Page 30 of A Lady’s Rules for Seaside Romance (The Harp & Thistle #3)

“Maybe,” Victor replied. Freddy and Mary were now two distant dots.

“Personally, I don’t think he’s anything like his father.

” Victor told her what Freddy had said moments ago, about not missing his father and how intense he’d seemed about it.

He did, however, leave out the part about Freddy’s supposition of Mary causing trouble and the duke confirming scandalous rumors of Winthrop to Freddy.

There was only so much worry a mother could take on, and he didn’t want Anne to worry more than she already did, especially over events that could not be changed.

“Has Freddy ever said anything like that to you before?” Anne asked. “Anything at all negative about Bernard?”

“No. Neither of them has ever brought him up to me before. I was surprised he did so today.”

“Why did he?”

“I don’t know.”

As she put her worried brow back on the distant dots of her children, he couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in her mind.

He had sometimes wondered, too, how the trio talked about the late marquess in private.

Did they often talk about him, or not at all?

When Victor and his brothers had been young, they hadn’t talked about their dead parents.

Well, he and Dantes hadn’t. Ollie would often ask questions, but he’d also had no memory of them.

It had made sense he’d been curious. And even though Dantes was only two years younger than Victor, as opposed to Ollie’s ten, Dantes had a very rosy and idealized memory of their parents.

Dantes remembered them being madly in love, dancing together in the house, crooning over each other, private laughter.

Victor remembered those moments as well—they hadn’t been created from thin air—but he also remembered the bad times.

Times his father had come home drunk and their parents had argued.

Their mother drinking alone herself and crying.

Throwing objects at each other in fits of fury.

Then there’d been their mother’s spiral when their father had died. Moving from their nice home to the rickety, drafty, tenement while their mother had been heavily pregnant. Then the difficult labor, the addiction to laudanum—and of course, the overdose.

Victor was the one who’d discovered her dead from an overdose.

Dantes spoke so highly of their parents in the rare moments they came up, Victor had decided to shoulder the truth all on his own. He didn’t want to ruin Dantes’s or Ollie’s perception of them. Instead, he would carry the darkness for them for the rest of their lives.

He’d made that decision when he’d discovered his mother dead with numerous empty laudanum bottles beside her. The postpartum madness and the melancholy from his father’s death, plus their fall from grace—it had all been too much for her.

Just before Dantes had entered the room, Victor had thrown all of the bottles but one out the window.

But it wasn’t like their mother or father were only bad memories for Victor, and he didn’t hate them, either.

He loved them despite their flaws. They’d been very flawed people, and because of the difficulties caused by their flaws, he’d striven his entire life to evade all temptations because of it.

The temptation of pride like what had led to his father’s death from one of his locomotives when he should have been at home with his family.

The temptation of drink, which had flamed the words and tempers of both his parents.

And the temptation of women, of intimacy, which had brought three brothers into a world filled with struggle.

Fortunately, this temptation was rather easy for him to avoid, as it never had appealed to him.

Regardless, it had been easier to avoid these temptations than tease the risk they could bring.

Temptation caused nothing but life-altering trouble.

Winthrop, meanwhile, had been a scoundrel through and through, the embodiment of sin with nothing but devils and demons on his shoulders whispering into his ear.

Victor knew from Vivian and Anne that when the former marquess had been younger, though he hadn’t been a saint even when he and Anne had first married, the cad had been a whole different person.

But once the responsibility of children had come around, even though he’d had servants to take on much of the children’s care, the man had changed into the monster Victor had known.

But it wasn’t as if Winthrop were the only man to change after the introduction of a baby.

It seemed as if this were more common than the husband who dropped everything to care for his postpartum wife, or the husband who shrugged into the role of father as if it were as easy and sensical as putting on a jacket on a cool autumn day.

Victor heard it all the time, the way these men talked at the pub.

They would laugh and laugh, drunk out of their minds, bragging that their wives were at home with the babies because that was where they were meant to be, but their day was so hard, they deserved to be at the pub for hours every night.

Which meant the women they mocked were home alone with babies, working their own jobs while their husbands went off and faffed about however they pleased.

And these husbands weren’t usually of the upper class, either. This behavior seemed to cross class lines.

Victor hardly witnessed a successful marriage.

His brothers were fortunate in that regard, but there was no way it would happen a third time.

A one-hundred-percent happy family success rate amongst the McNab brothers?

Those odds were not possible, not with their family.

He would be destined to be the miserable one.

He was a betting man, though his success was with horses and not outlooks on life.

But if he were to place a wager, his wager would be on him finding misery in marriage.

Something inside of him thrashed around wildly in protest, as if attempting to scream its disagreement.

It was a strange sensation, one he felt on a lesser scale while looking over the future losers in the horse racing booklets.

Shifting in his saddle, Victor decided to blame the strange sensation on hopefulness.

He was too old, too experienced in life, to feel hope for something.

Whatever it was, it was best to ignore it.

But as he rode along the beach, the warm summer breeze sweeping past, Anne riding at his side, he couldn’t help but wonder if a marriage with her could be one of happiness.

What would it be like if he married his closest friend?

Anne knew him as well as anyone could. They shared everything together, and their families were close.

He couldn’t imagine them being unhappy in a lifelong partnership.

But it also seemed impossible. Neither of them had marriage as a future goal. And yet he wanted her all to himself. How in the world was that supposed to work?

It couldn’t. But he did note that in letting himself think about this, the thrashing inside him had all but stopped.