“What astounds me is the altruism of your claim,” he said, finding his temper rather thinner than he liked. When normally he prided himself on being the sort of lion who did not concern himself overmuch with the existence of sheep, much less their opinions. “Out of the goodness of your heart, you chose to come here and share this news with me. That would make you the one woman in the world to claim she carries an heir to the Dukedom of Marinceli, yet has no apparent intention of claiming any piece of it.”
“I’m hoping it’s a girl, actually,” the maddening woman responded. In a tone he would have called bland if he couldn’t see her face. And that expression that seemed wired directly to the place where his temper beat at him, there beneath his skin. “If I remember my time here—and in truth, I prefer to block it out—there has never been a Duchess of Marinceli. Only Dukes. One after the next, toppling their way through history like loose cannons while pretending they’re at the center of it.”
His temper kicked harder. And he found he had to unclench his jaw to speak. “If you do not wish to make a bid for the dukedom, and you claim your only motivation is to inform me of this dubious claim of yours, I am again unclear why this required a personal audience.”
“I was under the impression that this was the kind of thing that was best addressed in person,” she said. Very distinctly. As if she thought he was slow. “Forgive me for daring to imagine that you might be an actual, real, live human being instead of this…caricature.”
“I am the Duke of Marinceli. The doings of regular people do not concern me.”
She rolled her eyes. At him.
Teo was so astonished at her temerity that he could only stare back at her.
“Noted,” she said, in that bored, rude way that he remembered distinctly from her teen years. Though it seemed far more pointed now. “You are now informed. When you receive the legal documents, you can sign them happily and in private, and we can pretend this never happened.”
“I beg your pardon? Legal documents?”
Amelia folded her arms, and regarded him steadily, as if he was challenging her in some way. And Teo was beginning to suspect that what beat in him was not strictly temper.
“Of course, legal documents,” she chided him. She chided him. “What did you think? That I would trust you to let this go?”
“Let this go?” he repeated. And then he actually laughed. “Miss Ransom. Do you have any idea how many enterprising women, whether they have enjoyed access to my charms or not, take it upon themselves to claim that I have somehow fathered their child?”
“You’re welcome to treat me like one of them. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy if you thought I was lying.”
Teo hadn’t really made a determination, not yet. He hadn’t let himself connect his mysterious redhead to this…disaster. Or he hadn’t wanted to let himself. But there was something about the way she said that that kicked at him. As if she really, truly wanted him to dismiss her. And that was so different from the other women who had turned up over the course of his life to make their outlandish claims that it made something deep inside him…slide to the left. A simple, subtle shift.
But it changed everything.
“We will determine if you are lying the same way we determine any other claim,” he managed to say despite that…shift.
“What does that mean? Ritual sacrifices? Forced marches? The dungeons?”
He lifted a brow. “A simple paternity test, Miss Ransom. The dungeons haven’t been functional for at least a hundred years.”
“I can take any test you like,” she said after a moment. “Though that seems like a waste.”
“Funnily enough, to me it doesn’t seem like a waste at all. It seems critical.”
She shrugged. “We can prove that you’re the father if you like, but I’m only going to want you to sign documentation giving up your parental rights.”
And something in him stuttered, then slammed down. Like the weight of the whole of this monstrous house he called his home, loved unreservedly and sometimes thought might well be the death of him.
“Miss Ransom,” he said, making her name yet another icy weapon. “You cannot possibly believe that if you are indeed carrying my child—the firstborn child of the Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli—that I would abdicate my responsibilities. Perhaps your time here as a child—”
“Hardly a child. I was a teenager.”
But Teo did not want to think about the teenager she’d been, too curvy and unconsciously ripe.
Had he noticed her then? He didn’t think he had, but it was all muddled now. The girl he’d tried to ignore and the redheaded witch who had beguiled him into losing his head were tangled around each other and thrust, somehow, into this pale woman who stood before him with her blond hair flowing about her shoulders, not the faintest trace of makeup on her hauntingly pretty face, and eyes the color of bougainvillea.
He was forced to accept that it was not merely his temper that seethed in him.
But he kept speaking, as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Whatever age you were, we clearly failed to impress upon you the simple fact that the members of my family take their bloodlines very seriously indeed.”
“I’m well aware.” And there was something in her gaze then, and in the twist of her lips. It dawned on him, though he could hardly credit it, that the august lineage of his family was not, in fact, impressive to her. “But if I recall correctly, you’re the person who, upon the occasion of our parents’ wedding, loudly proclaimed your deep and abiding joy that my mother was too old to—how did you put it?—oh, yes. ‘Pollute the blood with her spawn.’ I can only assume that any child of mine would be similarly polluted at birth. You should disavow us both now, while you can still remain pristine.”
It took Teo a long moment to identify the hot, distinctly uncomfortable sensation that rolled in him then. At twenty-six he’d had a sense of his own importance, but had imagined his own father would be immortal. His recollection of their parents’ wedding—evidence that his once irreproachable father had lost it completely, a deep betrayal of everything Teo had ever been taught, and a slap against his mother’s memory—was that he had been quietly disapproving. Not that he had actually said the things he’d thought out loud.
“I don’t recall making such a toast,” he said now. Stiffly. “Not because such sentiments are anathema to me, of course. But because it would be impolite.”
“You didn’t make a toast. Heaven forbid. But you did make sure I heard you say it to one of the other guests.” And he might have thought that it hurt her feelings, but she disabused him of that notion in the next moment by aiming that edgy smile of hers at him. “In any case, I thought it would be impolite not to tell you about this pregnancy.”
Teo didn’t care for the way she emphasized that word.
“But it can end here,” Amelia said, merrily. “No legal pollutants to the grand Marinceli line. I’m sure that in time, you’ll find an appropriately inbred, blue-blooded heiress to pop out some overly titled and commensurately entitled heirs who will suit your high opinion of yourself much better.”
Teo had never heard his duties to his title and his family’s history broken down quite so disrespectfully before. It was…bracing, really. Like a blast of cleansing winter air after too long cooped up in an overheated room.
She claimed she was pregnant, and he couldn’t dismiss the claim, because it seemed likely—however impossible and no matter how he wished it untrue—that she really had been the redheaded woman he had sampled the night of the Marinceli Masquerade.