Page 150 of Ironvine

No, I have no right to call you by that precious name, yet only you are my beloved now and always.

The thick putrid air of self-loathing gives way to the brisk biting air of contrition. My heart no longer beats the way it once did, once and only with you.

I await word from you to live again. Until then I am haunted, I am ruined.

Ever yours,

Hugh

Charles’s heart drummed in his chest as his gaze jumped from word to word. Sorrows to passions to pleading.

This was Hugh?

He’d never known his brother to be so…emotional. Indeed, emotionally vulnerable in any way. So intense in his writing. Positively genuine and genuinely heartbroken.

He read the letter again.He truly loved her.He knew of love. Love and affection that he and Father always mocked. That Charles had forced himself to learn to live without because it only led to misfortune, to ugliness.

All this time he thought his brother was simply besotted by lust and his own arrogance of having landed the Duchess of Oakley. But this…he clutched at the paper…was not arrogance. This was humility and repentance and bloody despair. And honesty.

Hugh was deeply and truly in love with her.

And he felt remorse for shooting him.

This was not the Hugh he’d always known—his brother was aloof and confident, sailing through his days on self-satisfaction. Nothing wrinkled his sails, he never allowed it to. Under their father’s roof, both boys had learned that sharing one’s feelings was not done. It seemed to have come easy to Hugh whilst Charles had struggled, but eventually learned the lesson.

The paper shuddered in his grip as his lungs constricted. Hugh’s written lines swam on the page.

A hand pressed into his back. “My darling?”

His chest caved in at the sound of Georgie’s voice, an ache twisting the very core of him. No words came to him. He held out the letter to her.

“May I, Your Grace?” she asked.

“Yes, read it,” replied the Duchess.

As she read, Georgina’s hand slid around Charles’s wounded arm, and the aching sting in his arm softened, the burning tension in his limbs released.

Charles was proud of his brother in a way he had never been before and never imagined he ever would be. He bore a scar on his arm to show for it. A scar that would always remind him of weakness, desperation, regret, sacrifice, and love.

Love above all. Love most of all.

“This—this was my Hugh,” Her Grace breathed, her eyes gleaming.

Yes, her Hugh.Not his. Not their father’s. To him, to the world, his brother had been somewhat selfish, wholly unsentimental. But he’d loved. With all his weaknesses bared, he’d loved.

Georgina gave the Duchess the letter. “I find it a terrible yet beautiful sort of justice that Amanda’s downfall was Hugh’s love.”

Georgina was right, wasn’t she? His heart thudded in his chest, a heart he had forced to lay dormant, to become stagnant, cold, and brackish for years, now beat hard and fast and flowed with warmth.

“Georgie,” he breathed, digging his hands in her loose hair.

Georgie. His woman, his wife, his Countess of Ryvves.

His love.

A riot of feeling and emotion blustered through him. Feeling and emotion that had been dammed for centuries.

Damn it all.

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