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If it had been anyone else that had taken him down—he could have accepted it, accepted everything that had happened.
But it wasn’t just anyone. It was Laney.
The girl he’d fallen in love with when he was just thirteen.
The woman he’d bedded days before their wedding because neither one of them could hold fast against the carnal air between them—whether they’d been alone or in a roomful of people. It’d always been the same. A current of lust running between them that had tuned his every nerve, every muscle to every movement she made, every word she uttered. Her smile. Her laugh.
Everything he now wanted to destroy in her.
He’d done all he could in the last seven years to wash her from the fabric of his being. Drowned himself in drink, women, brawls and battles.
He’d thought he’d done an admirable job of ridding her from his soul until he saw her standing in front of Gruggin Manor.
Just as she would stand and wait for him all those years they spent betrothed.
Thank the heavens for the long drive up to the manor house.
It had taken those precious minutes of the horses and wagon slogging up the drive to steel his mind, steel his thoughts.
No softness. No mercy.
He’d been delivering her dead brother and he wasn’t about to offer her pity at this juncture. Never again.
Yet he had.
Of all things, he wasn’t about to let her see Morton’s half destroyed face. No. He’d take that image, hold it for her so she didn’t have to. He couldn’t have her haunted by it.
For as much as he would enjoy breaking her, he wasn’t a monster. Not quite. Yet.
Her door closed down the hall from him. Athunk,and he was positive she’d just collapsed backward against the door.
Good.
She was exhausted by him—off kilter. Just as he’d planned.
Even if pity had once again wormed its way into his mind tonight, offering her port of all things. A bloody truce. Unacceptable.
But no more.
A momentary lapse of rationality, fueled by glimmers of sentiment from the distant past. He needed to gird his loins. He was far from done with her and he would need all the rage from the last seven years boiling in his gut to get through this.
Heaving a sigh, Wes stepped back into his room, his palm going flat on his door and pushing it quietly closed.
{ Chapter 7 }
“It’s dark.”
Covering a yawn, Laney leaned forward in the carriage, peering out through the window at the smooth, creamy facade on the four stories of her family’s Mayfair townhouse. She was desperate to crawl into her bed after the journey from Yorkshire and suffering three days’ worth of Wes’s glowering stares. But she hadn’t imagined she’d be stumbling about in the dark.
Hide. She just wanted to hide away—from him, from the fact that her brother was dead.
Hide at least for the night. Ten hours of peace.
It didn’t seem like too much to ask the fates to deliver.
“Did you expect a line of servants waiting on the steps for you?” Wes asked dryly from his seat across the carriage from her. He’d ridden the last half of the day in the coach with her, foregoing a mount when they changed horses in Dunstable. All the better to glare directly at her, his form swallowing every speck of space in front of her.
She looked to him. “No, but I did expect at the very least a lit candle in a window. I did send a missive on ahead of us.”
