“I will not promise you anything,” she said.
He drew in a long breath. “I deserve that. But…embrace this woman that you have become. She is all that I always knew you could be.”
Victoria looked at her father and wished that she could yell at him angrily, but she could not. And as he stepped up into his coach, he took one look back at her.
“I love you, Victoria, poorly perhaps. Poorly indeed. Perhaps I’m a terrible father, but I love you, and that is true.”
He shut the coach door behind him.
Without a backward glance, he banged on the roof, and off he rolled.
And she stared at the coach disappearing into the city.
He loved her?
He had arranged her marriage to the Duke of Chase.
He had pushed his other daughter into a corner.
He was a terrible man.
He had made horrible decisions, but in his own, twisted way, he had wanted them to be happy and to have more. She couldn’t hate him now, but she was disappointed that he had not trusted her more, that he had not trusted his daughters to be able to find their own way without his manipulations and machinations.
Still, he was right. She was a powerful woman, and she had every determination to wield that power as best she could.