She didn’t believe him. “Everyone is capable of love.”
“Not me.” With a muffled curse, he reached for his empty glass and hurled it against the wall. It shattered on impact, shards raining to the carpet. “Leave, Clara. Get the hell out of here while you still can.”
Stricken, Clara looked from the broken glass to her husband’s grim countenance. “Please, Julian. Don’t do this.”
“Go.I don’t want you here.” He spun her around so that she faced the door, his touch unusually rough. “Leave me now. And don’t come back.”
Tears threatening her vision, she found herself numbly obeying him, walking from his study. Leaving him. What could she say in the face of his anger? She’d laid her heart bare before him, and he’d turned it down before smashing it beneath his boot heel. Something inside her splintered, leaving her fragmented and hopelessly adrift.
Perhaps he didn’t love her after all, at least not enough to fight for her. To fight for them and what they’d only begun to build.I don’t love you. I’m not capable. Don’t come back.The awful words echoed through her mind, a mocking litany. Pressing a hand over her mouth to muffle the sobs she couldn’t suppress, she rushed over the threshold.
More breaking glass sounded behind her just before she closed the door.
he had gone.
Thank the bloody Lord. Odd how life had a way of working in circles. Demented circles. For here he sat, alone in his study, going about the business of getting thoroughly soused. He tossed back the rest of his brandy, wishing it could obliterate everything with its heady burn. How long ago had it been that he’d sat in this very chair on a similar night, and Clara had upended his world?
A lifetime, it seemed.
But the lifetime had come and gone now, taking with it every trace of brightness, every bit of joy she’d brought him. He would never find another like her. The Lord wouldn’t dare make a copy, nor would Julian settle for one. He loved her so much he ached with it, need of her an agony so searing he didn’t think he’d ever recover. Forcing her away from him had nearly been his undoing.
As had revealing all the ugly truths about himself. For try as he might to forget about the sins of his past, he couldn’t erase the indelible marks they’d left upon him. The evidence of it was everywhere, in the whisky and glass-soaked floor he’d refused to allow the servants to clean, in the incessant thumping of his head, in the pain tearing through him, and most damning of all, in the plum finger marks bruising Clara’s delicate throat.
His self-hatred was raging like a hurricane, threatening to blow him apart. Perhaps he ought to make it easy for the bastard who wanted him dead and drink himself to death. The idea had merits.
Nothing mattered now that Clara was back at her father’s house and safe. Whitney had sent word that they’d stationed guards everywhere in an effort to protect Clara and his sisters. That and the fact that they were removed from Julian’s ambit ought to prove enough to keep them safe. The best news of all: Whitney had managed to secure passage for Clara back to her homeland as well.
Knowing he would never see her again felt akin to a knife stuck in his chest. Whenever he thought about it—which was every other breath—raw, unadulterated anguish paralyzed him. Understanding it was for the best didn’t mitigate the pain. But he loved her too much to try to keep her. Even if the bastard who wanted him dead was caught, Clara deserved far better than a jaded rake who’d diddled half the ladies of thetonto keep the roof over his head. She deserved the best, and nothing but happiness, a man worthy of basking in her brilliance.
Julian was not that man. Nor would he ever be.
He took another gulp of brandy. Damn it, if only he hadn’t thrown his entire decanter of whisky against the wall. He was nearly out of brandy and he had yet to find the stupor he sought.
A discreet knock sounded at the door, disrupting his black thoughts. Couldn’t his butler ever do as he was bloody well told and leave a man the hell alone? He’d been explicit that he didn’t want to be disturbed. No matter how much crashing or breaking glass might be heard from within. By God, if he wanted to tear the entire study from floors to rafters and leave it nothing but a pile of rubble, he would.
He would, if that’s what it took to expunge Clara from his blood.
“Damn it, Osgood,” he roared, “I told you not to interrupt me. Not even for the devil himself.”
“Forgive me, sir, but a very urgent note has arrived from the Whitney residence,” Osgood intoned from the other side of the door. “I thought perhaps you may excuse the interruption in such an event.”
His blood went cold. An urgent note from the Whitney residence. What the bloody hell could it mean? He shot to his feet and stalked across the chamber, trouncing through broken glass, books, and papers without a care. He wrenched open the door himself to find his butler wearing a strained expression, a silver salver bearing a single missive in his hands.
Julian snatched it up and tore it open, desperate for news, praying for the first time in his life.Please God. Don’t let anything have happened to her. Take me instead.But why would the heavens want to listen to a man whose sins far outnumbered his years?
He scanned the contents of the note, dread sinking into his gut with the heaviness of a boulder. “Bloody, bloody hell.”
The message was penned in Jesse Whitney’s bold scrawl. And the words were the very last in the world that he wanted to see.
Clara had disappeared. So too had a footman instructed to guard an exterior door. But there was more. A single gunshot had been heard just outside the home. A frantic search of her chamber had turned up nothing.
Jesus. Everything in him withered.
No. He refused to believe something had happened to her. Anything but that. His sweet, lovely, bold Virginian lass could not be gone. Taken from the world when he’d done everything in his power to see her safe.
No, goddamn it.
He must have said the words aloud without realizing it, for they echoed now in the eerie silence of the hall like a war cry. It was the same hall where he’d pinned her to the wall and kissed her senseless on the day of their wedding. He thought of her soft, full lips beneath his, how innocent and sweet she’d tasted. How badly he’d wanted her. She could not be gone. Not his Clara. Not his little dove.
