Did he dare to believeshe might harbor some burgeoning feelings for him? Surely not as hard as he’d fallen, Adam consumed with thoughts of her from the first moment he’d seen her in church. But in time…in time might she perhaps grow to feel the same for him as he felt so intensely for her?
“Bloody fool,” Adam spat out, anger with himself building again. If he’d given her a chance to respond to his fervent declarationbefore assuming she wanted little to do with him—but no! Instead, he’d prodded her to reveal what lay at the heart of her hopes for the future and then he’d crushed the vision of happiness she longed for so dearly!
Yet it was true, just as he’d warned her. The man of her dreams that she imagined meeting in London might turn out to be as despicable as his father, and her end one day might be astragic as his mother’s!
With an impotent roar, Adam threw the wadded pillow across the room and lunged from the bed, pausing only to grab a robe to cover his nakedness. Then he strode to the nearest window and braced his hands against the windowsill, staring blindly outside.
What in blazes was the matter with him? In a few short days, what had become of the rational thought and restrained composurethat he’d honed during six years of medical study after turning his back on everything he’d known before? Everything he had hated and despised?
A ragged sigh escaped Adam as he rested his head against the cool windowpane.
He closed his eyes, listening to distant sounds from the harbor…a ship’s bell, the rumbling of wooden barrels along the wharf even at this late hour, and the raucous laughterof sailors as they spilled drunkenly out of one of the taverns.
Yet around him in tidy whitewashed cottages like Dr. Philcup’s, where Adam now resided, the townsfolk slept, and further out from Porthleven in their manor houses, the gentry and local nobility slumbered.
Like Linette Easton. The auburn-haired vision he’d never anticipated meeting who had turned his carefully constructed world upsidedown.
The often too serious young woman he’d wanted to make laugh and smile when instead, he had ground her cherished dream beneath his heel and wounded her. He’d seen the shock in her beautiful brown eyes and the mist of unshed tears.
Yet at least when she attended her first ball of the Season, she might be more wary now and protect her heart, Adam tried to console himself, staring out oncemore into the night.
How bitterly ironic life could be. If he had never renounced all bonds with his father, Adam might have been there to meet her and perhaps have the honor of her very first dance.
Instead he’d sought refuge from the demons of his past in a different life, a humbler life that the woman ofhisdreams would never share.
Not now. Not after how callously he’d treated her—damnit all!
Adam thrust himself away from the window, but instead of going back to bed, he strode down the dark hall to the study.
Work would ease his torment tonight. Dogged reading, research, and writing that kept his mind occupied and unwanted thoughts at bay had never failed him before.
He could only pray fiercely that throwing himself into his new practice wouldn’t fail him with each passingday that brought Linette closer to leaving for London.
