“Please,” she begged. “Don’t. I cannot.” If she spoke about what had passed, she would crumple up like a collapsing sun.
His expression grew shuttered. “Of course, my lady. Let me help you make your escape.”
After he’d seen her bundled up and loaded into a carriage, Fleur sat and stared out the window at the passing landscape.
What did she do now?
Chapter 21
“There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.”
~Lord Byron
Long after Fleur vanished, Hart’s pulse pulsated in his skull, violent enough to kill. It felt as if it already had.
His chest heaved from the broken breaths he tried to fill his lungs with.
Some dastard had gotten Fleur with child.
The horror refused to fade, no matter how often he repeated it.
Between the bile roiling in his stomach and the overwhelming weight bearing down on him, Hart didn’t know whether he was going to cast up his accounts or break under the force of his rage.
Don’t dwell on Fleur with someone else, he silently commanded himself. Focus entirely on the lady’s betrayal right here and now.
Hart closed his eyes and inhaled, striving to steady himself—failing.
It had all been a facade. She was as deceptive as the others, yet she kept that look of trust. It was infuriating—enough to make Hart question himself. Even now, her ghostly gaze still tricked him into faith.
Yet he wanted to believe her. For too many reasons—most too foolish to name. He wanted her all the same.
Christ. She was going to be a mother…of some other man’s child. Not you. Someone else. A rival who beat Hart to the woman he longed for.
And she had tried to pass that child onto him.
Ah, God, Fleur. Why? Why? Why couldn’t she have been the one real thing in his life?
Maybe because she was desperate. She was young and had been, until that masquerade, innocent, and even after, she still was. What future lay ahead for her? What fate? None that was good or respectable. Dread coiled in his stomach.
She’d be prey for all the rakes.
Shunned.
Just as I did…
Shame bowed his shoulders.
“Oh, Fleur,” he whispered, his voice catching. Perhaps he had only some of it right. Maybe Fleur attempted to give her child Hart’s name because she believed he was a friend.
Instead of telling her he understood the reason she did what she had, and proving he’d stand by her, he’d said the ugliest things. He was a bloody, jealous fool. There he had it. He could admit it to himself and be humbled by it.
Hart rubbed his throbbing temples, realizing that even now, frustration and guilt mingled within him. He was defending her, sacrificing himself in the process.
“…Trust no one, Hart. Trust women even less…”
The late duke’s lessons plagued him, driving him to the brink—or perhaps it was the unbearable reality that Fleur was gone forever.
“Stop,” he hissed.
