Where Serpents Sleep by C. S. Harris

to blame for what happened. He did nothing that men of his station haven’t done for a thousand years or more. He took a mistress and begat a child upon her. How could he have foreseen what we would become to each other?”
     
     
    Sebastian glanced up from splashing brandy into two glasses. “You defend him? He would have taken you from your mother if she hadn’t fled him.”
     
     
    “He meant it for the best.”
     
     
    “For whom?”
     
     
    She didn’t answer him. Hendon always did what was best for the St. Cyr lineage and the St. Cyr legacy. Anything and anyone else was expendable. She said, “You’re not angry with Hendon because of what he would have done to my mother.”
     
     
    “I’ve been angry with Hendon for years. This is just one more lie on top of so many others.”
     
     
    “Not a lie, exactly, Sebastian. He didn’t know I was his child. None of us did.”
     
     
    “Yet he knew you existed, and he never said a word. It rather begs the question, doesn’t it? What else hasn’t he told me?”
     
     
    Sebastian held out her glass. She took it, being very careful not to allow her fingertips to brush his. She said, “You haven’t found your mother yet?”
     
     
    For half his life, Sebastian had believed his mother dead, the victim of a boating accident the summer he was eleven. In truth, she had merely fled her loveless marriage—and abandoned Sebastian, her only surviving son. Another lie his father had told him. He said, “I believe she’s in France somewhere. The war makes searching for her . . . awkward.” He took a slow sip of his brandy and felt it burn all the way down. “You have forgiven Hendon for what he did to your mother?”
     
     
    “I was angry with him at first. Yet I’ve come to believe his love for Arabella was genuine. I see it in his face when he speaks of her. His voice softens. His eyes come alive.”
     
     
    Some flicker of emotion must have shown on Sebastian’s own face because she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” and he knew she’d misunderstood entirely the pain and envy she’d glimpsed.
     
     
    “I’ve known most of my life that there was no love in my parents’ marriage,” he said. She went to stand beside the bowed window overlooking Brook Street, her head turned away, and for one stolen moment he lost himself in looking at her. “Do you see Hendon much?” he asked.
     
     
    She swung to face him again. “He comes to the theater. Sometimes we go for a drive in the park.”
     
     
    “I don’t imagine Amanda likes that,” said Sebastian. Amanda, Lady Wilcox, was Sebastian’s other sister—his legitimate sister.
     
     
    “She knows the truth,” said Kat.
     
     
    “And acknowledges you no more than he.”
     
     
    “How can either of them acknowledge the truth when all the world knows I was your mistress?”
     
     
    Painful words. Words that brought back the shame of all they had once done together. Yet with the shame came such a rush of every feeling Sebastian had spent the last eight months trying to ignore that he shuddered.
     
     
    She set aside her brandy untouched. “I can understand your anger. You think I am not angry? But to blame Hendon for it is not right. He did not do this to us.”
     
     
    He drained his own glass and set it down with a snap. “Yet he somehow managed to get what he wanted, didn’t he?” Sebastian had loved Kat since he was twenty-one and she just sixteen. For all those years Hendon had fought and schemed to prevent his son and heir from marrying beneath him. In a sense it was ironic that the key to the destruction of their love had been there all along, if only he’d known. “You think the fact that it is—” Sebastian realized what he’d been about to say and began again. “You think the fact that it was wrong for me to want you should somehow make the loss of you easier to bear? Well, it doesn’t.”
     
     
    He was surprised to see a sad smile light up her eyes.