Richard

“It can’t be as bad as what we just endured with his lordship. What is it?” I asked, motioning for Tina to follow after me as I headed into my office proper.

“You mother would like you to call her,” Tina said, and I noted the pained grimace on her face.

“I was wrong,” I laughed as I sat down at my desk. “That is so much worse.”

“Shall I tell her that you’re engaged until later this afternoon?”

“No,” I sighed, resting my head in my hands. “I’ll call her now. No point in putting off the inevitable, is there?”

“No, marm,” Tina affirmed.

“Would you do me a kindness, though, Tina?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I would kill for a cup of coffee.”

Tina nodded wordlessly, moving out of the room, her clacking heels echoing out into the hallway beyond, leaving me alone with only myself and the looming prospect of having to talk to my mother to keep me company.

Lady Wolfe, otherwise known as my mother, was not always my favorite woman in the world. That was not to say she was a bad person… though perhaps she could have been described as a bit power hungry. My mother was one of those people who craved authority and recognition, though not always at the expense of others. She was motivated, determined, and at times, a little pushy. I didn’t blame her for the way she was—my mother was an impressive woman and one that I’m sure that many others girls could look up and aspire to be like. Just not me.

I reached toward the phone with a sigh, putting the receiver to my ear as I dialed her number. While both my mother and I were of a similar cut, sans the moderate lack of empathy on my part, I had a hard time holding a conversation with her that didn’t infuriate me. Everything from my sense of style to my choice in clothes was exactly the opposite of what she’d ever have chosen for me, something she never failed to comment on whenever we had the chance to speak, much to my chagrin.

The phone began to ring. Once, twice, three times before I heard the clatter of someone on the other line.

“Good morning, Gwendolyn,” my mother said in her usually cool tone. “How are you, dear?”

“Just fine, Mother,” I answered, leaning back into the comfort of my high-backed office chair. “And yourself? Tina had mentioned you wanted to speak.”

“I always wish to speak to my daughter, dear, when the time permits.”

I closed my eyes and fought to keep my tone even. While my mother might wish to speak to me, that was never the same thing as actually doing so. The time, as she said, never seemed to permit. I’d grown up dealing with this sort of behavior for years, and had always come to expect never actually being the kind of priority I’d always wanted to be in my parents’ lives. I wasn’t my father’s blood relation, and therefore was not in line to inherit any of his estate or a title—not that I was sorely missing it, to be honest.

“And what is it you’d like to discuss with me today?” I asked after a brief silence.

“Well, Gwendolyn, I have some news that I may need you to be sitting in order to hear.” Already I didn’t like the way that this was going, much less the way my mother seemed almost giddy as she spoke. My mother was not the kind of person to ever express anything so base as to be giddy over anything.

“I’m sitting down… go on,” I said, unable to shake the sense of dread that was pooling in my stomach.

She drew it out anyway, as though she’d rehearsed this moment for prime effect, pause and all. “I’m pregnant.”

Chapter 2

After Afghanistan, I thought I’d seen it all—the myriad of horrors the universe held, all the pain and suffering that could possibly be inflicted in this world. I’d experienced more than my fair share of shock and awe, seen the misery painted on the faces of my brothers-in-arms. I’d never been allowed on the front lines, of course—I was heir to a rather substantial duchy, after all—but one didn’t have to be eye-to-eye with terror to get caught in its illimitable hold.

But when my father told me his new wife was pregnant—and with a son, no less—that made all the darkness I’d seen in war seem like a children’s TV show, by comparison.

It wasn’t even the thought of my dad actually fucking someone that sucked the blood from my face, or the idea that his crusty sperm still had some vitality left in them. Those were repulsive enough ideas, but not the ones that made my stomach threaten to splatter at my feet.

It was knowing how this would change the course of the rest of my life that made me want to gag—a knowledge that no one but me, and my father, had.

Though I supposed now his wife knew, too. Why wouldn’t she? Dear old Dad would be only too thrilled to share this particular news—that his screw-up of a son wasn’t actually entitled to anything now that a legitimate heir was on the way. Yes, I was my father’s bastard, and in more ways than one.

Ever since I was young I’d been made painfully aware of my father’s thoughts when it came to my illegitimate standing, though as his only heir I would be the one to claim everything on the moment of his death. That was, of course, something that he had always begrudged, especially since he had—until now—been unable to repeat the miracle of my own conception. Everyone had thought him sterile, and that my birth had been a fluke of nature, or as my father liked to refer to it: a curse.

My mother had been young—barely into her twenties—when they two of them first met—he, however was most certainly not. Already approaching thirty-five himself, my father took advantage of the doe-eyed young lass while summering in the southern part of the country and one thing apparently lead to another. When all was said and done, my mother was dead and my father swore up and down that the girl had been nothing but a slut and that the child was not his.

One short paternity test later, and I was quickly named the bane of my father’s good name, a title I took to very readily and with much cheer. I learned to hate the old man, and took a certain satisfaction in the fact that I was the last person who he ever wanted to become the sole beneficiary of his estate. That was at least until I got the news that I’d have a little half-brother on the way within the next few months.

He’d decided to drive home this particularly devastating news over lunch, as he most often liked to do anything. I’d only just come back from my last tour when I received the sudden and prompt invitation to meet him the following day at one of his favorite restaurants, Coldwell’s. I was rather shocked to see him when I first arrived, thin as a rail and looking almost deathly. If it weren’t for the fact that he was stuffing his face with the dish in front of him before I even sat down I would have thought that he was starving himself. For the briefest of moments I felt something akin to sympathy for my father, even wondering whether my father had contracted some kind of horrible disease. Sympathy however soon turned to hopefulness, wishing that such a thing might actually come to pass.

“Ah, you’ve arrived—late as usual,” he muttered between bites. Every time I

saw him eat I pictured a vulture gorging itself on a carcass. That was what I’d always seen my father as, a scavenger that made his name on the backs of people who came before him. “Sit.”

I held in a vicious snarl. How a sod like that had gotten my mother pregnant, I’ll never know—nor did I want to. I was thankful to have missed out on the majority of his repugnant features, genetically speaking, leaning more heavily toward my mother’s looks than anything else. At least I’d gotten that much of her. At times he still chided me, claiming he still wasn’t even sure that I was his at all and that “the trollop” had made it all up. It was those times where I’d been on the verge of violence. I hoped my father would keel over in his seat.