Maggie wasn’t sure what to make of his reaction. At first, he’d seemed to be almost stunned. But now…Good lord, he was furious.

Nicholas had never had a close relationship with Jenny Seaton. He’d never even called her mother. Not that she’d deserved the title. She was ignorant and neglectful, notoriously loose with her favors, and prone to unpredictable mood swings that shifted between maudlin bouts of self-pity and shrieking rages during which she often struck her young son with whatever implements were close at hand.

But whereas injuries inflicted by Frederick Burton-Smythe could send Nicholas into a towering fury, injuries inflicted by his mother had affected him in an entirely different way. Maggie remembered one particular afternoon when, after suffering an awful beating from Jenny, Nicholas had come to their meeting place in the woods at Beasley Park, and laying his head in her lap, had wept with painful, racking sobs while she stroked his hair.

The memory provoked a peculiar feeling inside her. She felt for a moment that she might weep herself.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him about his mother’s death. Perhaps Jenny Seaton wasn’t worth even a second of his grief. But the Nicholas she’d known had desperately needed something from Jenny. Unconditional love, Maggie had always thought. That bottomless well of emotion that in the absence of feeling from his mother, Maggie had poured into Nicholas herself.

“I’m so sorry,” she said once more. And, undeterred by the coldness she saw in St. Clare’s face, she held out her hand to him, palm up in invitation. Again, she saw that peculiar shadow flicker across his hard features, but whatever feelings he had about her or his mother or the past didn’t prevent him from taking her hand and holding it protectively in his.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said huskily. “You might have died.”

Ah. So that was the source of his fury. Not the untimely death of Jenny Seaton, but that Maggie had risked her own life to care for her. “I did it for your sake.”

St. Clare shook his head. “No.”

“Jenny was all that I had left of you. The last link in the whole world. So, I sat with her. Holding her hand just as I’m holding yours now. I held it until she took her very last breath. I did it because of you. Because I loved you so very much.”

“Confound you, Maggie.”

Her heart gave a mad leap. It was far from a pronouncement of his true identity, but to her ears it might as well have been. She lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Nicholas—”

“No,” St. Clare said in a low, hard voice. He cupped the side of her face. “No more of this.”