"Yes."
He waited, knowing that she would get around to whatever occupied her thoughts eventually.
"She told Langley the truth."
"No one can force you to see him. I
won't allow it."
He saw her nod from the corner of his eye. "Thank you."
"Do you want to see him?"
"I…" She fell silent for almost a full minute. "I want him to tell me why he never searched. Why he married Jacqueline."
A completely unexpected thought came to him.
"If he never searched, then he did not know for certain your mother had died. He could have been committing bigamy." Then an even more disturbing thought took its place, a possibility that should have occurred to him before, but never had. "Was your mother dead when he married the current countess?"
"No."
No wonder Thea had so strongly resisted the idea of acknowledging her father. "The bloody bastard."
"You were right when you said that he lacked honor. He also lacked morality."
"Yet your aunt told him the truth about you. Why?"
"She feels responsible for my mother's death and for Langley's marriage to Jacqueline. She is convinced that had she told him the truth about my existence and Mother's flight to the West Indies, neither event would have transpired."
"That is a heavy burden to carry."
"Yes, I know. Almost as heavy as the burden a daughter might carry believing that had she not been born, her mother would never have left her son and country to live on an island that eventually killed her."
Drake understood this type of guilt, and he refused to allow his wife to torture herself with it. "You were a gift to your mother, not a curse. You must accept that, Thea, or you discount all the sacrifices she made to keep you."
He felt her gaze burning into him and slid his away from the surrounding traffic for a moment to meet it.
"It's true," he assured her.
"Then you, too, must accept that you are a gift to your mother and that her sacrifice in keeping you has not been in vain."
Drake laughed harshly. "She had no choice."
Thea shook her head. "Do not be a fool. She could have gone to the country, given birth to you, and given you away with no one the wiser. Your grandfather's connections are certainly enough to have ensured the safety of her secret."
Feelings inside of Drake shifted in a way that left him breathless. He had always defined himself by the fact that his father did not value him enough to acknowledge him, not the reality that his mother had wanted and loved him so much she had accepted a lifetime of Society's censure to keep him.
To have the right to call him son.
Unfamiliar moisture gathered in his eyes, and he blinked it away. "She is a very special woman."
"Yes, she is, and the evidence is in how well she raised you." Thea's words reached down into his soul and wrapped themselves around his heart.
Since meeting her, he had begun to care less and less about proving himself to Society and his father. In that moment, the desire to show his father he had value disappeared entirely from inside Drake. Thea had been right—his life was defined by his mother's love, not his father's rejection. And his value resided in the man he had become, not the man who had helped make him.
The freedom he experienced at Thea's words was unlike anything he had ever known. Yet another reason to give thanks to his Maker for this incredible woman who was his wife.
When they reached the warehouse, he had been so mellowed by his thoughts that he wanted only to kill Emerson, not torture him first for trying to hurt Thea.