Page 76

Solomon’s gaze sharpened. “Your father, last I checked.”

“LastIchecked, you ungraciously bowed out of that role.”

Solomon’s cold façade crumbled. His face contorted with pain. Still, he managed to compose himself when he turned to James.

“You had no right—” James took one step forward.

“I had every right!” Solomon stood up. “I wasn’t going to sit back, watching you waste your life away and soil our good name.”

“What good name? I had to live my life followed by whispers of you being mad!”

Solomon looked shocked.

“Oh, right!” James barked, his voice dripping poison. “You wereaway. I was here. I had to go to college and university and be pointed at as the boy whose father had gone mad.”

Solomon looked away, his jaw ticking.

“So, I decided if they were going to point, I would give them a new reason to do so.”

“Calling you a rake was the solution? Earning yourself the reputation of a scoundrel was your way of?—”

“You weren’t here!” James shouted. “You have no right to judge me!”

Solomon swallowed. His fingers tightened around the glass in his hand. He put it down and placed both hands on the desk, his chin dipped to his chest.

“And what would you have had me do, James?” His voice was low and controlled, but he was shaking beneath it.

“I don’t know.” James laughed bitterly. “Be a father, perhaps? Stay? Face your grief like a man instead of crawling into the dark and leaving me to fend for myself?”

Solomon’s eyes snapped back to James’s. “You think I wanted to leave you?” he croaked.

“I don’t give a damn what you wanted.” James’s voice was sharp as a blade. “I know what you did.”

Solomon’s chest rose and fell too quickly. He rounded the desk. “James?—”

“No.” James took another step forward. “You weren’t there, damn it! You weren’t there when I was a boy shouldering the weight of a title that should not have been mine to bear alone.”

“I…” Solomon exhaled, his voice cracking. “I thought I was protecting you.”

“Protecting me? You did a lousy job at it.”

Solomon closed his eyes for half a second, regret written all over his face. “I thought my grief would poison you,” he admitted.

James looked over his father’s shoulder and ran a hand through his hair. Pain, sharp pain lanced through him. The same one he felt that night when his father woke him up with the news that changed his life forever. With the same look he had right now. The one of complete defeat and utter grief.

“I loved your mother so much,” Solomon continued. “She meant everything to me. I thought if I stayed, if you saw me like that, you would drown in it, too.”

James felt sorrow and anger flood him.

“So, you left me to drown on my own,” James said firmly. “I lost her too, you know.”

Solomon collapsed on the closest chair and dropped his head in his hands. And James saw his body shake.

His father wascrying.

The shock was so great. He had never seen his father cry. Not even after his mother died.

James watched, stunned, frozen, unable to move. His father, the Duke of Pemberton, the man who had always been untouchable, unreadable, was crying. Not silent, dignified grief. Not a single tear wiped away before anyone could notice. He was shaking.His shoulders shuddered, his breath came uneven and harsh, and his hands were gripping his head as if to hold him together.