“She loves me. Iwillstop this marriage.”
Nicholas expected an outburst at his words. Bramwell was well known for those. His father had been at the receiving end of them many a time. But to his surprise, Bramwell only nodded. “She told you she wanted you, did she? The girl is more like me than I ever thought. She lied, boy. Understand that. She has known about the arrangement with Lovell for months. And she is looking forward to the life she was always meant to have. You werenevergood enough for her.”
“No,” Nicholas said, but there was a kernel of doubt in the back of his mind that he hated.
How many times had he pondered himself that their positions were so disparate? How many times had he wondered if he would be able to keep Aurora happy when she was without her pin money and her gowns and jewels and parties?
Now Bramwell was drawing those doubts to the surface, picking them open and exposing them to the light.
“You still believe she loves you?” Bramwell said with a sniff. “Then I suppose I must be cruel to be kind. Who wrote that?”
“The Bard,” Nicholas choked. “Hamlet. Act three.”
“You’re educated, at least.” Bramwell shrugged. “Come along.”
He crooked his finger, and Nicholas followed because he felt he had no choice. He was too numb to fight against a man with such power. They wound through the halls of this home he knew so well and out a parlor onto the wide terrace that stretched across the expanse of the back of the manor. It overlooked the garden. The place he’d first dared to kiss Aurora. In the orange and pink colors of sunset, he looked down over the green and found a woman not so far down the path from the house.
Aurora. Even from a distance, he could make her out. He knew her gait, he knew her posture, her knew the way she tilted her head as she paused at what she always called her favorite rosebush. She was the kind of woman with a favorite rosebush and he loved her for it.
Only today, she wasn’t withhimas she strolled those lovely paths. But she wasn’t alone, either. No, in the romantic glow of the sunset, she was with a gentleman. Nicholas’s heart sank.
“Lovell,” Bramwell said, with a pleasure to his voice that said he enjoyed being cruel. “They look well together, don’t they?”
Nicholas couldn’t respond to the jab. He was too busy staring at the couple. Aurora’s hand was in the crook of this man’s elbow. He was speaking to her and she turned her face toward him. Even from the distance, Nicholas recognized she was smiling. When she smiled, she did so with her entire body. He’d made a study of how her shoulders lifted and her hands fluttered in those moments.
She looked…happy now. The kernel of doubt became far more.
“Now, you might wish to go confront her,” Bramwell said softly. “Or exact some kind of revenge and break up this engagement.”
Nicholas set his jaw. “I would never hurt her,” he whispered.
Bramwell appeared confused at the concept, but he continued, “If you do so, if you attempt to talk to her or convince her to back out of this, I will destroy you. Do you understand that?”
“I am already destroyed,” Nicholas said, unable to keep his eyes from the couple. His voice no longer sounded like his own.
Bramwell chuckled. “Ah, the romance of youth. Well, if you don’t care about yourself, then think of your family. I could sack the man who raised you, give him no reference.”
At that, Nicholas pivoted away from the image of Aurora and her future husband. “My father has served you well for many years, my lord.”
“Yourfatheris the Duke of Roseford and you’re nothing but a bastard he abandoned, along with all the others,” Bramwell hissed. “My man of affairs lowered himself to marry your mother and legitimize you in the eyes of the law, but you know what you are. Do you want to make him regret helping you?”
Nicholas set his jaw. His father—the man who’d raised him—had always treated him as his own. Bertrand Gillingham had never been anything but an honorable man. A man Nicholas desperately wanted to be like, not the awful duke who had taken advantage of his mother when she was a servant in his home.
“I’ve heard the Duke of Roseford has taken an interest in you,” Bramwell said when Nicholas didn’t answer. “That the army is being bandied about as a future. I would consider taking that option, young man.”
Nicholas had rebuffed that idea when he had thought himself about to marry Aurora, but now it didn’t seem so very outlandish. She would marry someone else. At least if he was gone, he wouldn’t have to see that. Wouldn’t have to hear rumor of her happiness. Wouldn’t have to see her increase with that other man’s children, pass her in the park on Lord Lovell’s arm and have her look at him like he was a pathetic stranger.
“It doesn’t really matter what I do, does it?” Nicholas said as he turned on his heel and walked away. “I have no leverage over a man like you. It’s over. I understand that.”
“Gillingham?” Bramwell called out when Nicholas had reached the doors leading back into the house.
Nicholas froze there and slowly turned. Bramwell was smiling at him. Smiling as if stripping Nicholas of all his hopes and dreams was some kind of jolly pastime for him. “Yes?”
“Say thank you to your betters, boy,” Bramwell said.
Nicholas fisted his hands at his sides. He wanted nothing more than to walk back across the long terrace and punch the earl. An action his birth father would certainly approve of. But he had to think of more than himself and his worst impulses now.
“Thank you, my lord,” he said through clenched teeth.
