Chapter 2
Two
Dominic Westmore rode through the gates of Bramwell Park as the rain finally began to ease. He tried to convince himself that the tarts were the only reason his thoughts kept returning to the baker.
The estate looked smaller than he remembered.
The grand oak trees lining the drive had grown wild in his absence, their branches reaching toward each other like old friends embracing.
The gravel was patchy, and weeds pushed through in stubborn clumps.
The house itself—grey stone with tall windows—seemed to sag under the years of standing empty.
He dismounted in the stable yard, handing the reins to a groom.
The staff here were new, most of the old ones having found positions elsewhere when the family decamped to London.
They looked at him the way everyone looked at him now: quick glances at his face, then away, a careful neutrality that couldn’t quite hide the flinch.
Bramwell Park had sat empty for four years, maintained by a skeleton staff who aired the rooms and waited for a family that never came.
His mother preferred London. His younger sister had married well and produced two children already, heirs to someone else’s estate.
No one needed Bramwell Park anymore. No one except him.
London had become unbearable. The ballrooms, the dinner parties, and the endless social rounds had curdled into a particular kind of torture.
The stares followed him everywhere, though poor Lord Westmore, they murmured behind their fans.
Such a tragedy. And always, the unspoken addition: And Lady Vivienne, for well, one could hardly blame her, could one?
He’d written ahead to have the house opened, telling his mother he needed country air. He didn’t tell her he needed to stop seeing pity in every face he passed.
The study was cold when he entered. The fire was not yet lit. He rang for Graves, the one servant who had been his family since he was a boy and one of the few who had agreed to return, then sank into his father’s chair.
It was his chair now. It still did not feel that way. His father had died eight years ago in a hunting accident. It had seemed almost mundane at the time. Now Dominic understood that death rarely announced itself. It simply arrived.
The scar pulled when he moved his jaw, though two years healed and still angry-looking, still tight in cold weather.
Before the war, before Waterloo, he’d been considered handsome.
Dark hair, storm-grey eyes, a smile that had made debutantes blush and their mothers calculate his income. Now he avoided mirrors entirely.
Waterloo. The word sat in his mind like a stone.
He remembered the chaos of battle: smoke so thick it turned noon to dusk, screaming that came from everywhere and nowhere, the earth bucking beneath cannon fire until his teeth rattled and his bones felt loose in his skin.
He remembered Alistair Thorne at his side, the friend who had been closer than a brother since their Eton days.
He remembered the French cavalry officer who had broken through their line, saber raised, heading straight for Alistair with murder in his swing.
Dominic hadn’t thought. Hadn’t calculated or weighed the consequences.
He simply moved. The blade meant for Alistair’s throat caught Dominic across the face instead, opening him from temple to jaw in one clean, terrible stroke.
He went down in a spray of his own blood while the world turned red and then black.
He woke in a field hospital with his face stitched shut and Alistair gone.
Missing. Three days, no word, yet the regiment assumed him dead, though Dominic had refused to believe it.
He’d pulled the bandages from his own face, still seeping, and gone back into the wreckage alone.
Against orders. Against reason. Against every instinct except the one that mattered—Alistair was alive, and Dominic would find him.
He found him.
What happened after that belonged to a locked room in Dominic’s mind, a door he had sealed shut and would not open.
Not for the army chaplain who had asked careful questions.
Not for the regimental surgeon who had noted injuries in Alistair’s file that did not match any known weapon of war.
Not for himself, in the small hours when sleep refused to come and his hands remembered things his mouth would never speak.
The official report said Alistair Thorne had been separated from his regiment and recovered by Viscount Westmore. That was the truth the army needed. The rest of it—the real and ruinous rest of it—Dominic had buried so deep that some days he almost believed it had happened to someone else.
Almost.
Alistair wrote letters now. They arrived every fortnight, full of concern and invitations and gentle prods to rejoin the living.
Dominic read each one, and he could not bring himself to answer a single one.
Every time he saw that handwriting, his hands went cold and the locked door rattled on its hinges, and he had to sit very still until the shaking stopped.
It was not that he didn’t care. It was that he cared so much it had curdled into something he could not name, something that tasted of smoke and iron and a darkness he would carry to his grave.
And Vivienne.
He’d loved her since childhood. She was golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a laugh like bells and a smile that had haunted his dreams through every bloody mile of the campaign.
He’d carried her portrait into battle, pressed against his heart.
He’d written her letters full of longing and promises, fueled by the desperate hope that he would survive to keep them.
She’d been waiting when he returned. She stood in the drawing room of her father’s house, wearing pale blue and looking like an angel descended to welcome him home.
He’d reached for her, but she stepped backward—one step, then two, while her eyes fixed on his face with an expression he’d never seen before.
Horror.
“I cannot marry a monster.” She pressed her lace handkerchief to her mouth, her shoulders trembling as she backed away.
Five months later, she married a baronet with an unmarked face and a comfortable estate in Surrey. Dominic had heard she was expecting their first child.
He shoved the memory away and reached for the package of tarts.
The brown paper crinkled as he unwrapped it, and the scent of cranberry and butter rose to meet him.
He bit into one—and the pastry crumbled perfectly, rich and flaky, yet the cranberry filling was tart-sweet, bright against his tongue. It was exceptional.
The baker had made these—yet he pictured the woman with raven hair escaping its pins in dark wisps.
She had brown eyes too large for her face, set above round cheeks dusted pink from the heat of her ovens.
She had a rosebud mouth that had pursed at him in disapproval.
She’d barely reached his chest. The top of her head might graze his collarbone if she stood close, yet she’d looked up at him the way she could bring him to his knees with a single word.
She hadn’t flinched when she saw his face.
He turned the thought over in his mind, examining it from every angle.
Everyone flinched. Even the servants who had known him since childhood always showed that first moment, that quick flash of shock before training took over and they smoothed their expressions into careful neutrality.
But the baker had simply looked at him as if he were an inconvenience.
The rain had blown something unpleasant into her shop and she was waiting for it to leave.
It was the most refreshing thing anyone had done in two years.
He’d been rude to her. He knew this. He’d called her shop “quaint“ and dropped the sovereign on her counter like a challenge. He’d given her a once-over, noticing the generous swell of her hips beneath that apron and the soft fullness of her figure. He’d seen curves upon curves that his palms itched to learn, and he’d been daring her to react.
It was an old habit, part of the armor he put on without thinking.
If people were going to stare at him like a monster, he might as well act like one.
But she hadn’t backed down. She’d refused his gold. She looked at him the way she’d look at any other customer who’d tracked rain onto her floor. She spoke to him like he was ordinary. To her, his scar was only a scar. It was not a mark that demanded pity or fear.
He didn’t know her name. He hadn’t thought to ask. He hadn’t thought he would care. He shouldn’t return. She was a shopkeeper. She was a widow, judging by the black ribbon at her collar. She was beneath his notice and far beneath his station. He had no reason to go back.
But he reached for another tart. He knew, despite himself, that he would find a reason.