Her eyes widened.
“Do you know him?”
“I have recently met him, when he began attending with his wife.”
It had only been a year earlier that he had become reacquainted with his former classmate.
“I believe she operates a foundling home with her sister. I do not know them well.”
“Yes, they do,” Orlando answered. “Westbrook House.” He did not want to talk about Xavier, or his wife, of Westbrook House. He wanted to learn what else he could of Blythe since she left Brussels.
He glanced around the drawing room. While there were several gathered in various groups, nobody was paying them any mind, and he had a burning need for answers.
Orlando turned more fully to Blythe and stared into her blue eyes.
“You left me.”
She frowned and her forehead wrinkled as she drew her eyebrows together.
“Left you?”
“In Brussels. You left me.”
It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, but a statement of what she had done.
“The war was over. Napoleon had been defeated—again,” she answered as if she couldn’t understand why it had been wrong to simply disappear.
That was what he feared. That he had meant so little to her that when he was no longer needed for protection, that she dismissed him and went on her way. He had hoped that it wasn’t true, but perhaps it had been, along with having a family she did not want to be associated with. Yet, she had asked about them last evening, as if she wasn’t bothered.
“You did not even tell me goodbye.” Orlando believed that was what hurt the most. Nearly a month of seeing her every night, sharing stories from their childhood, of him confessing the secrets his family held close, knowing that Blythe would never speak out of turn…Even if they had not been lovers, they had become dear friends and she had simply disappeared as if the time they’d spent together meant nothing.
“I was free.”
“You were widowed,” he corrected.
“Yes, and it was time for me to go.”
“Without telling me goodbye.”
Tears glistened in her eyes and she looked away. “I wanted to…I tried…”
“When?”
“After the battle, when you did not return, I went to find you.”
Orlando nearly groaned. He knew where he had been and if she had gotten even close to the Farm of Mont St. Jean, she may have been so repulsed that she ran all the way back to England.
Yet, she didn’t say that he had been found.
“What happened?”
The burly footman stopped beside the settee and Orlando hoped that he wasn’t going to be removed because Blythe nearly cried.
“This message has arrived for you.” He then turned and walked away.
Orlando tore it open and grew irritated, then angry with himself for such a reaction.
“I fear that I must leave.”
