“I watched you shove a letter into your pocket the moment I arrived here, and since you keep touching that same pocket every time I mention Lizzie, I have to assume that you have received some kind of news since your arrival. Would you like to read it?”
“I already have.”
“But you want to again.” Lucas said it as fact, not a guess. And of course, the bastard was right. Hugh desperately wanted to read the letter again. To start making plans on how to deal with what was within those few lines.
“I can wait,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
Lucas folded his arms. “So can I.”
They held gazes, and for a moment Hugh was transported back to so many years ago. When he had run through fields with this man and all the others, when he had believed anything was possible. When they had cried together and laughed together and he’d known he could depend on them for anything. Especially Lucas.
He found his hand moving to his pocket and withdrew the now-crumpled letter. He stared at it a moment. He wanted the help his friend offered. Not just the emotional kind, but Lucas’s connections could perhaps do even more for him. Could find out more about Walters. About this woman he had apparently pursued and won, very likely under false pretenses.
“Hugh, you are my best friend,” Lucas whispered. “You were thrust into responsibility at far too young an age. And unlike me, you didn’t run. A year or so ago, you talked to Baldwin, at least, about trouble with Lizzie, and you have never been the same since. I look at you and I see you buckling under the weight of whatever this secret is. Let me take some of it from your shoulders.”
With a shuddering sigh, he handed over the note to his friend and watched as he read it. Lucas’s face was impassive as he looked over the lines a few times, then handed it back.
“It’s meaningless to me. Written in a hand of someone who obviously isn’t of your rank, referring to names of people I do not have a relationship to, though I think I met this…I assume he means viscount…at some party I was dragged to. But it clearly means a great deal to you. So explain it. And let me help you.”
Hugh stared at him, and it felt like a lifetime passed before he could find his voice. “If I tell one of you, I know it is telling all. This is too…sensitive to do that.”
Lucas’s brow wrinkled. “I will not breathe a word to anyone. Diana, I suppose, but it will go no further than the two of us. I have an enormous capacity to keep secrets—it used to keep me alive, remember?”
Hugh bent his head. The weight Lucas had observed upon his shoulders felt so devilishly heavy in that moment. The lifeline his dearest friend offered was tempting beyond measure.
“More than a year ago, right before Baldwin met Helena, Lizzie was…seduced.” He said that word and his stomach turned. “She was seduced by a man.”
Lucas’s eyes went wide. “No.”
He nodded. “Yes. I was…distracted. I saw the signs that there was some trouble in her world, but I did not act swiftly enough. He convinced her to run away to Scotland to marry. When I found out, I raced after them. He was a fortune hunter, a rogue of the worst description. But I was too…I was too—”
Lucas caught his arm and squeezed. “I understand. She did not marry him, did she?”
“No. That, at least, I thwarted,” Hugh said with a shuddering sigh. “Not that it mattered. Her reputation would be in tatters if the story came out. They’d been alone more than one night while on the road. I paid that bastard to keep his mouth shut in the hopes I could still provide her with a future.”
Lucas straightened. “Is he blackmailing you?”
“No.” Hugh snorted out a humorless laugh. “I gave him so much money, he would not have to come after me again for a very long time. I did so in the hopes that Lizzie would find her happiness in the interim and then whatever he said would matter little. It isn’t blackmail that has troubled me.”
Lucas frowned and glanced at the letter in his hand. “This man, it’s the Walters this person refers to, isn’t it?”
Hugh nodded, and he was certain his misery was plain on his face. “Yes. And as you can see, he has found another lady to pursue. This time I assume he has been more conventional in his engagement plans, but I have no doubt he has used the money he wrung from me in desperation to convince this woman he is not a fortune hunter. And yet he is.”
“You didn’t stop him in order to protect your sister from a reckless act,” Lucas breathed. “And so you have lived the last year regretting that you did not thwart him as he deserved.”
“And fearing he would do exactly what it appears he’s done and find another victim,” Hugh finished. “My source says their engagement is not public yet, but how long before they begin the announcements? A week or two to arrange some kind of sparkling ball? And then it will be too late to escape him without damaging this new woman’s reputation just as he would have destroyed Lizzie.”
“I’m certain that is his intent. To be sure that if his true motives are discovered, it will be too late to get out of the arrangement,” Lucas muttered as he paced away. “And if he was willing to take advantage of Lizzie’s sweet nature, I cannot give him the benefit of the doubt that he would have changed since then or truly loved this new woman.”
Hugh barely maintained control over the anger that still burned inside his chest. “Hemockedmy sister after he ripped her world to pieces. There is nothing decent or good in his heart.”
Lucas looked at him. “How is she?”
Hugh stared out the window in the distance. “Brokenhearted still. At first it was because she had truly cared for the man and she mourned whatever future she had hoped to have. But as time has passed, I’ve watched her turn her loathing away from him and toward herself. No matter what I say, she sees herself as a fool with no ability to know what is true and what is not. She only wants to stay in the country, locked away from everyone. She barely receives visitors, and only at my insistence. He broke her spirit. I wish I had killed him when I had the chance.”
“Doing so only would have hurt her more,” Lucas reminded him. “Which you know, or else I assume you would have done just that.”
Hugh jerked out a nod. “Yes. And here we are. This new woman is just as endangered by Walters as Lizzie was. I doubt she or her family have any idea the snake they are letting into their home.”
