She Vanished After the Duke Rejected Her—But When He Found Her Working as a Maid at Another Lord’s Estate, the Eight-Year-Old Boy Beside Her Revealed the Secret She Had Hidden for Nearly a Decade

PART 6

Everly closed his eyes. The full weight of what she was telling him settled over him like a shroud.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am more sorry than I can ever say. But I am here now, and I want to make this right. I want to know my son. I want to give him the life he should have had. And I want to give you the life you should have had.”

She stared at him for a long moment. The weariness in her eyes was edged with something harder—a refusal to believe that anything he said could be trusted.

“It is too late for that. You cannot undo what has been done. You cannot give Tom back the years he has already lost. And I do not want your charity, Your Grace. I have managed well enough on my own.”

“I am not offering charity. I am offering you what is rightfully his. He is my son, Elizabeth.”

She went very still. “He cannot be anything more than that. He is illegitimate. There is no place for him in a dukedom, whatever you tell yourself tonight.”

“I know it,” he said. “I will not pretend the law can be bent that far, and I will not raise his hopes on a lie I cannot keep. But I am a duke, and there is a great deal still within my power. I can acknowledge him before witnesses. I can settle a fortune on him in his own right, arrange his education, see that the name Everly opens doors for him instead of closing them. That much I can promise and mean it.”

Elizabeth shook her head slowly. “Even that would not be simple. There would be a scandal. There would be questions. What would become of your family’s reputation? What would become of the estate?”

“I do not care about the estate.” He was surprised to realize that he meant it. “I have spent my entire life caring about the estate, and it has given me nothing but loneliness. I will not let it take my son from me too.”

She looked at him for a long moment. The distance between them felt insurmountable, even though they were standing only a few feet apart.

“I am not asking you to make any decisions today,” he said at last. “I am only asking you to think about it. I have arranged to stay on a while longer. That gives us time to talk.”

“There is nothing to figure out,” she said. But her voice had lost some of its certainty. “You are a duke, and I am a maid. There is no future in which the two of us can simply pick up where we left off.”

“I am not asking to pick up where we left off. I am asking for a chance to know my son. And perhaps, in time, to earn back some small measure of your good opinion. That is all.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she shook her head and turned away.

“I cannot give you that,” she said over her shoulder. “Not yet. Perhaps not ever.”

She walked away, and he stood in the kitchen garden and watched her go. The rain began to fall again, soft and steady, as though the sky itself was weeping for everything that had been lost between them.

He did not see her again that day, or the next. He began to wonder if she intended to avoid him for the remainder of his stay. But on the third day after their conversation, a note was delivered to his room. It was brief, written in a hand he did not recognize, and it read simply:

Meet me by the lake at dusk. Bring no one.

He read the note twice, then folded it carefully and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. His heart was beating too fast.

At dusk, he stood at the edge of the lake, watching the water ripple in the fading light. The minutes stretched on, and he began to fear that she would not come. But then he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him, and he turned.

She was wearing a dark cloak over her maid’s dress, her face partly hidden by the hood. She stopped a few feet away from him.

“I did not think you would come,” he said.

“I almost did not. But I have been thinking about what you said. And I realized there are things I need to know.”