‘The Americas...?’ She could only stand and stare, for although Nicholas Bartlett had also risen he made no effort at all to cross the floor to greet her. Rather he stood there with his brandy held by a hand that was dressed with a dirty bandage and merely tipped his head.
In formal acknowledgement. Like a stranger might do or an acquaintance. His cheeks were flushed, the eyes so much harder than she remembered them being and his countenance brittle somehow, all sureness gone.
For a second she could not quite think what to say.
‘It has been a long time.’ Foolish words. Words that might be construed as hanging her heart on her sleeve?
He nodded and the thought of his extreme weariness hit her next. Lifting her hand to her heart, she stayed quiet.
‘Six years,’ he returned as if she had not been counting, as though he needed to give her the time precisely because the duration had been lost in the interim.
Six years, seventeen weeks and six days. She knew the time almost to the very second.
‘Indeed, my lord.’ She swallowed then and saw her brother looking at her, puzzlement across his face, for the hard anger in her voice had been distinct.
‘You welcome my best friend back only with distant words, Eleanor, when you seemed most distraught at his disappearance?’
God, she would have to touch him. She would have to put her arms around his body and pretend he was nothing and nobody. Just her brother’s friend. The very thought of that made her swallow.
He had not moved at all from his place by the fire and he had not put his glass down either. Stay away, such actions said. Stay on your side of the room and I shall stay on mine.
‘I am glad to see you, Lord Bromley. I am glad that you are safe and well.’
His smile floored her, the deep dimple in his un-ruined cheek so very known.
‘Thank you, Lady Eleanor.’ He held up his injured hand. ‘Altered somewhat, but still alive.’
The manner of his address made her sway and she might have fallen had she not steadied herself on the back rest of the nearby sofa. His dark brown hair was lank and loose, the sheen she remembered there gone.
‘I heard you had been married to a lord in Scotland and now have a child. Your brother spoke of it. How old is your daughter?’
Terror reached out and gripped her, winding its claws into the danger of an answer.
Without hesitation she moved slightly and knocked her brother’s full glass of red wine from the table upon which it sat. The liquid spilled on to the cream carpet beneath, staining the wool like blood. The glass shattered into a thousand splinters as it bounced further against the parquet flooring.
Such an action broke all thought of answering Nicholas Bartlett’s question as her brother leapt forward.
‘Ellie, stay back or you will cut yourself.’
* * *
Ellie? The name seared into some part of Nicholas’s mind like a living flame. He knew this name well, but how could that be?
He shook his head and looked away. He knew Jacob’s sister only slightly. She had been so much younger than her brother when he was here last, a green girl recently introduced into society. But she had always been attractive.
Now she was a beauty, her dark hair pulled back in a style so severe it only enhanced the shape of her face and the vivid blueness of her eyes. Eyes that cut through him in a bruised anger. He knew she had spilt the wine on purpose for he had spent enough years with duplicity to know the difference between intention and accident.
He’d asked of the age of her daughter? Was there something wrong with the child, some problem that made the answer untenable to her?
Jacob looked as puzzled as he probably did, the wine soaking into his carpet with all the appearance of never being able to be removed.
A permanent stain.
He saw Eleanor had sliced her finger in her attempt at retrieving the long stem of crystal that had once been attached to the shattered bowl. He wished she had left it for the maid who was now bustling around her feet sweeping the fragments into a metal holder.
‘I need to go and see to my hand.’ Eleanor’s words came with a breathless relief, the red trail of blood sliding down her middle finger as she held it in the air. ‘Please excuse me.’
She looked at neither of them as she scurried away.
When she was gone and the maid had departed, too, Jacob’s frown deepened. ‘Eleanor has been sad since the death of her husband. Widowhood weighs heavily upon her.’
‘How did her husband die?’
‘Badly.’ The same flush of complicity he had seen on his sister’s visage covered Jacob’s face.
Since he had been gone the Huntingdon family had suffered many tragedies. Jacob had told him of the loss of Ralph, the oldest brother and heir, and his father in a carriage accident. In the telling of it Nicholas had gained the distinct impression that Jacob blamed himself somehow for their loss.
His friends had their demons, too. That thought softened his own sense of dislocation. The hedonistic decadence of the club had not been all encompassing. Real life had a way of grabbing one by the throat and strangling the air out of hope. Perhaps no one reached their thirties without some sort of a loss? A rite of passage, a way of growth? A bitter truth of life?
He wished Eleanor Huntingdon might have stayed and talked longer. He wished she might have come forward and welcomed him back in the way her brother had directed. With touch.
* * *
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
