Chapter 32

THIRTY-TWO

“ S o let me see if I’ve got it,” Xavier said in a stunned voice nearly an hour later, after I’d recounted what I’d discovered and read the most important passages aloud to him. “Mum had a thing for Rupert, but Henry had a thing for her. She slept with Henry to make Rupert jealous. Didn’t work, but she got knocked up. Then Henry took her back to her family, who kicked her out all over again because of the shame. So he offers to marry her, and desperate and alone, she agrees. Right?”

I nodded where I sat back on my pillows after spending the last hour going through the journals and recounting the tale I’d just read. “Right.”

Xavier blew out a long, overwhelmed breath and continued.

“Then they return, and she feels she’s made a mistake, but he won’t give her a divorce because he loves her? So she leaves Kendal, refusing to be held down by a man she can’t love who wants to control her. She’d rather be free and poor than trapped.” Xavier shook his head. “Christ. Stubborn, wasn’t she?”

“Seems like a family trait,” I replied, earning a cheeky half-grin in response.

I took the humor as a good sign. If Xavier was managing even part of a smile, the news wasn’t completely bowling him over.

“It’s just so odd,” he said. “I grew up thinking it was him. Rupert, I mean. All my life, he was the one I thought sent the money, even if I never saw him.”

“Did your mother ever actually say that Rupert was your dad?” I honestly wondered how he’d gotten that impression. Or if it had just been wishful thinking on Masumi’s part, given her feelings for the man.

He frowned, thinking back. “I—I think so. We’d see him on TV every now and then, right? Or maybe in the papers. He was a peer, a major leader in the country. And when she’d see him, she’d nod and tell me that was my father.”

I frowned. “Was there…is there any possibility that Henry was in the pictures too? He was the steward, Rupert’s right-hand man, so…”

Xavier gulped. By the look on his face, I gathered the answer was yes.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why would Rupert agree to fool everyone into thinking he was my dad and that he had actually married my mum? What was in it for him?” He frowned. “Obviously, something changed when Mum died. That’s when Rupert showed up and acknowledged me as his. And then, a few years after that, the marriage certificate was found.

I poked him in the shoulder. “I’m not done with the story. But here, listen to this.”

Masumi’s memorial service next week. I shan’t go—I won’t be able to hide the absolute desolation. Everyone would know. They’d know it all. Especially the main point of going, which is to give the boy a foothold in this world.

It surprises me that Rupert would be willing to do it. Granted, I didn’t give him a choice. Honestly, if he didn’t want me to find him shagging the new viscount two months before his daughter was born and after rumors about them had already ruined Rupert’s chances with the Harwood heiress, they shouldn’t have chosen my horse’s bloody stall as their rendezvous point.

But the one secret my brother doesn’t want the world to know is that he loves Bernard Douglas more than anything. So it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that he would essentially become a father to protect him.

Even if it’s to ensure that my own son can be the Duke of Kendal one day.

It’s all I can really give him.

“Rupert didn’t acknowledge you for Henry,” I told Xavier after I’d finished. “He did it for Lord Ortham, don’t you see? They were lovers, Xavi. The reason your fath—well, Rupert—didn’t have children in the end wasn’t because of an accident. It was because he was gay . Gay and married to a woman he probably couldn’t stand.” I shook my head. “He did it to protect Bernard. He didn’t want to ruin what they had and blow up Lord Ortham’s life either.”

I closed the journal and turned to look at Xavier, watching carefully as several different emotions passed over his face. Anyone else might have seen nothing. Just another Brit keeping calm and carrying on. But I knew better. There was a flash of grief. Anger. A bit of betrayal. Maybe even some love.

“Fuck—fucking hell,” he managed in the end. “So it was all a ruse…to protect me…and to protect the… man …my uncle…truly loved?”

I nodded. “Looks that way.”

He swallowed hard. “Christ. You know, it’s so odd. But now I see it. He and the viscount were such good friends. They’d go on these hunting trips together, for weeks sometimes…no one else was ever allowed to go. Lucy used to tease her father for being a bad shot because he never brought anything back.” He shook his head. “I feel like an idiot now. How could they keep that a secret for so long?”

“Same as anyone else does, love,” I told him. “They just kept going.”

“Do you think he knows?” Xavier said. “Lord Ortham, I mean.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He said himself he didn’t read these journals, and Henry doesn’t mention anything about it. If the goal was to convince the world that you were actually Rupert’s son, he probably made him swear never to tell a soul. Eliminate the risk of anyone finding out, you know?”

“Mmm. I suppose.”

“Plus, if he doesn’t know, it explains why he likes you so much,” I said. “To him, maybe you’re the son he never could have had with Rupert. You’re all that’s left of his beloved.”

“Fancy that,” Xavier murmured. He rubbed his forehead, then took the journal and examined it like it was a bomb about to go off. He brushed the edge with his thumb and frowned.

“What is it?” I asked.

Xavier didn’t answer, just thumbed the back edge of the journal a few more times, then slid his finger under the edge of the binding. To my surprise, he withdrew a folded sheet of paper.

My eyes popped open. “What is that?”

“Something else Henry wanted to hide.” He then unfolded it. And his jaw dropped.

“What is it? What does it say?” I leaned over, but the paper, creased and spotted with age, was almost entirely in Japanese.

“It’s…I think it’s a marriage license,” Xavier said. “It looks exactly like the one that showed my parents were actually married at some point, though the divorce papers were English. Fabricated, obviously. But this is dated November 8th, 1985, same as the original.” He blinked and stared at me. “I think he forged Rupert and my mother’s license based on this one. Based on his . And my mum’s.”

He picked up the journal again, examined the place where the marriage license had been stowed, then surprised us both by pulling out another folded piece of paper.

“It’s a birth certificate.” I gasped. “Xavier, that’s your birth certificate.”

“They said it was lost,” he whispered. “Misplaced somehow when I was born. We—I—had to file for it later. With Rupert’s name, of course, after Mum died.”

He covered his mouth, staring with awe at the document that stated plainly his name, his mother’s, and his father’s—his real father, one Henry Merriweather Parker.

“Xavi, do you understand what all of this means?” I asked. “In terms of our situation now, with Parliament and Georgina and everything else?”

He frowned, and then, to my utter sadness, he deflated a bit. “I suppose it means I am really and truly the Duke of Kendal, doesn’t it?”

It was true. Because if Rupert died without issue, Henry was the next in line. And since he was, in fact, married to Xavier’s mother at the time of his birth, and Rupert ended up having no other children after marrying Georgina, that made Xavier fully legitimate.

It wasn’t how I saw it, however.

“No, my love,” I told him as I took his chin and turned his head. “It means you hold the keys to your future right here in your hands. It means for the first time, you have a choice.”

Xavier looked down, his gaze bouncing between the documents and the journal as he processed exactly what I was saying. That just like his father before him, he held legitimate fodder over powerful men who had previously toyed with his life like a puppet’s on a string. That he could decide whether to keep the truth hidden, let it out, or perhaps use some of the details to convince Lord Ortham, a powerful member of the very committee that might determine his future, to convince the others that whatever Xavier wanted for his future was in fact what was right.

The choice was his.

The choice was ours.

“So, I could be a bastard after all?” Xavier laughed, a sound of pure, booming joy that shook the room like thunder. “If I wanted.…I could choose not to be the Duke of Kendal. Which means you, my love, would be no duchess.”

I grinned so hard I thought my face might split.

“It means,” I told him. “We can be whatever we want.”

He dropped the papers, then pulled me across his lap and wrapped his arms about my waist.

“Whatever we want,” he confirmed as he kissed me once, then again, and again. “So long as we’re together.”