‘I lied.’
‘Why?’
‘It wasn’t your business,’ he ground out and then, looking at her again he seemed to soften, just for a moment. ‘And I’ve never spoken about him to anyone.’
She didn’t respond. What could she answer to that?
‘I told you that my mother was a hotel chambermaid. Well, the man she slept with—my biological father—’ he practically spat the word out ‘—was the son of the family who owned the hotel.’
Slowly, things began making a little more sense in Oti’s head. The marriage arrangement. The man who’d so vehemently opposed it. Lukas’s hostile takeover of Rockman’s hotel chain.
‘Your biological father is Andrew,’ she breathed. ‘Rockman. The Earl of Highmount.’
‘He is.’ Lukas could barely say the words. ‘And it wasn’t a one-night stand. He and my mother had a secret affair for over two years. She was deeply in love with him and, for his part, he pretended that he loved her too. But he claimed that he had to prove himself competent to run the family businesses and gain respect before he could present her to his father. My mother was stupid enough to believe him.’
She had to be careful. She could feel his pain and his rage.
‘This is what your mother told you?’
Those granite-grey eyes bored into her.
‘You think she lied.’ There was no rancour in his tone. ‘So did I, at first. But I know it to be true because I visited him when I was about twelve, when she was dying.’
‘Lukas...’ His name came out as a shocked whisper, but he carried on as though he hadn’t heard.
‘Obviously he’d married someone far more respectable by then, but my mother begged me to tell him that she was ill. She believed that he loved her deep down, but hadn’t had any choice but to do what he did. So I went, and he laughed in my face.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘It’s characteristic Rockman.’ Lukas waved it aside. ‘He then called my mother a multitude of names that I won’t repeat, and said that her gullibility was only one of the pathetic things about her, but that he’d kept her on his leash because she’d known how to satisfy him in bed.’
‘How cruel,’ she gasped, but again he cut her off as though, now that he’d started, he needed to get his story out.
‘He also had a few choice words for me, of course. The headlines were illegitimate, worthless, never amount to anything and, of course, the ubiquitous bastard. Then he had me thrown out of his house. In fact, I think the only reason he let me in was to hear me beg for my mother, and then he could see my reaction and feed off it.’
‘So he wasn’t shocked by what you had to tell him? He’d known she’d fallen pregnant, and yet he’d abandoned her,’ Oti said quietly. ‘Both of you.’
Lukas’s face twisted into something bitter and dark.
‘You’re not even close. He hadn’t just turned his back on my mother. He’d decided the best way to keep his own image intact was to sully hers. After that first meeting with him, I decided to dig around a bit.’
‘You were twelve?’
‘And I was determined. My mother had never told me who he was before that day, but once I knew I went all out. It didn’t take much for me to discover that her pregnancy hadn’t been the secret she’d told me it had been but that his entire family had known about it. About me.’
‘Yet they’d never reached out to you? Either of you?’
‘No. Though I’ve no doubt they knew the truth, publicly they claimed he?
?d never touched her, and that the first time he’d ever had cause to meet her had been because he’d had to fire her from her job when he’d discovered that she had a reputation at the hotel of sleeping with the guests.’
‘She didn’t, though?’ Oti gasped, knowing the answer but needing to ask the question all the same.
‘Of course she didn’t. She was besotted with him. Only him. She never even looked at another man, certainly not when I was a kid. But he also claimed that her assertion that he was the father of her unborn baby had simply been her way of getting revenge and attention, simply to wheedle a hush money payment out of his hotel chain.’
‘Oh, Lukas.’
‘My mother was hounded from her home, and from the village. She had no job, no husband and a baby on the way. It’s an age-old story, but it’s all the more devastating when the man concerned is from a powerful family, and can destroy a life—two lives—with a whisper in his friends’ ears.’