“I have what I came for,” he said, his attention lingering on Nell for a breath too long before he pulled his hat lower and stepped into the rain.
Then he was gone. The bell jangled behind him like a mocking laugh. Daphne exhaled a long, low breath. “Who wasthat?” she asked, setting the loaves down on the counter and crossing her arms over her chest.
Nell stared at the door, watching the water pool on the floor where he’d stood. “I have no idea. Some lord who wandered in from the rain.”
“Some lord,” Daphne repeated. “With a face like that and manners like a wet cat.” She tilted her head, studying Nell. “You’ve gone pale.”
“I’m fine.” Nell kept her eyes on the floor and reached for the mop.
“You’re not fine. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Daphne shook her head, her expression uncharacteristically serious. “What did he say to you?”
Nell didn’t answer because her heart was still racing, and it was not the old, familiar fear that Gabriel had trained into her bones. This was something else, something she didn’t have a name for and didn’t want to examine too closely. Gabriel’s cruelty had been hidden, sweetness masking poison. He gave pretty words and charming smiles until the door closed and the mask came off. But this man, with storm-grey eyes and a tongue sharp enough to cut, wore his disdain openly. There was no mask.
There was something almost honest about it.
Nell shook herself and bent to mop up the water he’d tracked in, for if he returned, she would be ready. She wouldn’t let a stranger unsettle her again.
Two
Dominic Westmore rode through the gates of Bramwell Park as the rain finally began to ease. He tried to convince himself that the tarts were the only reason his thoughts kept returning to the baker.
The estate looked smaller than he remembered. The grand oak trees lining the drive had grown wild in his absence, their branches reaching toward each other like old friends embracing. The gravel was patchy, and weeds pushed through in stubborn clumps. The house itself—grey stone with tall windows—seemed to sag under the years of standing empty.
He dismounted in the stable yard, handing the reins to a groom. The staff here were new, most of the old ones having found positions elsewhere when the family decamped to London. They looked at him the way everyone looked at him now: quick glances at his face, then away, a careful neutrality that couldn’t quite hide the flinch.
Bramwell Park had sat empty for four years, maintained by a skeleton staff who aired the rooms and waited for a family that never came. His mother preferred London. His younger sister had married well and produced two children already, heirs tosomeone else’s estate. No one needed Bramwell Park anymore. No one except him.
London had become unbearable. The ballrooms, the dinner parties, and the endless social rounds had curdled into a particular kind of torture. The stares followed him everywhere, though poor Lord Westmore, they murmured behind their fans. Such a tragedy. And always, the unspoken addition: And Lady Vivienne, for well, one could hardly blame her, could one?
He’d written ahead to have the house opened, telling his mother he needed country air. He didn’t tell her he needed to stop seeing pity in every face he passed.
The study was cold when he entered. The fire was not yet lit. He rang for Graves, the one servant who had been his family since he was a boy and one of the few who had agreed to return, then sank into his father’s chair.
It was his chair now. It still did not feel that way. His father had died eight years ago in a hunting accident. It had seemed almost mundane at the time. Now Dominic understood that death rarely announced itself. It simply arrived.
The scar pulled when he moved his jaw, though two years healed and still angry-looking, still tight in cold weather. Before the war, before Waterloo, he’d been considered handsome. Dark hair, storm-grey eyes, a smile that had made debutantes blush and their mothers calculate his income. Now he avoided mirrors entirely.
Waterloo. The word sat in his mind like a stone.
He remembered the chaos of battle: smoke so thick it turned noon to dusk, screaming that came from everywhere and nowhere, the earth bucking beneath cannon fire until his teeth rattled and his bones felt loose in his skin. He remembered Alistair Thorne at his side, the friend who had been closer than a brother since their Eton days. He remembered the Frenchcavalry officer who had broken through their line, saber raised, heading straight for Alistair with murder in his swing.
Dominic hadn’t thought. Hadn’t calculated or weighed the consequences. He simply moved. The blade meant for Alistair’s throat caught Dominic across the face instead, opening him from temple to jaw in one clean, terrible stroke. He went down in a spray of his own blood while the world turned red and then black.
He woke in a field hospital with his face stitched shut and Alistair gone.
Missing. Three days, no word, yet the regiment assumed him dead, though Dominic had refused to believe it. He’d pulled the bandages from his own face, still seeping, and gone back into the wreckage alone. Against orders. Against reason. Against every instinct except the one that mattered—Alistair was alive, and Dominic would find him.
He found him.
What happened after that belonged to a locked room in Dominic’s mind, a door he had sealed shut and would not open. Not for the army chaplain who had asked careful questions. Not for the regimental surgeon who had noted injuries in Alistair’s file that did not match any known weapon of war. Not for himself, in the small hours when sleep refused to come and his hands remembered things his mouth would never speak.
The official report said Alistair Thorne had been separated from his regiment and recovered by Viscount Westmore. That was the truth the army needed. The rest of it—the real and ruinous rest of it—Dominic had buried so deep that some days he almost believed it had happened to someone else.
Almost.
Alistair wrote letters now. They arrived every fortnight, full of concern and invitations and gentle prods to rejoin the living. Dominic read each one, and he could not bring himself toanswer a single one. Every time he saw that handwriting, his hands went cold and the locked door rattled on its hinges, and he had to sit very still until the shaking stopped.
It was not that he didn’t care. It was that he cared so much it had curdled into something he could not name, something that tasted of smoke and iron and a darkness he would carry to his grave.
