Sweet girl.
“It fits, though. I always felt fatherless. From boyhood, I was always the odd one out. Piers was cast from my father’s mold, and I . . . I just wasn’t. I was a miserable student. I didn’t excel at their gentlemanly pursuits. I didn’t have the right upper-crust friends. I was big and rough, not handsome and refined.” He took a draught of his porter. “Piers could sneeze, and the old man would beam with pride. I was always the mistake. Sometimes I wondered if I was even his natural son.”
“Of course you were his son. How could you doubt it?”
“Because he doubted it. He didn’t even want to claim me. I must be the Devil’s own boy, he always said.”
“Your own father gave you that name?”
He tapped his fork against the table. “ ‘No son of mine.’ I can’t count how many times I heard that growing up. He was always after me for one thing or another. ‘No son of mine will run with the common boys.’ ‘No son of mine will be sent down from Eton.’ ‘No son of mine will engage in fisticuffs.’ ”
With each sentence, he jabbed deeper into the cake.
“He couldn’t understand me. Hell, I couldn’t understand me. As a boy, I wanted, more than anything, to be the son he could love. To do well in my studies. To make him proud, as Piers did. To cease fighting with everyone. But I never could manage it.” He gestured vaguely toward his chest. “I’m too damned restless and impulsive. By now I’ve learned to check my punches. But I’ve always had a habit of blurting out words I wish I hadn’t.”
“Words like, ‘Clio, I think I’ll die of wanting you’?”
“No. Words like, ‘I don’t want to be your son, I don’t want a penny of your money, and I hope to never see you again.’ ”
Her fork paused in midair, and she sucked in her breath. “Those words would be more difficult to retract.”
“Where my father was concerned? Not merely difficult. Impossible.”
“What happened?”
“I asked to purchase a commission in the Army. My father wouldn’t hear of it, with Piers already overseas. He’d decided I should have a living instead. In, of all things, the Church. Perhaps God could save me where he’d failed.” He cracked his knuckles. “That notion didn’t sit so well with me.”
She laughed. “I can imagine it wouldn’t.”
“I refused. He raged. We argued, worse than ever before.”
This is the family legacy. No son of mine will be an aimless wastrel. No son of mine will squander his potential.
That was when Rafe had thrown the wildest, most ill-considered blow of his life.
I don’t want to be your son.
“I knew at once,” he told Clio. “So did he. As soon as the words were out, I could see it in those cold eyes. I’d crossed a line, and there would be no going back. He told me to leave his house. From that day forward, we were estranged. No inheritance. No home. No family.”
“That’s a harsh punishment for being youthful and brash.”
Rafe shrugged. No more harsh than starvation. After what Clio had endured, he wasn’t going to cry to her for sympathy. “I did ask for it. And at the time, I was happy to go. You know how it is. When you’ve been denied something long enough, you start telling yourself you didn’t want it anyway.”
She took a healthy bite of cake. “So you left. And turned to prizefighting to support yourself.”
“Aye. Best thing that could have happened to me, really. Gave me discipline and a chance to find my own success. And I can’t deny it made for delicious revenge. He was such a snob, you know. I took joy in fighting under the name he’d given me, engaged in such vulgar sport for money.”
Rafe sipped at his porter. Clio took bites of her cake. She didn’t press him for more. Only waited.
“He came to my fights.”
She swallowed. “The marquess?”
He nodded.
“I confess, I’m shocked. I visited the late Lord Granville once a fortnight. He never mentioned it.”
Rafe cracked his neck. “We never talked, before or after, but he was always there in the crowd somewhere, all tight-faced and stern. Never cheered. Never applauded. He just came to register his disapproval, I suppose.”
“Were you pleased to see him?”
He shook his head. “Made me so damned angry. Made me fight harder, too, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to lose in front of him. I had this wild idea . . . a hope, I suppose . . . that one day, I’d win and he’d come down from the crowd and shake my hand. Say, ‘Well done, Rafe.’ That would have been enough. In all my four years as champion, it never happened.
“The day I fought Dubose,” he went on, “I spied him there. And for the first time, I thought . . . if winning for four years straight doesn’t impress him, what would the old man do if he watched me lose?”
“Are you saying you lost the fight on purpose?”
“No. I can’t say that. That would be unfair to Dubose. He was bloody brilliant that day. But the thought of losing got in my head. And any trainer will tell you, once that idea’s in your head . . . it’s all over but the bleeding. I started making mistakes, slowing down, throwing wild punches that only caught air.”
“And you lost.”
“Badly.”
“Yes. I remember the bruises.” She winced. “So? What did your father do?”
Rafe took a long swallow of porter, fortifying himself for what came next. “He went home without a word to me. That night, he had a heart attack. You know the rest. Never recovered. Dead within the week.”
The words echoed dully in his chest.
“Oh, no.” Her voice softened. “Rafe. Surely you don’t blame yourself.”
“How could I not?” He massaged his temples. “I don’t have the faintest notion what was in his heart that night. Was he disgusted? Concerned? Pleased? Whatever emotion he kept so tightly bottled up in there, it finally exploded. And I’d lit the fuse.”
“Rafe, listen to me.” Her blue eyes drilled into his. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t. He’d suffered two smaller attacks in the past year. The man wasn’t well.”
He acknowledged her words, but they did little to ease his guilt. If what she said was the truth, Rafe should have known. He should have been even more careful. If he hadn’t antagonized the man, he might have lived to see Piers come home.