He removed his shirt and wiped his face, and looked with clear vision at the face pressed against the crystal panels.
Hart lost his footing. Shouting, his heart and stomach fell out from under him as he fell. He just managed to catch himself by both hands—two very tired hands.
Dangling there, shirtless, forty-five feet above the McQuoid family’s gardens, and sweat streaming down his back, Hart imagined how the headlines would read about the Duke of Hartwell’s untimely death.
And he knew beyond a doubt he was a changed man because he didn’t care what they—
“My apologies, Your Grace,” a cheer-filled voice called out to him.
Loud enough to wake the neighbors, and certainly the neighboring bedchambers.
Bloody hell. A cousin. “Don’t you have your own home?”
“Aunt Catherine’s home is my second home,” Lady Andromena explained as casually as if they were sipping teaacross a table in a parlor. “I—oh, just a moment.” She paused to speak to someone behind her.
He would have told her not to hurry back if his shoulders, biceps, triceps, muscles, and ligaments hadn’t been strained and screamed from the hell he’d put them through.
He couldn’t. He was going to die here.
Fleur. Think of Fleur. Seeing her. Getting to her. Telling her you love her and begging her to never leave you…
Digging deep, Hart let out a gasping shout and hauled himself until he was stomach down across the branch. Flakes of bark fell away.
Panting, he hung there—clung there, to be more exact—his arms wrapped around the rough branch, and watched those remnants of the tree that had served him well, flutter to the end of their story.
This, however, was only the beginning of his and—
Windows were thrown open, and voices came all at once.
“Your Grace!”
“Hartwell?”
“Hart?”
“Henry?”
But the “Henry” was all he heard. The shock, disbelief, confusion, and hope.
And she was all he saw—Fleur at the windowsill. Her fingers steepled in front of her mouth, attired in a modest white nightgown; her hair still damp and plaited, all ready for bed.
“You left.”
Here, Hart had an entire ride over and a lengthy climb to prepare his profession, and that’s what should steal from him.
Fleur cocked her head. “I…” She darted the tip of her pink tongue out. “Should I have stayed?”
Andromena flew over and joined Fleur at the window. Hands planted on the sill, she glared and answered for her cousin. “Why? So you could flaunt Lady A—”
Fleur slid her palm over the other woman’s mouth, and then, after she had her silenced, moved her out of the way. “Henry, what do you want?”
“I’d say a shirt and jacket,” Lady Cassia unhelpfully supplied her younger sister with the answer.
At leastananswer. Did none of the married McQuoids have a home of their own?
Hart’s throat worked uncontrollably. “I imagined this going differently, Fleur,” he said. Releasing his death grip, he got to his feet.
Gasps came from all the occupied windows.
