Page 104 of A Story of Love

It isn’t too late…you can still do the decent thing.

He could. And he would.

Liar. You have no intention of going anywhere other than to bed with the woman who has been dominating your thoughts for days. You are going to draw her deeper into your web even knowing that you very well might kill a man next week and have to run for the rest of your life…

Fast scowled at the unwanted voice and shoved the stopper into the decanter with unnecessary before turning around.

“Thank you,” she said when he gave her the whiskey.

Once this conversation was over, he would bid her a firm goodnight and go to Berkeley Square.

He would just have this one drink and then leave.

He lowered himself into the chair opposite her and lifted his glass. “Here is to both of us getting what we want, Lorelei.”

“I can drink to that.”

Fast found the way she pursed her lips after taking a tiny sip enchanting.

That was another thought he quickly thrust away.

He sighed and shoved a hand through his hair; the strain of spending the last week in close proximity with Bevil Norman and not killing him had worn him to a nub.

“You look tired, my lord.”

“My lord? Are we back to that again? Say my name if you want my story.”

Her pale cheeks tinged a delicate pink. “You look tired, Stand Fast.”

It tickled him to hear his full, ridiculous name on her prim lips. “I am fine,” he assured her.

She cleared her throat. “So, you were saying…”

“Who told you the children were Percy’s and not mine—and I don’t mean Parker’s anonymous source, I mean who confirmed it for you?”

She took a sip of whiskey, her gaze evasive. “I don’t want to get my source in trouble. She only told me because I gave her my word that I wouldn’t write about it.”

“You seem to have done a great deal of that recently.”

She gave a brief, wry laugh. “Yes, I have. I’m not much of a journalist.” Before Fast could argue with her on that subject, she said, “Tell me why you have claimed them as yours.”

Fast stretched out his legs and absently examined the tips of his Hessians, forcing his thoughts back more than two decades to the first time his brother put a child in one of his lovers, when Percy had been only seventeen.

“You have to know what growing up in our family was like to understand why I did what I did. The demands that were piled on Percy from the moment of his birth were crushing. My grandfather—and my mother to a certain degree—expected Percy to make up for my father’s dissipated, wastrel ways. It was to be my brother’s job to not only rescue the family name from the trampling it had endured beneath my father’s boots, but Percy was also supposed to sacrifice himself—his life—on the altar of matrimony to revive the family coffers.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Hell, even my father thought it was Percy’s duty to clean up the mess he’d made.”

“I understand your father had several illegitimate children of his own.”

“Several?” He snorted. “More like a dozen. My father was the very definition of a charming rake. And he was charming—as long as you didn’t have to rely on him for anything. He was a reckless gambler, an inveterate womanizer, a careless steward of the family fortune and reputation, and on and on. To be frank, it is fortunate that my grandfather survived him because the marquessate would not have survived too much more of my father.”

Fast stared at the whiskey in his glass and considered his next words. When he looked up, he saw she was not only patiently waiting, but the expression on her face was one of compassion. She was listening to him not as a journalist, but as a human being. That kindness decided him. “Tell me, do you know how my mother died?”

“I don’t know much about either of your parents.”

“It was the pox.”

She swallowed. “Oh.”

“My father—happy-go-lucky-philanderer that he was—managed to pass the disease along to her but never suffered any ill effects from it himself.” He threw back the rest of his drink, set down the glass with a thump, and said, “You’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with my brother’s by-blows?”