She froze in horror.
And in that moment shocking epiphany set in: He had just delivered that hideous news as remorselessly as any fencer landing a death blow, even though he surely knew how it would devastate her.
He’d wanted that badly to hurt her.
Or to win.
He did love to win.
Just like Isaiah Redmond.
She had never fully realized how dangerous this quality could be in another person.
All of these realizations were both disorienting and stark.
There were a lot of things she might have said then, tender things, beseeching things, and all would have been true:I love you so, Jacob.You were my last thought at night, every night, the first in the morning, and most of the thoughts in between.
And there were the things she didn’t dare ask now:Did you think of me at all while you were gone?Would my name have been your very last word? My face the last image you saw before you drew your last breath? Do you love me, or is your pride merely wounded?
Instead, she straightened to her full height, and said slowly and clearly, “Well. I hope your journey was worth it.”
His eyes flared in shock.
For a long moment they stood locked in silent, seething enmity.
At last, he gave a short, bitter laugh. “If Redmond is what you want, I won't stand in your way, Isolde.”
He spun on his heel, stalked over to his horse, and threw himself up into the saddle.
In an eye-blink, nothing remained of his presence but the echo of hoofbeats.
ChapterNine
Jacob was distantly aware he was in the woods surrounding Eversea House when he at last pulled his mare to a halt.
He slid from the saddle, staggered, then dropped to his knees and retched as if he’d been poisoned.
He swiped his hand across the back of his mouth, then sank down onto the long grass and rolled over on his back.
His eyes burned from the breakneck gallop into the wind. For a blessed moment he was captive to physical sensation only: his breath moving in and out in ragged gusts. The blood ringing in his ears. His heart like a fist thrown against his ribcage over and over and over.
The smell of grass and earth after weeks at sea was like oxygen and he gulped it desperately in.
Finally, he wrapped his arms around his body, and for a long, long time, he remained as still as a dignitary lying in state while inside him, ugly, jagged emotions collided like flotsam on a boiling sea.
And to think he’d believed he’d come home a man.
He was neither man nor boy. He was something worse: he was a knave.
So what if he had fought pirates and survived illness and witnessed death? It seemed he had learned nothing of importance. It was all for naught if it meant losing Isolde.
Pure hate surged and bubbled up from the morass of things he felt. Was it for Redmond? Certainly.
For Isolde?
No. Never, never, never.
Mostly he hatedhimself. For the absurd hubris of leaving such a woman behind for any amount of time. What the bloody hell had he been thinking?
