A Secret Consequence For The Viscount

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.’