To Love the Brooding Baron

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-FIVE

Riding his horse alongside his aunt’s carriage, Henry used the journey home to try to sort out all that had happened. A thousand questions about his sister, his mother, and his aunt twisted and knotted together until he no longer knew where one conscious thought ended and another began.

And what about Arabella?the voice inside his head whispered.

Henry’s gut clenched, and he felt an unmistakable ache inside his chest.

In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to steer his horse away and not stop until he was in front of her home. He’d pull Arabella into his arms and hold her against his chest until the ache dissipated. Until all that mattered was how he felt about her and how she felt about him.

But that was never how his fate worked. And even though he’d allowed himself to hope, his hope was beginning to wane.

When they arrived home, his aunt stepped from her carriage just as he dismounted his horse. She stared at him with wounded eyes, her lace handkerchief pressed against the scratches on her cheek.

“We need to talk,” he said, but she turned away and walked toward the front door.

She paused at the top of the steps and glared down at him as if he had been the one to maim her, then entered the house.

He felt the sting of her disappointment, but it no longer gutted him as it once had. He’d been a dutiful nephew to her, acquiescing to practically every wish. He hadn’t forced her to move out of his house and into the home his uncle left for her. She still slept in the same set of rooms she had when his uncle was alive while Henry remained in the same room from his boyhood. He’d never asked for anything, and he was done with the guilt.

Giving his aunt time to right her appearance in her rooms, Henry paced inside the entrance hall. But when she didn’t come down after ten minutes, he took the stairs two at a time, his nerves on edge.

As he drew outside his aunt’s sitting room door, which was connected to her bedchamber, Henry could make out her voice directing her maid to hurry.

“It does not matter,” she barked. “Throw them in.”

Not bothering to knock, he opened the door, not trusting the agitation in her tone.

His aunt sat in a high wingback chair in front of the fireplace, her hair still a tangled mess, her maid frantically trying to stoke a fire.

The hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood on end. It was too hot outside for a fire. “What are you doing?”

His aunt’s eyes snapped to him in shock, while her maid startled and dropped the hot poker before scrambling for something on the floor and tossing it into the fire.

The maid lunged again at what Henry now recognized as a stack of letters tied together with a black ribbon.

“Stop!” he ordered, charging across the room before she could also toss them into the flames.

The maid’s complexion drained of all color, and she dropped the letters onto the floor.

Henry snatched them up, gripping them tight in his hand.

“Give those back,” his aunt ordered, pushing herself out of her chair and reaching for them.

Henry stepped out of her reach. “What are these?” He waved the stack of letters, his anger rising.

“My personal correspondence,” his aunt snapped, her nose high in the air.

He believed her, but he didn’t trust her enough to return them to her.

Turning his back to her, he walked to the other side of the room and ripped open one of the letters.

“I demand you stop!” his aunt yelled.

He could hear her swift footsteps as she moved toward him, but he didn’t care.

The letter was yellowed and faded, the paper smudged with soot. He turned it over in his hands, noting that nothing was written on the outside nor was there any sign of a wax seal. He unfolded the paper, and it opened without any stiffness. The letter had been read often.

His aunt pulled hard on his arm, and he nearly dropped the letter. Her physical assault was nothing compared to the distrust coursing through him.

She doesn’t want you to see something, the voice whispered, echoing Henry’s thoughts.

The letter was indeed addressed to his aunt. His eyes jumped down to the bottom, and what he saw there knocked the air from his lungs.

The letter was from his mother. His eyes jerked back to the top to see if there was a date, but there was none. Nothing was conventional about the letter. The large stroke of his mother’s pen and the many inkblots splattered and smeared spoke of her rage as she wrote.

You will pay for this! My son is the baron now, and he will get me out. When he does, I shall see you—

Henry stopped reading, not wanting to know what she said next. It was clear to him that his mother wasn’t in her right mind.

But why does Auntie have the letter?the voice whispered.

His aunt’s fists beat against his back, her demands to see her letters returned to her more adamant.

Holding her away with one arm, he reached again for the stack and opened the next letter which was just as yellowed and worn as the letter from his mother had been.

There was a date to this letter, and the writing was as pristine as what Henry would expect from any gentle-born lady. His mother’s name stared up at him from the top of the page, while his aunt’s signature glared up at him from the bottom.

There was only one, small sentence written on the entire page.

I have won.

“What is all this?” Henry whirled around, startling his aunt, who stumbled a few steps back. “What did you win?”

She met his questions with a long, chilling silence followed by the most bitter and cold laugh. “You want to know what this is?” She smiled like a wolf. “This is twenty-three years of watching your trollop of a mother get—and take—everything she ever wanted.”

“I do not understand,” Henry said. His childhood had been barely a step above poverty because of his father’s gambling. And that was before his parents’ marriage had gone from utter infatuation to all-out hatred. What about his mother’s life had his aunt—the wife of a baron—coveted?

“Of course you do not understand,” she scoffed. “Because you have never been told.”

“Told what?” he gritted out, growing tired of being kept in the dark.

“Your parents were never a love match,” she began. “Your parents had to marry because she was already with child. With you.” She pointed an accusatory finger at him.

Henry’s stomach dropped. Her words contradicted everything he’d ever been told.

“Your mother,” his aunt continued, her eyes flashing with pure hatred, “managed to seduce your dim-witted father into marrying her instead of doing what his family said and sending her away.” She shook her head, disgusted. “She became like a weevil to the stock of this family. Finding her way in, corrupting everything, until there was nothing left untouched.

“Every time your father’s gambling left them destitute, she would find a way inside my home, preying upon my husband’s weaknesses until she gave him the one thing I never could.” Her eyes darkened, and they flashed with such malice it turned the blood in Henry’s veins to ice water. “A child.”

“Where is this child?” Henry demanded. The only children ever inside this home had been him and his sister.

And then the answer hit him, knocking the air from his lungs.

Sarah wasn’t his sister but his half sister.

“There was nothing ever wrong with Sarah. You had her committed to spite my mother,” Henry seethed.

“Oh, there was much wrong with her. You saw it today. She was always violent toward me. No doubt from your mother’s influence.”

Bile rose in his throat. He wanted to refute his aunt’s accusations, but after what happened today ...

His head pounded, and he pressed his hands to his temples, wanting it all to stop.

He needed time to think—alone.

“You will leave this house,” he said, dropping his hands from his head.

“I will not,” she said in outrage. “This is my home. My husband—”

“Your husband,” Henry snapped, his anger raging, “arranged for you to have a home after his death, and it is time you used it.”

“You cannot banish me,” she shrieked, her face turning a dark red. “I took you in. I made you who you are. You will be nothing but fodder for the gossipmongers without me and my husband’s reputation to raise you up from the failings of your parents.”

“Better that than to go on living an absolute lie with you,” he said. “You will leave and never set foot inside this home again.”

Not caring what she had to say, he left the room.

He’d thought his family’s madness to be their most damning trait, but he could see now that it went much deeper than that. His mother and aunt had poisoned everything with their jealousy and hate, leaving a path of destruction and pain in their wake.

The last flickering flame of hope he had for a brighter future with Arabella went out. He and Sarah would carry these scars for the rest of their lives. That had to be what drove Sarah into madness—to violence just like their mother before her end. He wouldn’t risk the day when the same madness finally overtook him and he hurt Arabella.