‘I could hardly pat him on the head and bid him be more careful next time.’
‘No, he could not,’ the boy’s mother admitted with a sigh, as if it cost a lot to stand up for such a grim stranger. She turned to Delphi with a resigned shrug and said, ‘He’s right. My son is far too adventurous for his own good. And I want you to see your eighth birthday, despite all your best efforts not to, my lad, so you can take the wounded expression off your face and listen to your elders and betters for once,’ she added as her boy let go of her narrow waist to stare up at her with the wide eyes of a wronged cherub.
Magnus revised her age down a decade and decided, if she still had a husband, the neglectful idiot should be here, trying to back up her efforts to keep their child alive so she wouldn’t look elsewhere for comfort for herself and a little help with the lad. A ridiculous, totally unacceptable part of him wanted to be the source of both for her for a moment and hadn’t he already had a harsh enough lesson about throwing himself at complicated and unfathomable women? And what did he know about how to bring up well-balanced and happy children after the childhood he and his younger siblings had endured at their father’s hands anyway?
‘I see,’ Delphi said almost as if she did.
Hope leapt in Magnus’s heart for a heady moment as his daughter blew kisses at him as if she would always be on his side. ‘Please, Delphi, let me come with you?’ he begged the child’s mother as softly as he could with all these wild emotions roiling around inside him right now. He would plead in front of the devil himself if it got him a place in his child’s life.
‘I told you before, Magnus. No. Have the manners to listen to me and stay away from us in future, before you do even more damage than you already have.’
‘Should I send for the Harbour Master?’ the strange woman said as if ready to leap into battle on Delphi’s behalf. Why must she be such an interfering, reckless female? He almost had to admire her for it. All his attention should be focused on Delphi and trying to persuade her to let him have any sort of role in his daughter’s life, but parts of it kept straying to this vital and puzzling stranger who was threatening to get in the way at the worst possible moment.
‘No, although I really do thank you for the offer,’ Delphi said with such horror in her expression a disinterested bystander might laugh at the show they were putting on. ‘He won’t hurt us,’ she explained.
Magnus was glad she gave him that much credit and supposed he ought to be grateful for small mercies. ‘I won’t,’ he added shortly.
‘Well then, perhaps you could work harder at seeming a little less threatening in future, Lord Drace,’ the woman said and made it all worse somehow.
‘He’s not my husband,’ Lady Delphine Drace said with such an appalled expression Magnus almost gave up and went home.
‘Oh,’ the stranger said, looking from one to the other and then at the baby in Delphi’s arms as if she had put two and two together and got four. She blushed and looked as if she wished herself a few hundred miles away as well right now, but she still met his eyes with defiance blazing from behind those disfiguring spectacles of hers and his reluctant admiration for her courage fretted like an itch under his skin. ‘It seems to me you have even more reason to leave her ladyship in peace, then, sir,’ she said severely.
‘None of your business, madam,’ he snapped because her words stung all the more sharply for being right.
‘Stop embarrassing me, Magnus, and go away. I have made it clear to you time and time again I will not marry you. Do me the courtesy of listening for once and leave us be.’ Delphi sounded so weary Magnus’s heart thudded with dread, then slowed to a horrified acceptance that she really meant it this time. Now he would have to watch them both sail away and the thought of it nearly took him off at the knees.
‘What about Angela?’ he said bleakly as he stared at his baby with what felt embarrassingly like tears in his eyes. The baby laughed back at him and gigged up and down in her mother’s arms as if she liked him, even if Delphi didn’t any more. She was so like him his paternity should have been obvious to the whole world at birth and he longed to proclaim it to the rooftops and be her father for life.
‘She will be safe, loved and with her mother. That’s all you need know,’ Delphi said implacably, and defeat had never tasted so bitter for Magnus.
‘Unlike her father,’ he said flatly as his life stretched away from him in a long, slow road he almost wished was over and done with.
‘I am sorry, Magnus. It was never you, you see?’ Delphi said, as if his pain at the idea of never seeing his child again was so plain to see even she could no longer ignore it. ‘You were never the man I really wanted when I had to wed Drace, nor afterwards when he died and I was rich as well as free and he still didn’t come to comfort me for all those wasted years I had to endure without him.’ She spoke as if that grief was the one she might never get over. ‘You look so like him at the age when he loved me back, you see. I admit I could not help myself taking what I could get from one of you Hailes when you arrived, so eager to comfort me after Drace died, and he still stayed away, as if he didn’t care a snap of his fingers about me and how I still longed for all I could not have because he turned his back on me. He said he had to do his duty and never mind where his heart led him, but if I was in his heart he managed to ignore me when it all ended and I still had nothing—not even a child to make the emptiness less cruel.’
‘So you used me to make one and never mind if I was the wrong man to make it with? I was only ever a poor substitute for another man as far as you were concerned, wasn’t I?’ Magnus said bitterly, a terrible suspicion dragging him back to the shore like a heavy anchor chained to his waist as she turned to walk aboard the ship so she could get on with forgetting he even existed on the other side of the Channel. ‘For my damned brother, I suppose, since you always hated the old man nigh as much as I did,’ he gritted out at her stiff-backed figure and felt as if this last, bitter truth might poison him.
‘You Hailes look so alike, you see?’ she turned back to tell him earnestly, as if he might nod and agree, as if he had been a fool to ever think himself aught but a stand-in for the man she really loved and wanted all along when she’d taken him as her lover for six glorious weeks after her husband died.
‘All except Wulf,’ he said numbly, relieved his favourite brother was both too young and too like their mother to be the man Magnus had been a substitute for when he had helped Delphi make a Haile baby to love so soon after her husband’s death—even the rightful Drace heir had not argued Angela was Sir Edgar Drace’s get. Maybe the man had been so relieved Delphi had birthed a girl he’d made no effort to see the babe in full daylight and Delphi had kept her child very close. She’d had Angela baptised soon after birth on the excuse she might not survive. That lie had sent him galloping all the way to Drace Dower House to discover his child thriving and he’d fallen instantly in love with her as only a father could. Nobody would believe Delphi’s lie about her baby girl’s health if they could see her in her mother’s arms now, laughing at the strange sayings and doings of her elders and so full of life.
Magnus numbly marvelled that Delphi’s relief at leaving her native land and him behind seemed to have lulled her into trusting a stranger not to noise her affairs abroad, when she usually kept her feelings so firmly in check. He only wished he shared her confidence in the woman hesitating nearby as if she knew she should leave them to have this very private discussion in as much peace as could be got in such a place, but felt she could not walk away lest he became violent. Couldn’t she tell he would never hurt a hair on either of these two females’ heads if his life depended on it? Luckily her boy had already got bored with such adult puzzles and had gone to create more mischief behind his mother’s back.
‘Marry me anyway?’ Magnus pleaded and to hell with his pride and their audience.
Even