He fell silent, his lips skimming along Sara’s temple.

“She told me as she lay dying she thought she could bed me and pass the child off as mine, but when it came time for the actual intimacies, she couldn’t stop crying, and I… couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Nick happened upon her a few weeks later with her lover, having no idea my marriage was unconsummated, and confronted my wife with her responsibility toward the Bellefonte succession. In all her worry and upset, it hadn’t occurred to her that burden might fall to us, and her bastard might inherit the earldom. She tried to rid herself of the child, but ended up ridding herself and the child of life.”

“I’m sorry.” Sara voice was small, brittle with pain, but she would not leave him in the midst of this recitation—she could not.

“I was sorry too,” Beck said on a sigh. “I was sorry enough before the marriage, always trying to outdo my brothers, all unbeknownst to anybody save myself and possibly my father. After the marriage, I was even sorrier. I went from frequent heavy drinking to incessant inebriation. I bet on anything, gambled my personal fortune away and back each month, swived any willing female… I was a disgrace.”

“You’re not a disgrace now.”

“But I have a disgraceful past, Sara,” Beck reminded her gently. “Aren’t you going to hold it against me, judge me for it, cast me away for sins I’ve committed? It gets worse, you know. My father was at his wits’ end and devised one journey after another for me after Devona died. I became the Haddonfield remittance man, sent far from home and hearth lest my excesses be too great an embarrassment to my family. There was always a token task to see to, always a veneer of purpose to my travels, but I was mostly sent forth because decent families do not leave inconvenient children on hillsides anymore. Not in this civilized land of ours.”

And yet, Sara had the sense Beckman was on a hillside, a high, lonely hillside with sheer drops only a few feet away.

“But you learned so much,” Sara protested. “You couldn’t have been drunk the whole time.”

“I wasn’t. I always set sail with good intentions and usually gave a decent accounting of myself, until I was homeward bound. Then I’d fall apart, thinking of the churchyard where Devona was buried, thinking of the child she lost, thinking of how disappointed my father must have been in me.”

Another silence, this one more thoughtful.

“I was simply too weak to deal with my disappointment in myself,” Beck said. “And in my family. They owed me, you see, owed it to me to ensure I was happy at all times. Life owed me happy endings, and I owed nobody anything. One can see my expectations were bound for readjustment.”

How she hated the dry irony in his voice. “What happened?”

“I tried to kill myself.” Beck drew his hand down her arm and back up again, in a slow caress that made her shiver. “First with whiskey, then absinthe, then opium, then any and all of the above. Nick fetched me home as I was about to succeed at my goal, and left me at Clover Down to recover, then marched me down to Sussex to work in the stables of an old-fashioned estate fallen on hard times, much like this one.”

Sara felt a shudder pass through her; he likely felt it too. “You could have hung yourself from the nearest barn rafter.”

“Might have, but I’d been given responsibility for the livestock. All I had to do was get up each morning and look after the beasts, and it… soothed me. They did not know of my past, did not care. All they cared about was whether their oats appeared on schedule, and that much I could manage. I could manage to be civil to the other stable boys. I could look after a scrappy little runt pig until it no longer needed to be fed from a bottle. The pigs have ever been charitable toward prodigal sons.”

“You grew up.”

“Perhaps, or I realized I could serve some purpose if I’d sober up enough to be of use. Then too, I found in Sussex, working each day on a specific patch of land, using my own wit and will to make the place healthier was much better for me than sailing off to foreign ports to carouse with strangers. I had never been successful running from my regrets, but I found some measure of peace in rising from the same bed, day after day.”

“You needed something to care about.”

“Apparently so.” Beck nuzzled her temple. “And someone to care about, someone to love.”

She went still beside him and remained silent. In that silence, she felt her heart sinking like a stone bound for the bottom of the sea. If she had viewed a continued liaison with Beckman as difficult before, it had become impossible with his raw truths and unvarnished trust.

“I do love you, you know,” Beck went on as the ache in Sara’s chest threatened to choke her. “And I think you must love me a little, too, Sara, or you would not have given me your virginity.”

Another instant of silence as the import of his words cascaded through Sara bodily.

“God help me.” She scooted forward and again would have left the room, but Beck put his hand on her nape, not gripping, just a warm, careful weight.

“I beg you, Sara.” He took a breath, his lovely, precise voice dragging like a rasp over Sara’s soul. “I beg you, do not lie to me now. Do not lie to yourself.”

The fire hissed and crackled on the hearth, the rain pelted the windowpanes, and the wind soughed around the corner of the house. In the warmth and solitude of the cozy sitting room, Beckman fell silent, and Sara…

Gave up.

Gave up pretending it didn’t hurt so badly to be without him, didn’t devastate her to consider his leaving, didn’t leave her howling in endless inner darkness to sleep one floor and a load of regrets away from him each night.

She loved him. He’d carried her secrets for her, waited for her, and now, in the face of his relentless pursuit, she just… gave up. Gave up her loneliness, her fears, her insecurities, and her bondage to a past that had come to cost too much. She curled back against him, along his side but facing away, because she could not bear for him to look upon her eyes. She felt Beck shift to curl himself around her on the sofa, the warmth of him providing a comfort beyond words.

“A man can’t tell if a woman is chaste. I’ve been promised a man can’t know for sure,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“I couldn’t tell with my body,” Beck said, “though I suspected, but with some other sense, I knew. You were like a gift, just for me, not like a woman who’d had a child with a man she loathed.”

“Reynard assured me our affection for one another would grow after we wed, though when he whisked me off to the Continent, it soon became apparent his affection was for the coin I could bring him. Being married to him gave me a veneer of respectability, but I think he sensed that if he forced me, I would take Polly and go, regardless of the folly involved.” She hoped she would have, and hoped equally some vestige of honor had informed her late husband’s unwillingness to assert his intimate marital rights. “So you knew about Allie all along?”

“I still don’t know about Allie,” Beck countered, wrapping an arm around Sara’s waist. “I only suspect and worry and wish I could help.”

“Reynard got to Polly.” Sara heaved a sigh the dimensions of the universe. “His strategy was to divide us, divide our loyalties, so Polly would fall in with his schemes and set herself against me. She was so young, Beckman. A child, and it never occurred to me Reynard would seduce a fifteen-year-old under his protection.”

“He cannot be dead enough to suit me.”

How she loved Beckman Haddonfield. “Once Polly conceived, Reynard was of course off on his other liaisons,” Sara said. “He nearly destroyed her, nearly destroyed us both. She tried to talk herself into hating me, but when his perfidy became undeniable, she hated the child and herself and me—and him.”

“For the last, we can be thankful.”

“If that kept her alive, then yes, we can be thankful even for a hatred like that.” Sara found herself lifted bodily and settled on Beck’s lap. “She nursed her baby but couldn’t really open her heart to Allie, not as a new mother.”

“Hence the subterfuge was made easier,” Beck said. “The child was yours and legitimate, but alas, as a legitimate child, also under Reynard’s authority. He went along with the scheme to put you, Polly, and Allie more firmly under his control, and probably saw the advantages to him from the start.”

“Of course,” Sara said, burying her face against Beck’s shoulder. “I think so far as he was capable, he loved Allie, but then when we visited England, she began to draw, and her talent was obvious.”

“That must have hurt you, to see such tangible evidence of her relationship to Polly.”

“No.” Sara shifted slightly. “The art is what drew them back together. Polly matured a great deal and loves Allie every bit as much as I do. But as my child, Allie would be legitimate, as you say. As Polly’s, she’d be a scandalous indiscretion and reflect poorly on Polly and me both. I’m not sorry we did what we did—even Allie seems to understand the why of it—I am sorry Reynard exploited the situation for his own advantage.”

“It can’t have been easy.” Beck’s lips found Sara’s crown. “Raising another woman’s child while she looks on.”

“It wasn’t, particularly when that woman is your younger sister and blames you for the child’s existence, when she’s not blaming herself, then berating herself for feeling any resentment, and on and on. It was during one of our periodic feuds that Reynard suggested to Polly the various nude studies of me.”

“They are breathtaking.”

He would focus on that, and he wasn’t wrong. “What a tangled web.”