“You would ruin me,” he spat. “Leave me with nothing? Have you no decency?”
“Father left you ten thousand pounds,” she reminded him, her voice calm. “That is hardly nothing.”
Haverleigh’s face twisted. “It’s not enough.”
Dorothea stepped forward, and Dominic instinctively tensed, his hand twitching at his side as if ready to intercept her. But she didn’t back down.
“I’m sorry, Matthew,” she said. “But I won’t apologize for receiving what was meant for me.”
With no warning, Haverleigh’s hand lashed out, striking her hard across the cheek.
“Dorothea!” Dominic roared, surging forward, but he stopped short when Dorothea, without hesitation, drove the heel of her palm into her brother’s throat.
Haverleigh staggered back, choking, eyes wide with disbelief as he clutched his neck.
Dorothea stood tall, eyes blazing. “I am not afraid of you anymore,” she said firmly. “You have treated me like something beneath you for far too long. It ends here.”
Dominic stepped beside her. And for the first time, he didn’t see a woman who needed defending. He saw a woman who could defend herself.
After a long, seething moment, Haverleigh drew in a breath through flared nostrils and finally met his sister’s gaze. His voice came out low, bitter. “I should have known. Your husband put you up to this, didn’t he? He wants your inheritance for himself.”
Dorothea didn’t so much as blink. “What I do with my money is none of your concern.”
Haverleigh gave a sharp tug on the ends of his waistcoat. “You’re not clever enough to manage such a large fortune. You’d squander it all on lace and sentiment and foolish causes. Is that what Father would’ve wanted? His hard-earned estate wasted away on your whims?”
Dorothea held his gaze. “You may go now,” she said. “You are no longer welcome in our home.”
Haverleigh gave a bitter laugh, his lip curling. “Yourhome? Is that what you’re calling it now? Tell me—did your husband suddenly drop his bid for annulment after discovering how much you were worth?”
“That,” Dorothea replied, “is none of your concern, either.”
Haverleigh’s smirk twisted into something uglier. “So typical. He didn’t want you when you were nothing. He was ready to cast you aside like rubbish. And now? Now he wants you? And you believe that? Who’s deceiving whom?”
Dominic had stood still long enough. His fists clenched at his sides, jaw taut with restraint—but just as he opened his mouth to speak, Dorothea placed a hand on his chest, stilling him. As much as he wanted to hit Haverleigh, to enact revenge for the man daring to touch his wife, he knew that this was Dorothea’s fight.
“Dominic is more honorable than you could ever dream of being,” she declared.
Haverleigh didn’t press her further. Instead, he turned towards the door with the slow, seething dignity of a man who knew he had lost.
“You’ll rue the day you treated me this way,” he snarled.
“I don’t think we will,” she responded.
Haverleigh said nothing more. The sound of his booted footsteps echoed as he stormed down the corridor and out of the townhouse, the main door slamming behind him.
Dominic moved to stand in front of Dorothea as he gently lifted his hand to her cheek, now reddened where her brother had struck her. “Are you all right?”
“I am.”
His mouth twitched into a crooked smile. “Remind me never to anger you.”
Dorothea gave a small laugh. “Thank you,” she simply said.
“For what?”
“For giving me the strength to stand up to my brother,” she replied. “I’ve waited so long to do that.”
Dominic cupped her cheek more fully now, his thumb brushing lightly against her skin. “That strength has always been inside you,” he said. “You didn’t need me to find it. You only needed to believe it was there.”
