"They are, but I have had no wife." He sighed, feeling his hopes once again draining away. It should get easier to accept rejection over time, and yet it never did. He had attempted to court a handful of women over the past few years, and when they heard what he was about to tell Vivian, they had all turned from him and made it clear that pursuance of his suit would not be welcome. "I thought someone would have told you-last night, surely, if not before."
"You are worrying me, Mr. Brent."
"My children's mother and I were not married. She was my mistress."
"Oh," she said softly, and he saw the hurt of disappointment in her eyes.
"The situation was nothing unusual, I am sorry to say. I am hardly the first man to sire children out of wedlock." The words sounded a miserable excuse even as he said them, as if he were trying to weasel out of his own past. "Sara and William are my heirs. They bear my name, and any woman I marry would have to raise them as her own, beside any children we might have together."
It was that last point that was so unpalatable to gently bred women. Bastards beside their own offspring? Bastards, heirs along with their own children? He could hardly berate them for following dictates of society in which they had been schooled since birth. They could not help their inability to accept bastards into their care.
And he, loving Sara and William as he did, could not accept a woman as wife who would not love his children.
"What of their mother?" Vivian asked softly.
"She is somewhere in London, with a new protector. She broke off our affair shortly after William was born, and did not protest when I demanded the children." He shrugged, beginning to feel angry and defensive on behalf of his offspring. "She sends gifts on occasion, and visits them once or twice a year, although less frequently as time goes on."
"Did you love her?"
"I thought so for a time, but it was based on illusion. I saw her beauty and her charm, and nothing of who she truly was. I was young and stupid, but I would not have Sara and William pay any more of the price for my idiocy than they already must."
"It was… quite remarkable of you to claim them as you have."
"I am their father," he said, the simplicity of the statement his only way to express the strength of the bond he shared with them. "I could not leave them without my name, without my protection, to be raised by strangers or by a mother who paid them little care. And I will not wed a woman who cannot give them the love they deserve. Better that they remain motherless than be subject to an unloving and jealous one."
He met Vivian's troubled gaze, holding it with his own. "Now you are wondering what you are doing here alone with me. I am no marriage prospect, as you were led to believe."
"You have surprised me, that is all," Vivian said, the weakness of her voice belying the words. She tried to smile. "I had been expecting to hear that you were divorced, or had beaten your wife, or that she had thrown herself from a window in despair of being married to you."
"That would have been better?"
"No, only more expected," she said, and to his astonishment her strained smile stretched to one more natural, as if she could almost see humor in the situation. Where, he did not know.
"I say, I don't look like a wife beater, do I?" he asked.
"I would not know. But perhaps you are someone a woman would throw herself from a window to avoid."
"I think some have tried."
"Perhaps if you made a habit of being more polite in your speech, a little more fawning and gracious, they might ponder longer before the leap."
"I prefer to have the truth laid out plain and unadorned, and let people think what they may." They resumed walking up the hill toward the ruins, skirting at least for the moment the subject of his past mistress. He did not fool himself into thinking it was an issue she could so easily overlook, and wondered what thoughts would eat away at her later, when she had time to think it through.
"Yes, you seem to have made a special effort to make yourself as blunt in your speech as possible."
"You are well matching me in that," he said, enjoying the banter, and willing to endure whatever arrows she chose to shoot at him as long as she kept talking.
"Only because it seems to be what you respond to best."
"Then you admit to humoring me, for your own ends."
"And what if I do? Don't we all do that?" she asked, slightly out of breath from the climb. Even through her breathing he could hear the trace of bitterness in her voice.
They had reached the top of the hill, and the heart of the ruins. He stopped so that she could catch her breath, and so that they could both take in the stone walls that rose and tilted and tumbled around them.
"It should have been time that did this," he said, gesturing to the stones around them, "not men."
"It does take away the romance," she agreed.
He led her in a slow circuit of the ruins, and paused with her at an opening in the stones that looked down over the valley and the village of Corfe Castle, gray against the green of the rolling hills.
"Do you always humor those around you?" he asked, not willing to let that bitterness escape unexplored.
"I haven't had much choice," she said, still looking down upon the view.
"It seems a hard way to live, always pleasing others and never yourself."
"One becomes trained in it," she said, "like a cook or a seamstress. It becomes one's work, for it is how one earns one's bread."
"That hardly seems to be a wise thing to admit."
"I am being honest about my dishonesty," she said, and looked up at him with confusion. "Only, with you, the more I seek to be as straightforward as you wish, the less I know if I am seeking to please you, or to please myself. I am growing to like saying what I think."
"And did you calculate that that is precisely the right thing to say to me?" he asked lightly, although his heart was thumping in his chest. It was so long since he had been with someone who could speak plainly to him of her thoughts. He had told himself for nearly two years that if he could find a woman who cared more for the honesty of her heart than for appearances, he would find a woman with whom he could share his life.
He wanted a wife. He wanted someone with whom to grow old, and watch their children grow. He wanted someone to pull into his arms at night, and sleep warm against him. He wanted someone who knew him completely, and whom he could know to the depths of her being. Life was not meant to be lived alone.
"Do stop thinking about yourself and what a grand matrimonial catch you are," she said, stepping away and finding a seat on a fallen bit of wall.
His lips parted in surprise, her words like cold rain against the warmth of his desires. They reminded him that he had not won her yet.
"Are you now thinking that you have created a monster?" she asked. "So be it. My nerves are worn from this, this…" She paused, waving her hand around. "Whatever you call this interplay between men and women. You don't have anything to eat, do you?"
"No, I'm sorry," he said, smiling to himself. Perhaps he should carry a pocketful of treats and win her that way. Would that do it?
She put her hand over her stomach and frowned. "That's all right. I don't think I'm as hungry as I thought." She cocked her head, staring at him in surprise. "Actually, the more I say what is on my mind, the less hungry I become. It seems quite beneficial."
"It's what I've come to believe."
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he fidgeted under her assessing gaze. He sat down beside her, if only to escape such frank scrutiny. She had managed to turn the tables neatly upon him, taking on the role of frank examiner that he was accustomed to having as his own.
"I think there's a touch of self-righteousness to your honesty," she said.
"Self-righteousness?" he repeated, appalled.
"Dear me, have I gone too far, and shared too much truth?"
"I am not self-righteous," he said in a priggish tone that seemed to prove the opposite.