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Despite her irritation, Lydia found herself smiling at him ruefully as she paused her tending.

“Something tells me that the word “punishment” does not invoke the same feelings in you that it does in others,” she replied wryly.

His only response was to give her a challenging grin.

“My mother was…she was the exact opposite of my father in every possible way,” she began, letting the memories of her childhood form. “Where he was big, she was small, where he was rigid and unyielding she was soft.”

“And where she was weak your father was strong,” Ezra added.

Lydia looked at him then, the humor in her eyes gone, and she shook her head.

“No. At least not from what I saw. My father may have outweighed her in brute strength, yes, butshewas the one who possessed the power. She could command people, my father included, with the softest tone and the lightest touch. She never became riled, not that I can ever recall.”

Heartache and yearning suddenly slammed into Lydia, and she blinked rapidly to dissolve the tears that threatened to spring forth.

“She was amazing,” she added, clearing her throat. “There was and will be no one like her. She was…irreplaceable.”

Ezra was quiet for a moment as Lydia began to gather the bandages and the bloodied basin.

“And yet you took up where she’d left off,” he mused quietly.

Lydia immediately shook her head.

“No, I simply stepped in and did what I could for my sisters,” she replied, keeping her eyes down as she busied herself with cleaning him up. “My father only put up with Alice and me because he was convinced that Juliet was going to be his darling boy. But once she came out and was identified as yet another girl, my father stormed out of the room.

“He thought my mother was going to recover from the birth just like she had the other two, so he went off to get foxed at a gentleman’s club. He was not there when the physician declared that she was still bleeding, or when she was begging the air to hold her hand.”

Memories, painful and raw, continued to slam into her so hard that she visibly flinched.

“You see, she was seeing things due to the blood loss,” she continued, her voice growing hollow. “So, she did not know that when a hand had grasped hers, it had been mine.”

“Your father is worthless,” Ezra announced as Lydia came back empty-handed from the bathing room.

He had kept his mouth closed as Lydia had peeled back her layers to show him a bit of her past, but he had not been able to stop his thoughts. Fury, malice, and redemption all flooded through him as he pictured his wife at seven years of age becoming not just a mother to her sisters, but essentially a wife to her own father, but for the biblical sense.

Lydia had explained that not only did she take on the burden of raising her sisters, but also that of being the Lady of the House. She had learned to care for and hire staff, plan and follow budgets for meals and parties, advocate for herself and her younger sisters when it came to education, and how to speak to adults as if she were an adult herself, all before she had turned fourteen. He had been fourteen when he became a duke…but Lydia had only been half of that when she was confronted with her burdens.

Lydia gave him a weary smile and simply shrugged.

“I have given up trying to measure a man’s worth long ago,” she sighed, “But I suppose I would not argue with your opinion.”

Something about her nonchalant manner annoyed Ezra.

“He abandoned you when you needed him the most. Then, when he finally decided to return, he made you do everything, Lydia.Everything!”

The last word came out as a shout, and it startled not just Lydia but also himself. Where had such an intense burst of emotion come from?

“I am well aware,” Lydia replied calmly, putting her palm on his chest.

Her touch first scorched, then soothed him, and he did not move.

“But you see, to me it was worth it,” she went on. “To know that my sisters were receiving a small portion of the love and guidance that our mother had been able to teach me before she passed. If I had let myself cry or feel the fear of being left alone with our father, I would never have been able to raise Alice and Juliet the way I did.”

“Lydia, you must know that is not a balanced scale,” Ezra remarked, although he could appreciate her optimism. “That what he took from you was not equal.”

“When has life ever been truly balanced?” Lydia asked with a soft laugh, her hand slipping up to his neck.

The wisdom and truth of her words struck him in his heart.