“He lied to me.” The words contained a raw pain that Charles knew all too well. “Even when—”
“Even when you were intimate? Yes, it’s rather a nasty realization, isn’t it?”
She sucked in her breath. “I already knew how despicable such lies are, darling.”
“Do you still think O’Roarke knows nothing more about Colin’s disappearance?”
“At the moment I can’t be sure what I think about anything. All of this may have nothing to do with Colin.” Her breath caught, as though she had been dealt a fresh blow. “Except that it means Colin is—”
“My brother.”
“Charles—Dearest—”
“I always told Edgar our family are a direct descendant of the House of Atreus. I never realized how spot on I was. No, I’m wrong.” His voice cracked. It seemed to have slipped beyond his control. “Clytemnestra slept with a pair of brothers.”
“Cousins.” Melanie’s own voice was harsh and unsteady. “Aegisthus was Agamemnon’s cousin.”
“So he was. There must be some mythological heroine who slept with a father and son. Damnable how a classical education deserts one just when it would come in handy.”
“Phedre. But she didn’t sleep with the son, she only lusted after him. And no, I never played her. I was too young, and my father didn’t care for Racine.”
“Pity. You’d have been good at it.” He put his hands over his face. “Jesus. Sweet, bloody Jesus. I don’t know—” He drew a breath. His chest hurt as though it had been pummeled black and blue. “Colin will always be my son, before anything else. Nothing can change that.”
He said nothing more for the rest of the drive, and she followed suit. They went straight to O’Roarke’s suite. Charles shouldered past O’Roarke’s manservant even more roughly than he had Velasquez’s. They waited in the sitting room by the light of a single lamp. A few moments later O’Roarke came in, carelessly wrapped in his dressing gown, with no shirt beneath it, his hair standing on end.
He cast one quick look from Melanie to Charles. “What’s happened? Is it the boy?”
Charles heard Melanie draw in her breath, then deliberately check herself and cede the reply to him. “Not directly,” he said. “That is, we’re here to find out how it concerns Colin. My brother just told me that you’re my father.”
O’Roarke’s eyes widened in rare surprise. He swallowed once, started to speak, bit back the words. He smoothed his hand over his hair, scraping it back from his temples. “I didn’t realize Captain Fraser knew.”
Charles studied the bony, ascetic face, searching for an echo of himself. “It’s true, then?”
“Oh, yes.” O’Roarke moved to the fireplace and stirred the banked coals. “At least your mother led me to believe so. And I’ve always fancied I could see something of myself in you.”
Charles crossed the room in two strides, seized O’Roarke by the arm, and pushed him into a wing chair. “You sick bastard, how long had you been planning this?”
O’Roarke met his gaze without shying away. “I didn’t plan it at all.”
“No? You just happened to get Melanie pregnant and then married her off to your son?” Charles gripped the arms of the chair and leaned over O’Roarke. “I don’t give a damn about my own birth, but I want to know what this means for Colin.”
“Believe it or not it has nothing to do with Colin. Save that—” O’Roarke drew a breath. “Having watched over you from your birth—albeit often from a distance—I knew I could trust you with Melanie and her baby.”
“Don’t.” Charles tightened his grip on the chair arms until he could feel the damask give way beneath his fingers. “I may be the most gullible fool since Malvolio, but don’t expect me to believe you wasted one minute thinking about Melanie and the baby.”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything, Fraser. But it happens to be the truth.”
“You set Melanie to spy on me.”
“Loyalty is always a matter of choices. Surely a career in diplomacy and politics has taught you that.”
“Your only loyalty is to yourself, O’Roarke.” Charles drew back and stared into the gray eyes Melanie had said were like his own, seeking answers. Throttling the man would be satisfying but would get him nowhere.
Melanie was staring at O’Roarke. “How could you?” Her sterling and crystal tones gave way to the scrape of iron and rock. “I was carrying your child. Our child. How could you marry me off to your son and not tell me?”
O’Roarke looked past Charles at her. “It would have created unnecessary complications.”
She walked up to him and slapped him hard across the face. “My God, Raoul, you were playing games with all of us from the first.”
He took the slap without flinching. “But of course. I never pretended otherwise,
Charles watched him, noting the telltale tremor in his hand, the rattle of the decanter jerking against the glasses. It seemed there were ways in which he took after O’Roarke. “You’re saying it’s purely coincidence that Carevalo is holding my son and using you for an emissary and that you happen to have…fathered both me and Colin?”
“I wouldn’t quite call it coincidence.” O’Roarke walked across the room and set two of the whiskies down where Charles and Melanie could reach them. “I had nothing to do with your being sent to retrieve the ring seven years ago, but if you hadn’t been my son—if I hadn’t known all I know about you—I doubt I’d have been so quick to urge Melanie to accept your offer of marriage.”
Melanie looked at him as though he had stripped the skin from his face to reveal another person beneath. “For the past two days I’ve been telling Charles that I knew your limits, that there were certain things you wouldn’t do. I don’t believe that anymore.” She glanced at the whisky. “And getting me drunk won’t change things.”
“It takes more than half a glass of whisky to get you drunk, Melanie.” O’Roarke returned to the table, picked up the third whisky, and took a swallow. “I’m not claiming to be proud of my actions. I don’t know that I’d do what I did again. But then I rarely play a hand the same way twice.”
“Is that what we are to you?” Melanie said. “Charles, Colin, me? Playing cards?”
“No.” O’Roarke looked into her eyes. “You were pregnant. I couldn’t marry you myself, you didn’t want me to send you back to France, you wanted to keep the baby. Charles offered you marriage.”
“And as his wife I was ideally positioned to spy for you. Don’t deny that that was why you leapt at the opportunity.”
“Of course. But as I said, I’d had knowledge of Fraser from the time he was a child. When he was a boy, I knew him rather well.” He glanced at Charles. “I don’t know that you…”
A hand offering ices, advice about how to hold a fishing pole, the treasured copy of
For an instant, the same memories seemed to flicker in O’Roarke’s eyes. “I’m glad to hear it.” He looked back at Melanie. “I felt—rightly, I think—that I knew the sort of man Charles was. If I hadn’t, I’d have argued against the marriage.”
Melanie watched him with drawn brows and an angry mouth. “So the fact that he was your son made it easier? Sleeping with a father and son is—”
“A sin in the eyes of a church you have no use for.”
Melanie drew a sharp breath and turned her head away. O’Roarke reached out his hand to her, then let it fall.
“And my mother?” Charles said. His voice shook despite his best efforts.
“Your mother was a fascinating and troubled woman, Charles. When I was young I would have said I—” O’Roarke shook his head. “That’s neither here nor there. We were lovers off and on for a decade or so, though the affair was at its most intense in the year before you were born.” He cleared his throat. “There was no question of not pretending you were Kenneth Fraser’s son, of course. Your mother was reckless, but there were certain risks she wasn’t prepared to run.”
“She told my brother the truth of my birth just before she put a bullet through her brain,” Charles said.
O’Roarke’s cool gaze wavered, like ice under a hammer blow. “Poor Elizabeth,” he said, in a voice so low
