Page 139 of The Lyon Returns
“Grayson, enlighten me. That summer, before I returned, I’m told you escorted Fannie around town—in the company of Brice and Lady Mary. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Grayson answered. “What are you thinking?”
“If memory serves, Brice and Lady Mary became engaged shortly after I wed Fannie.”
“Correct again.”
“Did you notice anything odd about Brice and Fannie that summer?”
Grayson’s brows arched. “Now that you mention it, yes. A familiaritysprang up between them that went beyond the kinship that had existed between them since we were all kids running around Averly Abbey.” A corner of his mouth quirked upward. “He had a terrible crush on Fannie, then. Did you know that?”
Gideon shook his head. “He never said anything to me.”
“Of course not,” Grayson said. “He was always competing with you, and she was so clearly besotted with you that it drove him mad.” He aimed a cold smile at his mother. “You remember, Mother? How she followed Gideon around so much you lobbied Father to send him to India?”
She stiffened. “She developed a taste for the exotic, which his proximity only served to fuel.”
“Exotic. I have always detested that label. Kindly never use it in my presence again.” Grayson shifted his attention back to Gideon. “Brice admitted he fancied her to me, the younger brother whom he discounted. In fact, the day you went into the river—when he and I saved you—I saw her coming up the path as I headed down to meet you. She was laughing with her maid, saying how she’d brought you lunch and not him. I got the sense she’d done it on purpose—to vex him. She was always like that. Not a care for anyone but herself.”
“How could he?” the duchess intoned, her hands fisted at her sides. “He let me think she carried my grandchild.” She turned her head abruptly toward Grayson. “Your baby, Grayson. All this time I thought…” She shook her head. “And every time I looked at Gideon, I saw her and your dead baby.”
Her eyes gleamed with a bitter fervor. “Everything changed the day your father came home with Gideon, don’t you see, Grayson? If not for him, you would have had all of your father’s love. If not for him, the temptation of seeing him, Fannie would never have started down the path to ruin.”
“Are you hearing yourself?” Grayson demanded. “Gideon came to you—us—a helpless toddler. He had to live with your forbidding eyeson him every minute. Of course our father doted on him. If not for father’s love, who would have cared for him? Not you, that’s for certain.
“As for Fannie, she was always up to no good, you just refused to see it.” He laughed a humorless laugh. “Just as I could do no wrong, and Gideon could do no right. And what does Brice have to do with any of this? Who was he but the son of the local magistrate, a hanger-on, that he should have earned your trust over that of your own stepson?”
She sniffed. “I had to look out for myson. Brice and I had an arrangement.”
The hair on Gideon’s nape stirred.
She went on. “I needed someone to keep an eye on Gideon, to make sure he didn’t overstep. Brice was happy to do my bidding—for a small price.”
Grayson’s face went devoid of color. He met Gideon’s eyes. “I never knew. I swear to you.”
Gideon nodded. After all these years, hearing how much the duchess reviled him confirmed what he’d always known, inside, but had discounted. Perhaps because, on some level, he had always understood how hard it would have been for her to have him underfoot, the evidence of her husband’s love for not only another woman, but a woman of mixed race—like him.
As a result, he had tried to please her in the hopes one day she would forgive him for intruding on her life. He had done everything in his power to behave as she asked, to never embarrass his father or Grayson or her.
A part of him, he realized, perhaps for the first time, believed he did not merit her abiding affection, and that he must earn his place. Indeed, with every liaison he entered, he reinforced the belief he was only as good as what he could do for someone else.
Then came Gwen, and he’d tried to replicate the pattern. But sherefused to see him asless than, a man only good for what he could offer her in money, sex, and powerful connection.
With an effort of will, he set aside the tumultuous revelations. Later, he would share all of this with Gwen. But first, he must sort out the past.
“So Brice came to you and told you Fannie had seduced Grayson and that he did not wish to accept responsibility, and then what? Whose idea was it I should be the stand-in?”
She lowered her eyes to her hands, clenched in her lap. “Brice said,You could make Grayson do the right thing. But you do have another you can call on, one who owes you a great debt.”
“Ah, yes. Exactly how you put it to me at the time. I owed a debt, and by marrying her, I could repay it.”
Grayson stormed to the terrace doors, turning his back on the room, almost as if he could not bear to face what she’d done.
Gideon went on. “When the child you thought was Grayson’s died, you made another arrangement with Brice, did you not?”
She met Gideon’s eyes, her expression deeply wary. “I merely told him that every time I looked at you, I lost my grandchild all over again. I said, if only there were some way to draw you away from England…”
“Mother,” Grayson bemoaned, turning to look at her with sorrow-filled eyes.
