“I don’t want to leave him. I should not have come.”

“I can understand that sentiment.” Vim led her down the steps as he spoke. “All my relations are about to descend, and I feel… ambushed, like I was lured here under false colors. I’m tempted to ride in the direction of Bristol rather than return to Sidling.”

“Is that what you did all those years ago? Rode for Bristol?”

His step didn’t falter as they moved across the frozen green toward the livery. “Have you asked your brothers about my past, then?”

“I have not. I’m asking you.”

Abruptly, it seemed the thing to do. If this was what made it impossible for Vim to settle down at his family seat, if this was part of what made any hope of a future with him a ridiculous wish, then she wanted to hear it, and hear it from him.

For a time, they walked in silence, and Sophie thought if there was something worse than a crying baby, it was the silence of a man figuring out how to explain why he’d never be gracing the neighborhood again.

“Let’s take a seat, shall we?”

He led her to a bench carved from a single oak tree trunk. The thing was huge and beautiful in a rough way. It had probably been there when Good Queen Bess had been on the throne.

“You’re sure you want to hear this?” He waited for her to choose her seat then came down on her left. “The tale quite honestly flatters no one.”

“Scandals usually don’t, but you said it wasn’t quite a scandal.”

She wasn’t at all sure she did want to hear an old and sordid tale, but she most assuredly wanted to hear his voice, to have a chance to study his features. In the bright, wintry sunshine, his eyes looked tired.

“Not a scandal. I was finishing up at university, trying to figure out how I was to go on in life.” He paused, and Sophie saw him glance at her left hand. She was wearing riding gloves, which did not provide a great deal of warmth.

Did he want to take her hand? To make a physical connection to her? She made a pretense of gathering her cloak a little more closely and moved so their sides touched.

“You were here for the holidays?” she asked.

“For the holidays, yes, but I was down here a lot that fall, because Grandfather was old enough that at any point, he might be taken from us. He was hale at the time, and there was speculation he and his fourth wife had finally succeeded where the second and third hadn’t been as lucky.”

Sophie remained silent. Old men siring babies wasn’t a subject she was equipped to converse on, not even with Vim.

“I became infatuated, Sophie.” Vim said softly. Sophie could not tell if he was being ironic. She feared he was perfectly serious. “At the hunt ball, the first of October thirteen years ago, I fell in love with the most beautiful, witty, kind, attractive woman in the shire, an innocent girl with the promise of all manner of pleasures in her eyes, and she accepted my suit. I was over the moon, ready to move mountains, willing to conquer pagan armies to impress my lady.”

“You were smitten.” She watched his lips moving, forming words that seemed to hurt him as much as they hurt Sophie. He was in all likelihood still smitten, and that was why he absented himself from his own home for years at a time.

“The fall assembly had passed, and we were to be married early in the New Year, so we’d had no opportunity to make an announcement. She’d asked me to wait until after Yuletide to speak to her father, but there was no young man more optimistic than I. My lady allowed me the occasional taste of her charms, but I esteemed her too greatly to fully anticipate our wedding vows. She was delicate in this regard, and I respected that.”

And what a lucky young lady she must have been, to have Vim’s affections at such an earnest and tender time of life. Sophie smoothed a hand down her skirts, wishing she’d never asked for this recitation.

“So imagine my chagrin, Sophie, when I took my handsome young self in my best courting finery off to one of the most prestigious holiday gatherings in the shire, and my lady’s father called for all to attend him, as he had an important and felicitous announcement to make. My chest filled with pride, for I was certain he was going to announce the impending nuptials and spare me an awkward interview.”

Vim paused, and Sophie watched as his glance scanned the green. He looked like he never wanted to see the place again.

“Her papa announced that she’d be marrying the Baronet Horton’s heir. Tony Horton was ten years my senior, in definite expectation of a title, and a man reputed to know his way under a woman’s skirts, if I might be vulgar. I could not believe her father had cast her into the arms of such a worthless bounder.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to call the man out, right there at the men’s punch bowl. I’d held my tongue until the prospective groom was among his confreres and away from the eyes and ears of the ladies. I accused him of poaching on an understanding, of enticing a gently bred lady with his charm and his expectations, and being the ruin of her happiness.”

“Plain speaking.” Egregiously plain speaking. Tony Horton’s family was well settled in the area, though his holding was not known to be particularly prosperous.

“I would have slapped him soundly before all and sundry, but the host of the gathering caught me by the arm and prevented the blow.”

“This is significant?”

“When a blow has been struck, no apology should prevent the duel, not if honor is to be maintained by both parties.”

“Men.”

His lips quirked, a fleeting hint of his smile. “Yes, men. The host made a joke of my outburst, said half the shire was going to go into mourning because Tony had taken my intended out of consideration, said young men were prone to such overreactions as mine, and with a few more cups of punch, I’d likely be falling in love with mine host’s best milk cow. The man was and is well respected, and the others were all too happy to follow his lead. They ended up toasting His Grace’s milk cow before I was hustled out of the room by three of my burlier neighbors.”

Oh, my goodness. “His Grace?” There were other dukes in Kent, several, in fact.

“Your father, Sophie Windham, His Grace, the Duke of Moreland. Your father was the one who heaped such ridicule and scorn on my head, made a laughingstock of me before my peers, and saw to it an engagement undertaken in bad faith obliterated one made in good faith. I’ve crossed paths with him since in Town, and it’s almost a greater insult that he treats me with great good cheer, as if a defining moment in my life meant nothing at all in his.”

Sophie felt physically ill. Her father, particularly as a younger man, had been capable of callous, calculating behavior but this crossed a line to outright meanness.

“You never married?”

He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle. “I’m English, Sophie. I always envisioned myself with an English bride to go with my English title and my English family, and yet, I’ve spent precious little of my adult life in England until recently. Then too, I was content to dwell in Cumbria when I had to be somewhere in the realm, but that option has been precluded now, as well.”

Sophie blinked in the bright sunshine, hurting for him and feeling a hopelessness close around her. Not only had Vim chosen to leave the area never to dwell here again, her own father had been the author of his difficulties.

“Sophie, are you ready to go?”

How long Westhaven had been standing there, Sophie did not know. Vim got to his feet and extended a hand to Sophie. “I’ll walk you to the livery.”

When she put her hand in his, he bowed over it then wrapped her fingers over his arm, as if they were strangers promenading in some drawing room.

“Looks like we might get yet more snow,” Westhaven remarked.

Neither Sophie nor Vim replied.