Amanda McCabe - The Runaway Countess

But Hayden laughed at her words, as if she had just made some great joke. He let go of her hands and sprawled back on to the steps. ‘Go off to the country now? Jane darling, it’s the very midst of the Season. We can’t possibly leave now.’

‘But it could be—’

Hayden shook his head. ‘Staying in London would do you more good than burying yourself in the country. You should go to parties with me again, enjoy yourself. Everyone expects it of you, of us.’

‘Go to parties as you do?’ Jane said bitterly as her faint, desperate hope faded away. Nothing had changed. Nothing would change.

‘Yes, as I do. As my parents always did,’ he said. ‘It’s better than wallowing in misery alone at home.’

Jane wrapped her arms around herself, feeling suddenly hollow and empty. Cold. ‘I am tired. Perhaps I will go away by myself to visit my sister. Poor Emma writes that she doesn’t like her school and I miss her. I just need some time away from London. I want to go home to Barton Park for a while.’

Hayden closed his eyes as if he was weary of her and this conversation. Weary of her emotions. ‘If you like, of course. You will have to return before our end-of-Season ball, though. Everyone expects that.’

Jane nodded, but she already knew she would not be back for any ball. She couldn’t return to this life at all. She needed to find her own soul again, even if she couldn’t make Hayden see that he needed to save his.

He gave a faint snore and Jane looked down to find that he had drifted to sleep right there on the stairs, in the middle of their conversation. His face looked so beautiful and peaceful, a faint smile on his lips as if he had already floated out of her life and into the one he had chosen for himself long before he met her. She leaned down and softly kissed his cheek and smoothed back his hair one last time.

‘I’m sorry, Hayden,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive me.’

She rose to her feet and stepped over him, going back to her chamber and closing the door quietly behind her. It didn’t even make a sound in the vast house that had never really been hers.

Hayden stared up at the ceiling far above his head, not seeing the elaborate, cake-icing whorls of white plaster. He barely felt the hard press of the stairs at his back, either, or the familiar feeling of a headache growing behind his eyes. All he could see, all he could think about, was Jane.

He closed his eyes and listened carefully, but she was long gone. There was only silence since she had tiptoed away and softly closed her chamber door behind her. Even his butler, Makepeace, had given up on him and left him lying there on the stairs. Cold air swept around him from the marble floor of the hall.

He had truly become what he never wanted to be—his parents.

Not that he was really like his father, oh, no. The elder earl had been all about responsibility and proper family appearances. It was Hayden’s mother who had liked the parties, liked the forgetfulness of being in a noisy crowd. But they had both liked brandy and port too much and it killed his father in the end.

His mother, rest her giddy soul, was done in by childbirth, trying one last time to give his father another son.

A spasm of raw, burning pain flashed through Hayden as he remembered Jane’s face, as white as the sheets she lay on after the first baby was gone, thin and drawn with pain.

‘We can try again, Hayden,’ she had said, reaching for his hand. ‘The doctor says I am truly healthy, there’s no reason it won’t work next time. Please, Hayden, please stay with me.’

And he’d taken her trembling hand, murmured all the right, reassuring things, but inside he was shouting—not again . Never again. He couldn’t hurt her again, couldn’t see her go through what his mother had.

When he first saw Jane, saw the young, hopeful light in her pretty hazel eyes and the sweet pink blush in her cheeks, he felt something he had thought long dead stir inside of him. A curiosity, maybe, an excitement about life And what might happen next. It was more intoxicating than any wine, that feeling Jane gave him. And when he touched her hand, when she smiled up at him…

He only wanted that feeling she gave him to last for ever. He had to have her and he never stopped to think of the consequences. Until he was forced to.

He’d done Jane a great wrong in marrying her so quickly after they met, before she could see the real him. No matter what he did now it seemed he could not make her happy. He couldn’t even see what she wanted, needed. She always looked at him so expectantly, so sadly, with those eyes of hers, as if she was waiting for something from him. Something he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

So he ran back to what he did know, his friends and their never-ending parties. And Jane grew sadder, especially when the babies were lost. Three of them now.

Hayden pushed himself slowly to his feet and made his careful way up the stairs. There was no sound beyond Jane’s door, just that perfect, echoing silence. He pushed the door open and peered inside.

Jane lay on her side in the middle of the satin-draped bed countesses had slept in for decades. Her palm was tucked under her cheek, her thick, dark braid snaking over her shoulder. The moonlight fell over her face and he saw she was frowning even in her sleep. She looked so small, so vulnerable and alone.

Hayden knew he had let her down very badly. But he vowed he would never do it again, no matter what he had to do. Even if it meant letting her go.

‘I promise you, Jane,’ he whispered as she stirred in her sleep. ‘I will never hurt you again.’

Three Years Later

Was it an earthquake in London?

That was surely the only explanation for the blasted pounding noise, because Hayden knew that no one in his household would dare to disturb him with such a sound in the middle of the night.

He rolled over on to his back in the tangled bedclothes and opened his eyes to stare up at the dark green canopy above his head. Pinpricks of light were trickling around the edges of the tightly closed window curtains, but surely it was still the middle of the night. He remembered coming home from the club with Harry and Edwards, stumbling through the streets singing, and somehow he had made it up the stairs and into bed. Alone.

Now he felt the familiar ache behind his eyes, made worse by that incessant banging noise.

The room itself wasn’t shaking. He could see that now that he forced himself to be still. So it wasn’t an earthquake. Someone was knocking at the bedroom door.

‘Damn it all!’ he shouted as he pushed himself off the bed. ‘It is the middle of the night.’

‘If you will beg pardon, my lord, you will find it is actually very near noon,’ Makepeace said, calmly but firmly, from the other side of the door.

‘The hell it is,’ Hayden muttered. He found his breeches tangled up amid the twisted bedclothes and impatiently jerked them on. His shirt was nowhere to be found.

He glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel, and saw that Makepeace was quite right. It was going on noon. He raked his hands through his tangled hair and jerked open the door.

‘Someone had better be dead,’ he said.

Makepeace merely blinked, his round, jowly face solemn as usual. He had been with Hayden’s family for many years, having been promoted to butler even before Hayden’s parents died when he was twelve. Makepeace had seen too much in the Fitzwalter household to ever be surprised.

‘To my knowledge, my lord, no one has shuffled off this mortal coil yet,’ Makepeace said. ‘This letter just arrived.’

He held out his silver tray, which held one small, neatly folded missive. Hayden stared at it in disbelief.