“If it has not been consummated, we will have it annulled. You can still marry Almsley if he will have you. We can tell him you were married against your will if we must,” Lucien said, planning aloud. “When Strathmore goes to trial, his despicable actions, abducting you and running away with you under duress, will not work in his favor. And no one will blame you.”
No one except Lucien, but she did not say it. Her brother did not forgive, and she could see in the harshness of his expression, the tense determination, the rigidity of his posture, that he did not forgive her now.
“It is too late,” she forced herself to say through numb lips.
Too late to annul the marriage. She may already be carrying my child. All the more reason for Arden to keep from arresting me.
A sob rose up within her, strong and overwhelming. It was a wave on the ocean, white-capped and frothy, crashing over her head. And she could do nothing but wait there and allow it to batter her.
The sob broke free.
She pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Did he hurt you?” Lucien growled, his tone once more deadly. “Tell me the truth, Violet. I will not let him live if he hurt you. Do you understand me?”
Of course she understood. Her brother was fiercely protective. Griffinhadhurt her, but not in the way Lucien meant.
“Only my heart.” The words were torn from her, from the deepest, darkest, most painful, broken part of her. Only the most vulnerable part of her. The part that had dared to fall in love with a beautiful man and his devil-may-care air. A man who had cooked for her, and kissed her as if she were something he meant to consume, who had told her about his mother, who had fretted over the bandage on her hand when she had returned from her visit to Charles. A man who had snuck to her chamber to make certain she had not been injured. A man who had made her body sing and her heart sigh.
Surely not all of it had been a lie.
Surely some of it had been real.
He may not love her, but had he truly been that adroit at deception?
“You fancy yourself in love with him, Violet?” Lucien asked, drawing her attention back to him once more, back from where it had been, dwelling in the past.
Lingering over Griffin.
“I do not fancy myself in love with him,” she said. “Iamin love with him. I know it with all my heart.”
He may not deserve that love, and her love may well be misplaced, but love did not work that way. It could not be rescinded in a heart’s beat. It did not disappear because it had been given to the wrong person.
Was Griffin the wrong person?
“Bloody fucking hell,” Lucien cursed.
It was the first time she had ever heard him curse with such vulgar force in her presence, and she knew the slip spoke to how upset he was. She did not think she had ever seen him this disturbed since the day he had returned to Albemarle carrying their mother’s body in his arms.
Was this a death to him as well?
“I am sorry, Lucien,” she apologized again.
“If you love him, why did I find you walking down the drive all alone, hell-bent upon escaping him?” he demanded.
The answer to that question was simple, and yet it was so very complex.
“Because he doesn’t love me.”
And then, her tears came again, burning her eyes, sliding down her cheeks. She surrendered, let them fall. Let the sobs claim her along with the pain.
Cursing again, Lucien shifted to her side of the carriage. Putting an arm about her shoulders, he gathered her to his chest. She sobbed into his shirt front and waistcoat, huge, ugly tears.
“Everything will be well again, Lettie,” he said soothingly, using the old name he’d had for her in their childhood. “Sometimes, you just need to cry.”
She wanted to ask him if he ever had since the day he had carried their mother’s body home, and how he could be so sure everything would be well, but it had been a long time since her brother had embraced her, and she had an ocean of tears to cry, and so she held him back with all her might instead, and sobbed as she hadn’t in years.
Griffin had combedOxfordshire for Violet, and he had yet to find her anywhere. Not at the train station. Not in the drive to Harlton Hall. Not on the roads in between. But he searched on, dread a knot ever growing in his gut.
