“You lived there?” He sounded surprised.
Of course he was. It was a showpiece. A far cry from the tiny row house where her mother took in travelers to help pay the mortgage.
“Da spent a lot of money fixing it up. It made him popular in the village, hiring local builders and such. Mum was his maid. He fell in love, no surprise. She was twenty to his thirty-eight. When she became pregnant with me, she moved into the house proper. We lived like a real family, if you overlooked the fact he had another family in England. Most people pretended to, since their livelihoods depended on his keeping the house open.”
She risked a glance at him, dabbing under her nose as she did.
He was listening, probably wondering where she was going.
“He promised Mum the house, but that didn’t happen. It belonged to his ‘real’ family. When he died, they sent a lawyer, told us the property was part of the titled holdings and evicted us.”
“How old were you?” He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to recall if she’d told him this before. “There were four of you, by then? And your mother?”
She shrugged and nodded. “I was almost twelve.”
“That’s a long time to be a man’s pretend wife. Your mother didn’t contest it?”
“How? She sold her jewelry to buy groceries. She wasn’t even allowed to keep the car he’d given her. The whole village turned their backs on us because she’d been living in sin. The only people who were kind to us were the staff we’d lived with at the house. They helped her find a room over a carriage house. We shared it for two years until I was able to start working and help with rent.”
She blew her nose.
He was completely unreadable, arms folded, only the penetrating glacier-blue of his eyes moving as he searched her expression, filing this new information into his mental database.
“All five of us in one room with a single hot plate and no refrigerator or even a proper bath, just a toilet and a sink with a curtain. No one at school would talk to us. Mum had to ride the bus into the next village to work and even then it was only washing dishes and doing laundry for a hospital. Even waiting tables was impossible. People were horrid to the bunch of us for years.”
“Like that woman at the hotel,” he ventured. “Why didn’t you move?”
“To where? With what money?” She came to the heart of her story. “I tried to tell you in the hospital that I wasn’t in your class. I should have tried harder, obviously, but I really hate talking about it.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, stemming the pressure underscoring her eyes. “It’s so humiliating. But I should have been honest. Pretending I’ve risen above it makes me the trash they called me. Now it’s all going to come out downstairs, when Diega tells everyone Thomas Shelby is my half brother.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
CESAR WASN’T USED to being angry. Not at this level. If he’d thrown tantrums as a toddler, they’d been reasoned out of him by the time he had made permanent memories of his earliest self. Yes, he had moments of frustration and irritation. He had a low tolerance for incompetence, disliked people who played politics and was never happy if his brother happened to win against him at anything.
The most incensed he’d been as an adult had been waking to the infuriating loss of a week and the long recovery his injuries demanded. Still, he’d kept that to merely a lousy mood that had clung stubbornly right up until, hell, he supposed it had finally started to dissipate sometime between holding his son for the first time and necking with Sorcha in the solarium.
But even as miserable as he’d been stuck in the hospital, staring down a marriage he didn’t want, he’d kept his cool.
Not tonight.
Sorcha worked hard. He knew few people who worked as hard as she did with as few complaints. Her work ethic was only surpassed by the quality of her work, which was why he’d always respected her.
He’d seen how modestly her family lived, too. He had known pretty much from the start that she sent money home and knew she was still squeezing funds for them from her savings. He had padded the account he’d set up for her to ensure she could keep helping out at home without denting anyone’s pride. He admired her even more since their marriage, now that he’d seen how far she’d come from her disadvantaged beginning to the position she’d held with him.
And she was kind. Warm and cheerful and never one to strike back at rudeness with equal harshness. He liked to keep the pressure on. Not everyone responded well to that. Aside from the occasional dark look, she’d always sucked up his demands with a smile.