The Fairy Tale Bride

by Kelly McClymer

  * * * * *

  "I owe your mother, and I owe you, so I'll stay."

  His father had been drinking. His American habits were more pronounced when he was foxed, Simon found. "Your mother is a stubborn woman."

  Simon felt only relief as he glanced at Miranda and wondered if he should ask her to leave them alone. "I believe I know that well."

  Peter watched him from his position slumped in a chair by the fire. "We've got a problem, Simon."

  Simon tightened his arm around Miranda's waist and drew her closer. She smiled at him, but her expression was troubled. "I have none, Your Grace. You solved them all for me."

  "Wrong. " Simon found himself slightly uncomfortable with this new, hardheaded Peter. "You're still my little brother to the world. I don't plan to marry again, or outlive you. Not by a long shot. So you've got some time to sort yourself out and take your responsibilities like a man. I don't like it. But like I said, I owe you. And I owe your mother."

  "Take her as a lover, then. She has had her share."

  Miranda shot Simon a look filled with disappointment, and he warmed with shame. Why he said it he could not explain, even to himself.

  Peter sat up, incensed. "Your bitterness is out of place, Simon. Your mother was blameless. Sinclair, our father, and I were the fools."

  "Your father, not mine."

  The older man met his gaze steadily. "I wanted to explain to you why you are truly Sinclair's son, and not my own, but I was distracted by the news I was going to be a daddy again." He sighed. "But it's time for you to face the fact that you are a true heir as no future son of mine could ever be."

  "I do not need to accept a lie as fact."

  Peter lurched over to the desk and shuffled through the papers on the desk and tossed something to Simon. "Read this."

  It was the envelope, seal broken. The one meant only for the eyes of the duke. "This is not for me to read. He told me you did not understand the Kerstone motto. I presume that is why he was so careful to drum it into my head."

  "Honor and truth in all." Peter's lips twisted with distaste. "It is as much a part of me as the Watterly blood."

  "It could not be."

  "Read it. Until then, you do not know enough to judge."

  "Who are you to tell me this?"

  "His son." Peter looked away, his hands massaging wearily at his neck as he looked away out the windows and onto the lawn where Kate, Betsy, and Jeanne, Peter's youngest daughter, were playing blind man's bluff with the older girls. "His other son."

  "No son would have done what you did. I don't want you to think I hold my mother blameless, but —"

  Peter's eyes blazed with anger. "Your mother was completely innocent in this. She was the victim of a controlling old man and a young man with much too much self-conceit."

  "I cannot excuse her for what she did, and you should not either."

  Miranda intervened at last, with a gentle pull on his arm. "Look out there, Simon." She pointed to the window. "Look at those girls, laughing, playing games as children should."

  Simon looked, reluctantly, just in time to see Juliet captured by a blindfolded Jeanne.

  "Your mother was younger than Juliet when she married."

  Simon had known her age — fifteen — at her marriage, but he had not stopped to imagine her as a girl, like Juliet. It was impossible even to imagine. "I doubt she ever stopped to play a game. She was never as young as those girls out there."

  Peter's hushed tone disputed that contention. "Oh, yes, she was. So very young and so very serious about her new role as duchess. She had no idea what my father wanted of her. I doubt he knew, at that point, either. He had not thought beyond a child to the years of marriage ahead."

  "Why did he not have you marry her, then?"

  "Control, Simon. Control. I was entering a dangerous profession, and he did not want to risk having to fight my widow for control of the fate of any child of mine."

  That certainly meshed with what Simon knew of Sinclair Watterly. He disliked defiance and used every weapon necessary to demolish it at the first sign.

  Simon took the wrinkled, water-stained envelope that had remained sealed since he received it. Now broken, the Watterly seal sat above a strong bold hand declaring, Honor and Truth in All.

  Another fairytale, he thought bitterly. There were three pages enclosed, in three separate hands: Sinclair's, the Eighth Duke; Mortimer's, the Fifth Duke, and Geoffrey's, the Third Duke. Three generations. He read, Miranda's body warm next to his, lending him strength to face this last hurdle.

  After a long silence he looked up to see Peter staring into the fire. He knew Sinclair's sin, and now he knew the reason for it. An unbroken line from father to son. It was a lie. Mortimer had been injured in a hunting accident, unable to father children, and had taken his dying sister's bastard to raise as his own son. Geoffrey had been afflicted with syphilis and had conspired with his younger brother to impregnate his unknowing wife.

  "Do you expect me to be comforted by the fact that we both spring from a line of men who do not know the meaning of honor?"

  "They made sure the blood was true, and that was what they honored most."

  "I cannot be like them. I will not."

  "I understand. I tried — and failed."

  Looking into the pain-shrouded gaze of his father, Simon suddenly felt understanding flood through his heart. He knew why Peter had never come back. It had not been cowardice but honor. The same twisted Watterly honor that held him here against his will.

  He stood watching his father. The man was willing to give up the woman he loved, the child he wanted. For what? Not for the same reason the men in the letters had. Only to restore Simon's own sense of honor.

  Peter rubbed a weary hand across his sun-weathered skin. "You're going to have to succeed me, Simon. I'm sorry. I hope you can reconcile it in the years to come. But I don't see any other way. We're both the true heirs to their tradition."

  "No." Simon stood and went close to the fire.

  "We're not their heirs." He tossed the generations old papers into the fire and watched them burn.

  In the flare of light, his eyes met Peter's. "We're beginning a new tradition."

  Peter eyed him warily, as if he was afraid to dare believe that Simon meant what he said. "And what tradition is that?"

  Simon crossed to where Miranda still sat, watching him with hopeful eyes. "The tradition of the happy ending."

  Peter allowed a small smile to soften the rough-hewn planes of his face. A thread of doubt crossed the older man's features. "Are you sure you can live with this? Because once I marry that woman and take her away, I'm never coming back."

  "Honor and Truth in all. Our family thought to circumvent that motto to keep the bloodlines passing from father to son. We won't pass on that legacy. Instead, we'll begin a new generation who'll learn what's most important in life."

  Miranda rose to face him and asked softly, "What's that?"

  "A happy ending, of course — and no more lies."

  "Except that Peter Watterly is dead." Peter's eyes darkened.

  "Is that a lie?" Simon could not break his gaze from his wife's dawning joy.

  He shook his head slowly. "No. Peter Watterly died a long time ago."

  Simon looked away from Miranda's joyful gaze for a moment. "Yes, he did. And Peter Watson has a woman who loves him. I'd have to be a fool to stand in the way of his happy ending." He held his wife close. "Or my own."

  Miranda whispered to him, softly. "To new traditions, and happy ever afters."

  He replied in her ear, "To sons or daughters as they may come — no more will the Duke of Kerstone put a cuckoo in his nest to satisfy pride. Honor will out, now and forevermore."

  "Not love?" she teased.

  He held her against him, tightly, and yet without binding her so that she could not breathe. "Of course. How else can one have a happy ever after, if not with love?"