Now, this was rather interesting. His sister blushed, and with a pointed look from their mother, she excused herself from the room. Simon stood, went to the sideboard, and poured himself some brandy into a glass. He suspected he might need the fortification.
“She was your soiled dove,” she said, her lips shaped in a moue of distaste.
His gut tightened. “My mistress?”
A flush of angry embarrassment colored her cheeks. “Yes, and it is rather distasteful to have this conversation. I am shocked she had the temerity to approach you so publicly. The very idea of it is too brazen to contemplate.”
He’d kept a mistress. The awareness of it felt odd and most certainly out of character. As a second son with little prospects, how had he kept a mistress? The viscountess stood and came over to him, surprising Simon when she poured a glass of sherry and took several sips. His mother never drank.
“You ended whatever agreement you had with that…woman before you went off to war.”
Instantly, Simon knew his mother did not speak the truth and that surprised him. He did not know of a time when they had lied or hidden truths from each other. Theirs was a relationship of trust and mutual love with respect. That she would be dishonest had a wary chill chasing down his spine.
“Do not lie to me, mother,” he said with chilling softness. “I should be able to trust you and Vanessa with helping me recover those missing times.” Almost three years of his life were blank. Three bloody years. Sometimes it was truly too much to contemplate.
His mother narrowed her eyes and said, “I dearly hoped you would not remember that woman. I thought it a blessing in disguise that you had forgotten her. It should also prove to you that she was not important in your estimation. If you will excuse me, I promised to call upon Lady Katherine’s mother. I daresay Lady Katherine should be the only lady in your thoughts.”
His mother swished from the room, her feathers clearly ruffled. Simon knocked back his drink, a thoughtful frown on his face. Had Miss Fanny Fairbanks truly been his mistress? The idea seemed far-fetched. Colin Fairbanks had been an acquaintance he respected. Simon would not have seduced his younger sister and not had the decency to offer marriage afterward.
Perhaps he had been attracted to her wild beauty. Perhaps…
Simon stumbled as an illicit memory rocked through him, demolishing the idea of perhaps. It was her, naked and splayed lasciviously atop a chaise longue, her expression sweetly provocative as she beckoned him forward with a finger. Then the taste of her exploded on his tongue, the feel of her plump folds on his lips, the sound of her moans and passionate cries echoed in the air around him.
The glass in his hand shattered, the sharp fragments cutting him in several places on his palm.
“My lord!” a young servant girl cried, hurrying over.
Simon barely heard her, desperately trying to follow the thread of those memories, mentally clasping them and drawing them close. Frustration clawed up inside him when they vanished like wisps of smoke.
A few days ago, he had not known Frances Fairbanks. He had agreed to an engagement with a close family friend, and he had decided to step forward without worrying about the past. He felt it deep in his gut that the past, which had seemed so damn elusive, would now come back to haunt him until he unraveled it. And that haunting would come in the form of blue eyes paired with the sweetest laugh he’d ever heard. Even if that laugh had been in his dreams.
Bloody hell.