Led Astray by a Rake (The Husband Hunters Club 1)

“We had a terrible argument, my father and I. In the library. I shouted at him. I said unforgivable things, but I was so hurt and angry with him. I’d believed him to be perfect and he wasn’t. He was begging me not to tell my mother, pleading with me one moment and ordering me the next. At first I refused, but he wore me down, and I suppose I could see the sense in what he said. Why hurt her when it was possible to keep it all a secret? Abbot would never tell, he was completely loyal to the family.”

“So you came around to his way of thinking,” Olivia said quietly.

“Yes.” He looked at her, and her lips trembled into a smile of encouragement. “I left him there in the library. He looked utterly exhausted. I felt as if everything I thought I knew had been turned inside out.”

“I felt exactly the same when I saw Sarah.”

He turned his hand in hers, grasping her fingers tightly. “I’m sorry. I promised to tell no one the truth. I promised my father I’d let everyone believe Sarah was my lover, and that Jonah was my son. He resembled me anyway.”

“You’ve allowed yourself to be blamed for this, Nic. For a promise to your father ten years ago?”

“For my mother’s sake,” he corrected her. “It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t talk to me. Like me, she loved my father beyond reason. If she’d known what he’d done she would have been destroyed. When he died, it was the least I could do to keep my promise to him, and protect his memory.”

“You should have told me,” she said, and she was angry and upset. “Sarah is my sister and I thought she was dead.”

Nic put his palm against her cheek, feeling the tears. As he’d been speaking she’d been crying, mourning for him and his father and her sister.

“I should have told you,” he murmured, “but how could I? What would you have done if I had?”

Olivia stared back at him. “I would have asked why I was lied to.”

“Of course you would have. And if I’d then gone on to tell you that my father was Jonah’s father and not me?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“Could you have kept silent? My mother”—and he glance

d down to where she was standing, waiting anxiously, below them. “My mother would find out. I wanted to tell you, Olivia, but I had to be careful.”

“But you took the blame, Nic!”

He shrugged, dismissing it, but she wouldn’t be stopped.

“It changed you, Nic. You weren’t able to live your life as you wanted to.”

He grinned. “I’ve led a very good life, Olivia. A very diverse life.”

She shook her head, refusing to be pacified.

“You sacrificed yourself to your father’s conscience, to save him. He should never have asked that, Nic, and you should never have agreed.”

“Olivia,” he murmured, inching closer. “I can’t change the past, but I don’t want it to mean nothing. I will continue to let people believe that I am Jonah’s father.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Sarah…”

“That was your parents’ doing. They wanted to pretend she was dead so there was no scandal attached to them or you. And Sarah has suffered, too. The man she loved died and she was left with a young child. I’ve done what I can but she hasn’t been well. You saw for yourself. Sometimes she gets mixed up about the past and the present.”

Olivia had seen for herself. The thought of her sister, alone and suffering, was almost too much to bear. She remembered her own childhood and her mother’s desperate attempts to keep her from repeating Sarah’s mistakes.

“Did my mother and father know about Sarah and your father?”

“Yes. When they discovered the affair they tried to separate them, and then when Sarah was expecting Jonah they sent her away, but she came back. She loved him, Olivia, and I think, in his way, he loved her. I didn’t understand that then, or I couldn’t understand it. Now that I’ve lived myself, I can understand and forgive, even if I don’t want to go down that road myself. Not if you’ll stay here with me and be my wife, Olivia. I swear”—and he leaned closer, his dark eyes intent—“I will never look at any woman but you.”

Olivia wrapped her arms about him, forgetting their precarious position, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. “Nic, I’m sorry I didn’t stay to talk to you. I was so upset when I recognized Sarah, and then to think you’d lied to me…”

“My fault.”

“No, no…”