What the hell was Rauf doing letting her argue? She should have been gone by now.
“Rauf!” he barked, unable to stop himself. Fortunate for his commander that he didn’t storm out into the hall and toss him out with her! Loyal friend or not.
He heard footsteps marching toward him and realized what he’d done. He should have been prepared to rush out if he opened his mouth. He wasn’t. She was coming!
He pushed the door gently and without a sound and watched the slit disappear—just before a flash of her red hair appeared.
“I see then,” her voice seeped in as the door closed in her face. She was bold enough to open it. But she wasn’t a fool. She didn’t know who he was. She hadn’t recognized him. He would examine why it stung later. For now, she wouldn’t open the door.
“What kind of man hides behind a door like a frightened child? Who would ignore the terrors of the true child in this castle by wanting me to leave? He needs to trust someone. I can help him do that.”
“Someone else will be his governess. Not you,” he muttered in a deep voice through the door. “He will learn to trust me.”
Silence.
“So, ’tis…just me you do not want.”
He heard what it took for her to say such words, for in Berwick, everyone had wanted “Jules” Feathers. “That is correct. You may leave.”
He would admit that someplace deep, deep inside, someplace beyond the stone walls, there was a part of him that wanted to open the door and just look at her. Take her in one more time, like a sunrise after years of darkness—or a forbidden desire he still longed for more than breath.
He was no fool either. He would never go back. Love was pain. Love was torment. Especially loving Julianna. Especially her.
Even after King Robert had given him Lismoor and the title of Earl of Rothbury, he could never forget what he had been. He couldn’t forget because it was the reason he lost her.
She had been all he had for his whole life. Julianna, with her lush, fiery hair and dark, soulful eyes had won his heart from a day before he could remember. He’d had a hope that he could someday be worthy of her. It was foolish and it was deadly, but oh, how he had loved her. He would have done anything, risked everything, including his life for her. She’d been the reason blood flowed in his veins, and when she left, she left him empty.
But he didn’t love her anymore. There were days when he hated her—even the memory of her because she had proven that love was deadly.
Finding his brothers was a miracle and he was grateful, but loving Julianna as a boy had saved him from missing a family he was too young to remember. After Cain and his wife had gone to Invergarry, the fateful truth had settled on him. He felt empty without Julianna. He wrote letters to her. They were rough, he would admit, for he’d always disliked Julianna’s writing lessons. But he wrote them. Six in all. Telling her how he felt and what he thought of her. He’d realized that sending what he wrote in anger wasn’t wise, so he burned them all.
Mattie, a handmaiden at the castle, had stayed behind when her lady left and tried to save him. She had loved him while he’d grown more distant, more impenetrable. She’d clung to any vestige of emotion he had left and pulled him from the wreckage of his own heart.
When he lost her, he knew love was a curse, a torturous ploy to get him to relinquish his heart.
He was not interested in anything or anyone having to do with love; past, present, or future. Love had almost completely destroyed him. He didn’t want to see her or speak to her.
He pressed his ear against the cool wood and listened to her footsteps fading in the distance.
He cracked open the door. She was gone, as was Rauf. He looked down the hall at his son’s room. The little fellow had a good set of lungs on him. It didn’t bother Nicholas that his son cried and screamed often. He wanted something he wasn’t getting. Nicholas understood that.
Just before he had returned to Lismoor, he’d returned to Berwick, now back in the hands of the Scots, and had gone to the castle—to the servants’ quarters. He had wanted to look at where his memories of servitude began at the age of two as he had been told, sold to the house of Governor Feathers of Berwick for a stone. He’d wanted to stare those memories, and the memories of the governor’s daughter, in the face and deny them the power to hurt him anymore. Before he saw his son.
But now she was here and his thoughts were already tossed like leaves in a whirlwind.
His son’s cries halted his thoughts. Even the ones of Julianna.
He yanked the door fully open and, without looking either way, set off down the hall. He didn’t go to his son out of compassion. He felt none. Love did not lead his feet. He didn’t love Elias. Not as he should. All he knew of the babe was screeching. He didn’t go because the crying hurt his ears. It didn’t. In fact, it was familiar and a bit soothing.
He went because he should. It was his child disturbing everyone’s peace.
He had known how his leaving might affect the boy, but he hadn’t been able to give any more of himself after Mattie died. Everyone he had loved…gone, or dead.
Elias was not a servant but the son of an earl. When Nicholas left, he had known his son would be well taken care of. And he had been. Richard and the rest of the household and even the villagers loved the babe and indulged him. He’d had Avice. A young mother from the village who had delivered a stillborn had been hired to nurse him.
But she had left him—just as easily as Berengaria had left him and Julianna.
Damn her.
