Desperate Daughters by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bluestocking Belles

Pevenwood and Gary were at the garden party. Dom saw them almost as soon as he and Chloe arrived, as they looked around for Lady Seahaven’s party. He steered Chloe down another path. “I do not particularly wish to meet those two people,” he told her.

Chloe visibly restrained herself from peering around him. “Who are they?” she asked, then corrected herself. “Never mind. You do not have to explain yourself to me.”

“Do I not?” Dom smiled down into her lovely eyes. “If I am planning to ask you to share your life with me, I think you do have a right to an explanation.”

He took a deep breath, wondering where to start. Chloe, that wonderful woman, said nothing, giving him the time to compose himself.

He had better start with the cause of the breach between himself and the family he was raised in. “Your brother knows about my family scandal. Has he told you?”

“Aunt Swithin told us both. She reads the scandal columns in the news sheets, and she remembers your… the marquess’s divorce case.”

“Attempted divorce case.” It had changed his life. Or, rather, the fight between Pevenwood and his wife had changed Dom’s life, but the public application for divorce and ensuing trial had let the whole world in on the secret.

“I was ten years old. My brother Totters, the heir, must have been eighteen, for he is six years older than Gary, my next brother. Gary and I were born only eighteen months apart, and were the firmest of friends. We never saw much of the marquess and our mother, or of Totters. But we had each other.”

Rosario, who had been sitting on Chloe’s shoulder, leapt across to his and embraced his face with one long cold hand.

Dom swallowed the lump in his throat and continued. “The marquess and our mother were seldom in the same place at the same time, and when they were together, they fought. Usually about the marquess’s affairs. In one of those fights, Mother told the marquess that I was the son of the Duke of Haverford, and not his son at all.” Dom had heard them yelling at one another.

Chloe did not need to hear the detail—that she’d found herself with child after a brief dalliance with Haverford, undertaken in revenge for one of Pevenwood’s periodic infatuations. That she’d coaxed Pevenwood back into her bed and then convinced him that the ensuing child was premature.

“Pevenwood and Haverford had never liked one another. I think he could have ignored anyone else. When my mother confronted him with the affair, he threw her out and me with her. And he began divorce proceedings. After they failed, he had to take us back, but by then, he’d turned Gary against me. They called me Cuckoo. Gary started it, and even the servants took it up.”

Gary’s defection still hurt, all these years later. More, even, than his mother’s. “Mother didn’t stay. She moved to another of Pevenwood’s houses, and I never saw her again. She died three years later.

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