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She reached her room and threw herself upon her bed, face buried in her pillow as she screamed out her grief. Six years of sorrow and loss and hope and love. For nothing.
Six years of waiting for the moment Nicholas Bartlett might return with all sorts of plausible explanations as to why he’d been away for so very long and how he had fought hard to be back at her side again, his heart laid at her feet.
The truth of tonight had a sharper edge altogether. Was he just another rake who had simply made a conquest of a young girl with foolishness in her heart? She had offered him exactly what it was he sought—the use of her body for a heady sensual interlude, a brief flirtation that had meant the world to her. Had it meant nothing at all to him?
‘I. Hate. Him.’
He had looked at her like a stranger might, no inkling as to what had passed between them in his bedroom at the Bromley town house, when he had whispered things into her ear that made her turn naked into the warmth of him and allow him everything.
Swallowing hard, she thought she might be sick.
Lucy might never have the promise of a father now, a papa who would fold her in his arms and tell her she meant the world to him and that he would always protect her.
The family she’d imagined to have for years was gone, burst in the bubble of just one look from his velvet-brown eyes and his complete indifference. And the worst thing of all was that she would have to see him again and again both here in the house and at any social occasion because he was her only brother’s best friend.
That thought had her sitting and swiping angrily at her eyes.
She would not waste her tears. She would confront him and tell him that to her it was as if he was dead and that she wished for no more discourse between them.
Then she would leave London for Millbrook and stay there till the hurt began to soften and the fury loosened its hold.
She would survive this. She had to for Lucy’s sake. She had seen other women made foolish by the loss of love and dreams and simply throw their lives away. But not her. She was strong and resolute.
Taking in a shaky breath, she walked over to her writing desk and drew out paper. She would ask to meet him tonight in the summer house in the garden, a place they had met once before in their few heady days of courtship.
She would not be kind and filter out any of the ‘what had been’. She would throw his disloyalty in his face and make him understand that such a betrayal was as loathsome to her as it was hurtful. No. Not that word. She did not wish for Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, to know in any way that he had entirely broken her heart.
Chapter Three (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
He was exhausted. His migraine had dulled to a constant headache and all he wanted to do was to sleep.
Tomorrow he would clean himself up. He would have his hair cut, his beard shaved and find some clothes that were not torn and dirty. He would also see a doctor about his hand because it felt hot and throbbing and he was sure an inflammation had set in. But for now...sleep, and the bed in the chamber Jacob had given him on the second floor looked large and inviting.
A sheet of paper placed carefully on the pillow caught his attention and he walked across to lift it up.
Meet me at the summer house as the clock strikes one. It is important.
Eleanor Huntingdon
Surprise floored him. Why would she send him this? Even his own dubious moral code knew the danger in such a meeting.
Her writing was precise and evenly sloped, and she had not used her married surname. He could smell a perfume on the paper that made him bring the sheet to his nose and breath in. Violets.
A mantel clock above the fireplace told him it was already fifteen minutes before the hour she had stated. Pulling his coat from the one bag he had brought as luggage from the Americas, he let himself quietly out of the room.
* * *
Ten minutes later he saw her coming through the drifts of dirty snow, a small figure wrapped in a thick shawl that fell almost to her knees. The moon was out and the wind had dropped and in the silence all about it was as if they were the only two people left in the world.
Her face was flushed from cold as she came in, shutting the glass door behind her. In here the chill was lessened, whether from the abundance of green plant life or just good building practice, he knew not which. When she spoke though he could see a cloud of mist after each word.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘You thought I would not?’
She ignored that and rushed on. ‘I was more than surprised to see you tonight. I don’t know why you would wish for all those years of silence and no contact whatsoever, but—’
‘It was not intentional, Lady Eleanor. My memory was lost.’
Her eyes widened at this truth and she swallowed, hard.
‘I must have been hit over the head, as there was a sizeable lump there for a good time afterwards. As a result of the injury my memory was compromised.’
She now looked plainly shocked. ‘How much of it exactly? How much did you lose?’
‘Everything that happened to me before I disappeared was gone for many years. A month ago I retrieved most of my history but still...there are patches.’
‘Patches?’
‘The week before my disappearance and a few days after have gone entirely. I cannot seem to remember any of it.’
She turned at that, away from the moonlight so that all her face was in shadow. She seemed slighter than she had done a few hours earlier. Her hands trembled as she caught them together before her.
‘Everything?’
‘I am hoping it will come back, but...’ He stopped, because he could not know if this was a permanent state or a temporary one.
‘How was your cheek scarred?’
‘Someone wants me dead. They have tried three times to kill me now and I doubt that will cease until I identify the perpetrators.’
‘Why? Why should you be such a target?’
‘I have lived in the shadows for a long time, even before I left England, and have any number of enemies. Some I can identify, but others I can’t.’
‘A lonely place to be in.’
‘And a dangerous one.’
‘You are different now, Lord Bromley.’ She gave him those words quietly. ‘More distant. A harder man. Almost unrecognisable.’
He laughed, the sound discordant, but here in the night there was a sense of honesty he had not felt in a long, long time. Even his friends had tiptoed around his new reality and tried to find the similarities with what had been before. Lady Eleanor did not attempt to be diplomatic at all as she had asked of his cheek and his circumstances and there was freedom in such truth.
He felt a pull towards her that was stronger than anything he had ever known before and stiffened, cursing beneath his breath. She was Jacob’s younger sister and he could offer her nothing. He needed to be careful.
‘I am less whole, I think.’ His good hand gestured at his face. ‘Less trusting.’
‘Like me,’ she returned in a whisper. ‘Just the same.’
And when her blue eyes met his, he saw the tears that streamed down her cheeks, sorrow, anger and grief written all over her face.
He touched her then. He took her hand into his own to try to give the coldness some warmth. A small hand with bitten-down nails. There was a ring on the third finger, encrusted diamonds in gold.
‘Was he a good man, your husband?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Then I am sorry for it.’
At that she snatched her fingers from his grasp and turned. She was gone before he could say another word, a shadow against the hedgerows, small and alone.
Why had she asked him here? What had she said that could not have been discussed in the breakfast salon in the morning? Why had she risked such a meeting in the very dead of night just to ask of his health?
Nothing made any sense.
* * *
Everything was now dangerous.
Nicholas being here, the desperate people who were chasing him, the new man he had become at the expense of the one he had been.
She barely recognised him inside or out. He looked different and he sounded different. Bigger. More menacing. Distant. And yet...when he had taken her hand into his she had felt the giddy rush of want and desire.
‘Nicholas.’ She whispered his name into the night as she sat by the fire.
‘Amnesia.’ She breathed the word quietly, hating the sound of it.
Lucy had been her priority for all the years of their apartness. She had risked her social standing, her family’s acceptance and her future for her daughter and if there was even a slight chance that Nicholas could place her in danger then Eleanor was not prepared to take it.
He had said the perpetrators had attacked him three times already and had looked as though he expected a fourth or a fifth or a sixth. What was it she had heard him say to her brother just a few hours ago as she had over-listened to their conversation in the library?
‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you or your family...’
If she told him the truth about that week before he disappeared, would he want to be back in their lives? Did she want to risk telling him of their closeness, knowing so little about him? He was a stranger to her now, so perhaps she should wait to discover what kind of man he was before revealing a secret so huge it would change all their lives for ever.
These thoughts tumbled around and around in her mind, going this way and that. If he had just looked at her for a second as he used to, she knew she would have capitulated and let him know everything. But this new Nicholas was altered and aloof, the indifference in his eyes crushing.
Lucy was now her priority. As a mother she needed to make decisions that would protect her child. She had not told another soul about her relationship with Nicholas. Jacob had been distraught from the loss of his friend and she thought he might not cope with another heartbreak and scandal. She had never seen her brother so broken.
And so she had told her family nothing of the father and lover and instead, with their help, had removed to Scotland and away from prying eyes.
Goodness, those years had been hard, she thought, and shook her head. She had been so lonely she might have simply died, there in Edinburgh in the house Jacob had set her up in waiting until she could return to Millbrook for the birth of her child. A terrible secret, a dreadful scandal and all the hope of what could have been disappeared as completely as Nicholas Bartlett had.
Blighted by her own stupidity, she’d lived in sadness until the first look at the face of her daughter had banished any regret.
On her return she found Jacob had concocted a story of a husband who had died and that she was now a grieving young widow with a small child in tow. She had become Eleanor Robertson at the stroke of a pen, the name being a common and unremarkable one, though she never thought of herself as such and used Huntingdon when signing letters to anyone she knew well. Oh, granted, she realised that many people did not believe such a fabrication, but nobody made a fuss of it either. She was a duke’s daughter with land and money of her own and in the very few times she’d returned to the city she found the few friends she still did have to be generally accepting of her circumstances.
A fragile existence that only took the renewed appearance of Nicholas Bartlett to break it down completely. But this missing week seemed well established in his mind and he himself had said it had been a month since any recall had returned.
Which meant no other memories had crept back in. She did not know enough about the state of amnesia to have a certainty of anything, but tomorrow she would go to Lackington, Allen & Co. and look up the files under the medical section of the library. Knowledge would aid her.
Perhaps she could help him redefine his memory. But should she? Would her presence at his side, even in that capacity, put her own self into danger?
She needed to wait, she thought. She needed to see just how the next few days turned out in order to make an informed decision about her and Lucy’s future.
He did not wear his crested ring any more. He did not smile as he used to. She wondered if he was financially strapped with his hair and his clothes and his scuffed old boots. There had been talk of his inheritances passing on to his uncle given the number of years of his being away. Perhaps being presumed dead even negated legal rights to property?
Many had thought him dead, after all. She had heard it in the drawing rooms of society and in the quieter salons of the ton. The dashing and dissolute young Viscount Bromley’s disappearance was mourned by myriad feminine hearts and the gold coins he had lost in the seedier halls of London’s gambling scene had only added to his allure. He was now touted as a legend whose deeds had only been enhanced by the mystery surrounding him.
Eleanor could not even imagine him in society looking like he did now. No one would recognise him. People would pity him. The scar at his cheek, the injured hand and the uncertainty. He would be crucified within the hallowed snobbery of the ton!
How could she protect him?
By staying in London and being there to pick up the pieces, perhaps? By sending Lucy home to Millbrook House with her nanny and maids tomorrow until she was certain which way the dice tumbled?
Oh, God, now she was thinking at the opposite spectrum of what she had started to decide. Stay away from Nicholas entirely or try to protect him? Which was it to be? Which should it be?
Underneath her thoughts a small flame flared, then took and filled her whole body with gladness. These arguments were all academic because now he was alive to her again. Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was not dead. He was here and breathing, the past covering him like a dull shroud, but nevertheless still quick.
Everything was possible whilst life bloomed and her brother and his friends would not desert him. She knew that from what Jacob had said. Placing her hands together she prayed.
‘Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you...’ Thessalonians again. She murmured the scripture into the silence with an emotion that she found both comforting and worrying.
Tonight she would dream of him just as she had done a thousand times since he had disappeared, his arms around her body and his warm lips covering her own.
But this time it would be different for he was no longer just a ghost.
* * *
Frederick’s carriage collected him the next morning well before the luncheon and when he arrived at the home of the Challengers in St James’s Square, Nick understood just how happy his friend was these days.
Georgiana, Fred’s wife, was gracious and welcoming even with the house in an uproar as it made itself ready for the evening’s entertainment.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Lord Bromley.’ A real smile touched her blue eyes and although she did not look at his scar, she did not look away from it either. ‘I have heard much about you for Frederick has spoken of you so very often.’
‘I hope he concentrated on my good qualities rather than the bad ones.’ He tried to keep his tone light.
‘The wildness of youth is never easy, I fear, and often misrepresented, but rest assured my husband has missed you.’
In such wisdom Nick detected that Georgiana’s life might have had its own complexities and he wondered about her story.
* * *
Half an hour later when he and Fred were alone in the library and a drink had been poured, Nick put his head back against the leather rest of a large wing chair and took in breath.
‘Your wife has the knack of making this all look easy,’ he said finally. ‘A house of things being both interesting and alive, but without the chaos of your upbringing? Where did you meet her?’
‘I first saw her at Vitium et Virtus late one night when she was auctioning off her virginity to the highest bidder, wearing nothing more than a silk concoction that was barely decent.’
