"The old ones," Emrys said as he shook his head. He couldn't pretend to understand the logic of it. Certainly he'd never anticipated that his brother's reputation would cause any problems for him, or else he might have done something differently to prevent this problem. Perhaps he could have made the acquaintance of Miss Fawley's parents earlier and more firmly, and put in a little legwork to ensure they thought he was a nice, respectable sort instead of projecting his brother's bad behavior onto him. He couldn't do that now, though, and the sting of rejection was still too fresh for him to even properly want to. It seemed an awful lot of effort to go through for a girl he only had a mild interest in. She wasn't the love of his life; she was the lesser of all evils he'd found so far, and wooing parents as well as women seemed... tedious.

"Apparently a proclivity towards bastards is a familial trait," he said dryly, with a roll of his eyes. "Though you'd think it that was true someone else would have some. We've all had plenty of time," he pointed out. Both his sisters being unmarried at rather advanced ages meant that if they were having affairs it would be rather obvious. Granted, it was harder to say definitively that he and Daniel didn't have bastards lurking somewhere — since neither of them would have been quite so foolish as Trystan to acknowledge them — but on the balance, Emrys still thought he ought to get the benefit of the doubt. One wayward brother and two obviously chaste sisters should have worked out in his favor, but it clearly hadn't.

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