Sophia James - A Secret Consequence For The Viscount

* * *

Ten minutes later he saw her coming through the drifts of dirty snow, a small figure wrapped in a thick shawl that fell almost to her knees. The moon was out and the wind had dropped and in the silence all about it was as if they were the only two people left in the world.

Her face was flushed from cold as she came in, shutting the glass door behind her. In here the chill was lessened, whether from the abundance of green plant life or just good building practice, he knew not which. When she spoke though he could see a cloud of mist after each word.

‘Thank you for coming.’

‘You thought I would not?’

She ignored that and rushed on. ‘I was more than surprised to see you tonight. I don’t know why you would wish for all those years of silence and no contact whatsoever, but—’

‘It was not intentional, Lady Eleanor. My memory was lost.’

Her eyes widened at this truth and she swallowed, hard.

‘I must have been hit over the head, as there was a sizeable lump there for a good time afterwards. As a result of the injury my memory was compromised.’

She now looked plainly shocked. ‘How much of it exactly? How much did you lose?’

‘Everything that happened to me before I disappeared was gone for many years. A month ago I retrieved most of my history but still...there are patches.’

‘Patches?’

‘The week before my disappearance and a few days after have gone entirely. I cannot seem to remember any of it.’

She turned at that, away from the moonlight so that all her face was in shadow. She seemed slighter than she had done a few hours earlier. Her hands trembled as she caught them together before her.

‘Everything?’

‘I am hoping it will come back, but...’ He stopped, because he could not know if this was a permanent state or a temporary one.

‘How was your cheek scarred?’

‘Someone wants me dead. They have tried three times to kill me now and I doubt that will cease until I identify the perpetrators.’

‘Why? Why should you be such a target?’

‘I have lived in the shadows for a long time, even before I left England, and have any number of enemies. Some I can identify, but others I can’t.’

‘A lonely place to be in.’

‘And a dangerous one.’

‘You are different now, Lord Bromley.’ She gave him those words quietly. ‘More distant. A harder man. Almost unrecognisable.’

He laughed, the sound discordant, but here in the night there was a sense of honesty he had not felt in a long, long time. Even his friends had tiptoed around his new reality and tried to find the similarities with what had been before. Lady Eleanor did not attempt to be diplomatic at all as she had asked of his cheek and his circumstances and there was freedom in such truth.

He felt a pull towards her that was stronger than anything he had ever known before and stiffened, cursing beneath his breath. She was Jacob’s younger sister and he could offer her nothing. He needed to be careful.

‘I am less whole, I think.’ His good hand gestured at his face. ‘Less trusting.’

‘Like me,’ she returned in a whisper. ‘Just the same.’

And when her blue eyes met his, he saw the tears that streamed down her cheeks, sorrow, anger and grief written all over her face.

He touched her then. He took her hand into his own to try to give the coldness some warmth. A small hand with bitten-down nails. There was a ring on the third finger, encrusted diamonds in gold.

‘Was he a good man, your husband?’

‘I thought so.’

‘Then I am sorry for it.’

At that she snatched her fingers from his grasp and turned. She was gone before he could say another word, a shadow against the hedgerows, small and alone.

Why had she asked him here? What had she said that could not have been discussed in the breakfast salon in the morning? Why had she risked such a meeting in the very dead of night just to ask of his health?

Nothing made any sense.

* * *

Everything was now dangerous.

Nicholas being here, the desperate people who were chasing him, the new man he had become at the expense of the one he had been.

She barely recognised him inside or out. He looked different and he sounded different. Bigger. More menacing. Distant. And yet...when he had taken her hand into his she had felt the giddy rush of want and desire.

‘Nicholas.’ She whispered his name into the night as she sat by the fire.

‘Amnesia.’ She breathed the word quietly, hating the sound of it.

Lucy had been her priority for all the years of their apartness. She had risked her social standing, her family’s acceptance and her future for her daughter and if there was even a slight chance that Nicholas could place her in danger then Eleanor was not prepared to take it.

He had said the perpetrators had attacked him three times already and had looked as though he expected a fourth or a fifth or a sixth. What was it she had heard him say to her brother just a few hours ago as she had over-listened to their conversation in the library?

‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you or your family...’

If she told him the truth about that week before he disappeared, would he want to be back in their lives? Did she want to risk telling him of their closeness, knowing so little about him? He was a stranger to her now, so perhaps she should wait to discover what kind of man he was before revealing a secret so huge it would change all their lives for ever.

These thoughts tumbled around and around in her mind, going this way and that. If he had just looked at her for a second as he used to, she knew she would have capitulated and let him know everything. But this new Nicholas was altered and aloof, the indifference in his eyes crushing.

Lucy was now her priority. As a mother she needed to make decisions that would protect her child. She had not told another soul about her relationship with Nicholas. Jacob had been distraught from the loss of his friend and she thought he might not cope with another heartbreak and scandal. She had never seen her brother so broken.

And so she had told her family nothing of the father and lover and instead, with their help, had removed to Scotland and away from prying eyes.

Goodness, those years had been hard, she thought, and shook her head. She had been so lonely she might have simply died, there in Edinburgh in the house Jacob had set her up in waiting until she could return to Millbrook for the birth of her child. A terrible secret, a dreadful scandal and all the hope of what could have been disappeared as completely as Nicholas Bartlett had.

Blighted by her own stupidity, she’d lived in sadness until the first look at the face of her daughter had banished any regret.

On her return she found Jacob had concocted a story of a husband who had died and that she was now a grieving young widow with a small child in tow. She had become Eleanor Robertson at the stroke of a pen, the name being a common and unremarkable one, though she never thought of herself as such and used Huntingdon when signing letters to anyone she knew well. Oh, granted, she realised that many people did not believe such a fabrication, but nobody made a fuss of it either. She was a duke’s daughter with land and money of her own and in the very few times she’d returned to the city she found the few friends she still did have to be generally accepting of her circumstances.

A fragile existence that only took the renewed appearance of Nicholas Bartlett to break it down completely. But this missing week seemed well established in his mind and he himself had said it had been a month since any recall had returned.

Which meant no other memories had crept back in. She did not know enough about the state of amnesia to have a certainty of anything, but tomorrow she would go to Lackington, Allen & Co. and look up the files under the medical section of the library. Knowledge would aid her.