The realization of these facts felt like a right hook to the jaw and a low punch in the gut from the famous boxerGentleman Jackson. All his breath seemed to leave his body, leaving him gasping.
He was sure he felt his heart break, its pounding turning to a sluggish flip-flop in his chest, like a fish floundering on the shore. Oliver turned on his heel and numbly started to walk down the street. There was no destination. It didn’t seem to really matter where he ended up. He no longer cared. The only thing he felt was a deep ache which had invaded every nerve in his body. He saw nothing but a dark abyss opening up before him. Would it be too much to hope he would fall into it and be done with this pain?
Oliver walked onto the road, heard the shouts of people all around him, horses neighing loudly above him, but he just kept walking.
*
Lisbeth collapsed inthe doorway. She was only vaguely aware Rollands had caught her before she hit the floor.
Oliver had walked away! He had misunderstood her note and refused to stay and let her explain. Once again, she cursed Dalmere for taking her voice. Looking down at her notebook, she read the frantic scribble she had attempted.
You will never be nothing to me. I love you. Don’t leave me.
Tears dripped onto the page. Why had he left her so easily? Had he never loved her at all?
She put her hand on the door knowing he was somewhere on the other side. Hurting, just like her.
Marie and her grandmother were by her side, and she should have felt comforted by their presence but right now she wished to curl up in a ball and cry. Cry for all she had lost and all she may never get back.
“Is this what you told him?” her grandmother asked looking down at her notebook. “No wonder he stormed off.”
Lisbeth let out a keening cry.
“We will fix this,” Marie said, giving their grandmother a wide-eyed glare. Her concern and determination was evident in her tone. “We will help you write him a proper letter explaining it all and how you never meant to send him away. He will feel foolish and return, begging you to have him back.”
“I will deliver it myself, my lady,” Rollands said.
Lisbeth nodded, for she needed to hold on to some remnant of hope this disaster could be fixed.
“I don’t understand it, my lady. Lord Bellamy told me he came here to propose to her.” Lisbeth heard the words Rollands whispered to her grandmother, and tried to block them out with her hands but then all she could hear was the blood rushing in her ears, like a chant. Fool, fool, fool. She had thought she was being so noble letting him go. Although, perhaps he’d never really been hers in the first place.
Now she may never be able to explain about the ledger and the money that would soon be returned to him. Never be able to tell him how he had saved her in every way that counted.
This should have been the happiest of days but instead she wished nothing more than to do it all over. To wipe away the hurt she had caused him.
Outside, a cold wind whipped up the leaves on the trees outside her window and thunder rumbled in the distance. Rain fell in big fat drops saturating everything in its path in misery. An echo of her own desolation.
*
Oliver was wetto the bone. If he was lucky he would die of a chill. Who said words couldn’t cut as deep as a knife? He certainly felt as if all his life’s blood had been drained from him, leavinghim nothing but a husk of himself. Dragging himself into his brother’s house, Oliver climbed the stairs to his brother’s room and ordered his valet to pack every bit of clothing he owned. He then told the butler, Kinsdale, to start closing the house and have everything packed and shipped to Whitely Hall as soon as practical. Oliver planned to leave in the morning.
He undressed and crawled into bed with a bottle of his brother’s finest brandy, having decided to drink it until either he passed out or the bottle was dry.
How could he have forgotten the reality of his situation? Love was blind and when it turned on you it was like having your eyeballs scorched in their sockets by a red-hot poker. He had been such a fool. She should have skewered him with that fire poker on the night they met. It would surely have been less painful than what he was experiencing now.
He should hate her, but he couldn’t. He shouldn’t love her, but he did. This in itself made him pathetic to the point of, well, something more pathetic than pathetic.
Tony would say he’d had a narrow escape. That he had eluded the clutches of Madame Marriage, dodged a life of the doldrums, and shimmied out of the shackles of matrimony. He would say the way to a happy life was not through a wife.
Tony would be wrong on all counts.
About halfway through the bottle of brandy, Oliver decided the time had come to at least earn the title of the Earl of Bellamy.
Chapter Twenty
Oliver sat staringat a cold cup of tea. In the gray and dismal light of dawn, and a near whole bottle of brandy later, things were even more complicated than they had been the night before. Rain beat against the windows to his left in relentless torrents, like fists against his skull.
All around him was the commotion of packing. It was like a constant ringing in his ear. Nothing he could do would shut out the noise.
