I’ll never really know why. He claimed to love her, though he enjoyed throwing her low connections up to her whenever they argued. But I know for certain their marriage was legitimate—the first thing my cousin the duke did when he found me was confirm that.”
She snuggled against him and waited for him to continue.
“Still, Father was no saint in his salad days. From what I understand, he sowed his wild oats liberally. By the time he married Mother, he’d already contracted syphilis during an earlier encounter with a whore.”
“Oh, Victor,” she whispered.
“The pox wasn’t too virulent and had no lasting effects, or so we thought. Mother said he showed no signs of it when they married. I only know of it because of what happened when I turned thirteen, and he... he...” He dragged in a hard breath. “He tried to stab Mother.”
Isa froze.“What?”she said incredulously. “Whyever for?”
“The reason he gave was that she burned his potatoes. But the real reason was the syphilis rotting his brain. At least that’s what one of the doctors at Gheel told us when we brought him there.”
That stunned her. For all of her life in Amsterdam, she’d heard of Gheel. Out of devotion to the Irish saint Dymphna, its inhabitants took care of the insane. “You brought him to the Colony of Maniacs?”
“Some call Gheel that, yes,” he murmured. “It was certainly fitting for him. That’s where he lived until his death when I was sixteen.”
Three years. Victor had endured his father’s madness for three years! A chill went through her. The poor boy. His poor mother! Isa had lost her father at twelve, so she knew how difficult that was. But at least Papa had fallen prey to an illness she could understand, and she’d had him there in spirit until his death.
Victor had been forced to watch his mother suffer through the loss of his father in spirit and sense long before the man’s body had wasted away. How horrible for Victor! It created an ache in her chest that would not be banished.
She laid her hand on his knee. “Why did you never tell me?”
His gaze shot to hers, wrought with pain. “That my father went mad because of his whoring? That the rest of us were forced to work long hours in a neighboring village so we could afford for him to be fed and housed and kept from killing anyone? At twenty, it still mortified me to even think of it. I certainly wasn’t going to tell the woman I’d convinced to marry me.”
“I would have understood,” she said softly.
“Really?” he asked, his voice suddenly distant. “Your family convinced you that I had a suspicious past solely because I never talked about my background. Imagine how much more convincing their tales would have been if you’d known of my father’s sordid life and death. They would have made much of that, of my mother’s being a tavern maid and my father’s going mad.”
“Or they would have latched onto you as the descendant of a duke,” she pointed out.
“I didn’t know about that then.”
