Nathan groaned. That meant he’d only gotten about four hours of sleep.
“Can we talk about this later?” he asked, sitting back in his chair. “I’d like to try and sleep a few more hours before I go out searching for Lord Cain again.”
“Ahh, so this does have to do with Lord Cain.” James’ jaw clenched. “That man is a snake. He somehow managed to slither his way out of prison, and now, he’s back in our lives, wreaking havoc again…”
“It’s worse than that,” Nathan said. “He devised a whole elaborate scheme to kidnap Rosalie. Of course, he doesn’t see it that way. He thinks he’s wooing her. But she despises the man,and he’s completely delusional about it. I’m sure that he will try to kidnap her again and convince himself that she has gone with him willingly.”
Phineas cracked his knuckles. “Not if we have anything to say about it.”
“That’s why I sent Rosalie away,” Nathan said. “For her own good. The closer she is to me, the more it incites Cain. And I can’t go looking for him when she’s in the house. It would frighten me too much to leave her alone. That’s why I sent her to yours, Phineas. I’m sorry if it was inconvenient.”
“Don’t get me wrong, she is always welcome with me,” Phineas said. “We love to have family stay with us, but it is getting a bit tense in the sitting room… the three sisters seem bent on some sort of scheme to seek vengeance against you.”
He shuddered, and Nathan almost laughed.So, Rosalie has found herself the heroine in a new kind of novel, I see. A revenge story.
Although another part of him also wanted to rage at what he had lost.
“It’s best if she hates me,” he forced himself to say. “Living with me would only cause her pain.”
James’s eyes narrowed. “So, thisisn’tjust about Lord Cain?”
Nathan cursed himself.Trust James to be able to interpret everything I say.“It is about Lord Cain,” he said quickly. “But I also think that I am fundamentally not a good fit for Rosalie. She wants a very different kind of man, and ultimately, she would not be happy with me.”
“Did she say that?” James asked. “Or did you decide that for her?”
Nathan flushed. “I am doing this for her own good!”
“In my experience,” James said gently, “ladies like to decide for themselves what is for their own good. They don’t want their husbands deciding it for them.”
“And in my experience,” Phineas added, the look of irritation finally having given way to sympathy, “when a man pushes a lady away and says it’s for her own good, it is, in fact, usually because he is trying to protect himself from getting hurt.”
Nathan swallowed. At once, Rosalie’s words from the night before flashed before his mind:Idocare for him. In fact, I love him!Those words had filled him with the utmost terror. Was it possible that he had only pushed her away and claimed it was to protect her because he feared what would happen if she knew the real him?
Is it possible I fear that she will stop loving me?
But that was ludicrous… He was the Beast of Carramere! Nothing scared him!
And then he remembered the look on her face as he had packed her into the carriage and sent her off to the Eavestone house. Thathadscared him: the look of pain and hurt in her eyes. It had scared him to think that he could hurt someone he loved so much and that it might result in her loving him less.
“Maybe you did what you did to protect yourself against the pain of losing her,” James said wisely. “If you pushed her away, hurt her, and rejected her, then if she stopped loving you, you could point to that as the reason. It wouldn’t be because you’re unworthy of love; it would be because she was hurt by what you did to protect her.”
Nathan licked his lips. This hit him right where it hurt the most, and he had a terrible feeling that James was right.
“Well, what was I supposed to do?” he demanded, anger filling up the hole of sadness that was still inside of him. “You know my history, James! You know the things I’ve done! Was I supposed to let her find out about those and watch the love she has for be extinguished? No! It is better we break now before we both get deeper into this. The pain would be much worse down the road for both of us.”
James gave Nathan a long, searching look then he turned to Phineas. “Could you give us a few minutes alone?”
Phineas threw James a disgruntled look, set down the pitcher, and left the study. Only once the door was firmly closed behind Phineas did James speak.
“There is another option,” he said, his voice low and careful. “You could tell her the truth. The real truth, not the way you have twisted the truth in order to take all the blame.”
“The truth is that I am responsible for the deaths of my brother and father. The truth is that I welcomed my father’s death! I even hoped he would die.”
“You arenotresponsible!” James said, banging his fist down on Nathan’s desk. “But until you learn to let go of your guilt and accept that you are not to blame for your father’s sins, then you will continue to sabotage every good thing that comes into your life.”
“I—” Nathan began, but James cut him off.
“I know about pain. You know how much I hated my father. You and I were both cursed with evil fathers. But that does not mean that we carry the same evil inside of us. And it does not mean we have to spend the rest of our lives haunted by the things they did to us. You have a choice, Nathan. You can continue to carry your pain inside of you, and it can continue to push away everything good, or you can let it go and try to repair yourself and your relationships.”
