“Miss Abbott…Abigail, please don’t cry.” A linen handkerchief so fine as to be translucent dangled before Abigail’s eyes. “You must not cry. I had my revenge. I killed the old devil, so nobody need ever cry for me again.”

She took the handkerchief, which was redolent of his exquisite scent. “You don’t fool me, my lord. Your father needed killing—my Quaker family would disown me for that sentiment—but I killed my mother, and I know taking the life of a parent is a difficult wound for a child to heal regardless of how it happens.”

Chapter Four

As a youth, Stephen had occupied himself with deciding which day had been the worst of his life. The day he’d killed his father had not made the list. The day his father had smashed his knee hadn’t either. At the time, a very young Stephen had shrugged it off as just another beating from old Jack Wentworth. Slower to heal and more painful than others, but all in a day’s suffering.

The day he’d fallen face-first into the grass of Berkeley Square while trying to manage two canes and deliver an ice to a viscount’s blushing daughter was on that list. So was the day Quinn had been marched to the scaffold for a murder he hadn’t committed. What had been Abigail Abbott’s worst day, and why did she weep for the company of an ill-mannered terrier she didn’t even own?

“Did you slip some rat poison into your mother’s gin?” Stephen asked, surely the least genteel question a gentleman had ever asked a lady.

She looked up from his handkerchief. “You laid your father low with rat poison? Very enterprising of you, my lord.”

Nobody had ever referred to Stephen as enterprising in quite those admiring tones. “I was lame, eight years old, and my sisters’ sole protection. Jack was making arrangements to…making arrangements for them I could not countenance. Quinn had gone off somewhere to earn coin, and I had to make do. Quinn was old enough to fend for us, but he lacked the legal authority to take us away from Jack. I remedied the situation as best I could.”

Nobody else outside the family knew this story. Duncan, Stephen’s cousin, had the basic facts, but Stephen didn’t discuss what he’d done with even his siblings. Better that his sisters not know how close they’d come to dwelling in hell itself, better that Quinn never learn of it.

“You saved your sisters’ lives,” Miss Abbott said. “And that is understating the matter.”

To hear the words spoken with such conviction, by a female as decent and estimable as Abigail Abbott, was unsettling.

“Tell me about your mother.” Stephen kept the query general rather than ask specifically how the lady had died.

“I killed her simply by being born. She survived a month past my arrival, but she never stopped losing blood.” Miss Abbott sniffed at Stephen’s handkerchief and bowed her head. “I was too big.”

Those four words held a world of sorrow and despair.