Page 9 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Six years of waiting for the moment Nicholas Bartlett might return with all sorts of plausible explanations as to why he’d been away for so very long and how he had fought hard to be back at her side again, his heart laid at her feet.
The truth of tonight had a sharper edge altogether. Was he just another rake who had simply made a conquest of a young girl with foolishness in her heart? She had offered him exactly what it was he sought—the use of her body for a heady sensual interlude, a brief flirtation that had meant the world to her. Had it meant nothing at all to him?
‘I. Hate. Him.’
He had looked at her like a stranger might, no inkling as to what had passed between them in his bedroom at the Bromley town house, when he had whispered things into her ear that made her turn naked into the warmth of him and allow him everything.
Swallowing hard, she thought she might be sick.
Lucy might never have the promise of a father now, a papa who would fold her in his arms and tell her she meant the world to him and that he would always protect her.
The family she’d imagined to have for years was gone, burst in the bubble of just one look from his velvet-brown eyes and his complete indifference. And the worst thing of all was that she would have to see him again and again both here in the house and at any social occasion because he was her only brother’s best friend.
That thought had her sitting and swiping angrily at her eyes.
She would not waste her tears. She would confront him and tell him that to her it was as if he was dead and that she wished for no more discourse between them.
Then she would leave London for Millbrook and stay there till the hurt began to soften and the fury loosened its hold.
She would survive this. She had to for Lucy’s sake. She had seen other women made foolish by the loss of love and dreams and simply throw their lives away. But not her. She was strong and resolute.
Taking in a shaky breath, she walked over to her writing desk and drew out paper. She would ask to meet him tonight in the summer house in the garden, a place they had met once before in their few heady days of courtship.
She would not be kind and filter out any of the ‘what had been’. She would throw his disloyalty in his face and make him understand that such a betrayal was as loathsome to her as it was hurtful. No. Not that word. She did not wish for Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, to know in any way that he had entirely broken her heart.
