A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

by Sophia James

  She nodded her head in order to underline such a truth.

  Her own heart was beating so fast and strong she could see the motion of it beneath the thick woollen bodice of her blue-wool gown. Eleanor wondered if she might simply perish with the shock of it before she ever saw him.

  Sitting down, she took a deep breath, placing her head in her hands and closing her eyes.

  She needed to calm herself. This was the moment she had dreamed about for years and years and it was not supposed to be anything like this. She should be running down the stairs calling his name, joy in her voice and delight in her eyes.

  Instead she stood and found her white wrap to wind it tightly about her shoulders because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, there had been a hesitancy and a withdrawal between them on the last night they had been together.

  He’d seen her off, of course, in his carriage, but he had not acted then like a man who was desperate for her company.

  ‘Thank you, Eleanor.’ He had said that as he’d moved back and away from the kiss she had tried to give him, as if relieved for the space, his glance sliding to the ground.

  He had not even stayed to watch her as the conveyance had departed, the emptiness reflected in her own feelings of dread.

  So now, here, six years later she could not quite fathom where such an absence left her. What if she went downstairs now and saw this thought exactly on his face? Would her heart break again? Could she even withstand it?

  She had to see him. She had to find in his velvet-brown eyes the truth between them. There was a mistake, a misunderstanding, a wrongness she could not quite identify.

  Her feet were on the stairs before she knew it, hurrying down. A short corridor and then the library, the door closed against her. Without hesitation she pushed the portal open and strode through.

  Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was sitting on the wing chair by the fire and he looked nothing like how she remembered him.

  His clothes were dirty, his hair unshaped, but it was the long curling scar that ran from one corner of his eye almost to his mouth that she saw first.

  Ruined.

  His beautiful handsome face had been sliced in half.

  ‘Eleanor.’ Her brother had risen and there was delight in his expression. ‘Nicholas has been returned to us safely from all his years abroad in the Americas. He will be staying here at our town house for a time.’

  ‘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 t
he 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 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

  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.