He settled his chin against the top of her head. His voice was thick and sleepy. “When I was twelve, my brother Bertram was born. My father rejoiced to have a healthy baby boy . . . a spare heir. He called me to his study and I thought he meant for me to share in the celebration. Instead, he told me what I’d sensed my whole life, but hadn’t had confirmed. He hated me because he saw me as a symbol of my mother’s sin.”

“I thought it might be something like that.”

“My mother was a good woman. Absolutely faithful to my father in marriage. The sin my father could never forgive her for happened before they were married. She conceived a child with the village blacksmith. That child was me. Her parents forced her to marry my father to cover the scandal, and because she was an heiress, and he was a duke. The match was socially acceptable.”

“And the village blacksmith . . . ?”

“Owen Blake. Her parents paid him a fortune to stay silent. He’s dead now. I visited his grave once. He never married, true to my mother’s memory to the last. I’m the only child he sired.”

“How did your father learn of the deception?”

“She gave birth to me too soon after the wedding. I had blue eyes, and my mother’s blond hair, but the timing was too suspicious. He became convinced that I wasn’t his son. It ate away at him, like a cancerous tumor. He beat my mother. And he beat me. He finally forced her to confess that she’d been with child when they married, but she never told him who my father was, no matter how hard he beat her. She was afraid that he’d kill her former lover. She only told me my true father’s name the night she died.”

Viola stroked his jaw, her heart breaking. “West, I’m so very sorry.”

“I was born into a loveless marriage. He vented his hatred and his anger on me and my mother. She was so sad all the time. I was always trying to make her more cheerful. And when Bertram was born, my father smiled upon her for the first time. But not upon me. He hated me, but he couldn’t disinherit me because I’d been born within wedlock. The only revenge he could take was to will away the settlement my mother had come to the marriage with—her lands, her fortune—and give it all to Bertram, instead of me.”

“But Bertram died. Didn’t it revert to you?”