Dark Deceptions: A Regency and Medieval Collection of Dark Romances(82)

Adam quirked a brow.

“Nicholas,” his mother murmured. She gave a slight shake of her head.

Ever the earl, Nick ignored her. “You married Georgina against our better wishes. We all but pleaded with you to set the woman aside, but you were adamant. You were insistent. It is now clear to us—”

“And all the ton,” mother said beneath her breath.

Nick ignored her and continued, “…that you merely married Georgina because you were nursing a broken heart for Viscount Blakely’s daughter.”

Adam ground his teeth, fighting the urge to cross over, drag Nick up by the lapels of his coat and throw him from the room. Nick knew nothing about what plagued Adam but believed he possessed some kind of insight that gave him leave to speak candidly about Adam’s marriage.

“That’s right. I’m bitter because I loved and lost Blakely’s daughter,” he mocked.

The truth has more to do with the fact that I loved and lost my own wife.

Mother stifled a gasp behind her hand. “Adam, you are destroying your reputation.”

He spun on his heel. “Is that what has you worried, Mother? My reputation?” He snarled the last word at her.

Nick surged to his feet. “Do not speak to her in that tone.”

Tears filled his mother’s eyes and a wave of guilt hit him. “We are worried about you, Adam,” she whispered. “I wish you’d never met that woman. Either of them. But you did, and you are married to Georgina. You must put aside your differences. If you don’t, it will destroy you.” A hauntingly prophetic note hung on those last words.

Adam shoved down the unnerving sensation roiling in his gut. He bowed his head. “I’ll try.”

For as long as I’m wed to Georgina.

His heart turned over at the thought of her absent from his life.

“No more whiskey,” Nick instructed.

Adam nodded. The moment Georgina had fled his office like a scared rabbit he’d decided he’d taken his last drink. He’d wallowed in spirits long enough to know they were not erasing any of the bleeding hurt. “No more spirits,” he pledged.

Mother clapped her hands, a smile on her face. “Excellent! I shall call for tea so we might celebrate!”

She rang for a servant, who materialized almost instantly.

When the servant hurried off, Nick looked Adam square in the eyes. “I was determined to not like Georgina from the moment you all but dragged her from Middlesex Hospital. I’d decided early on that she was unworthy of you, brother.”

A defense sprang to Adam’s lips.

Nick held a hand up. “I believe I was wrong. To have faced down the gossips as she did that night took real courage. I think you can give this marriage a go. Even if you still love another woman.”

I don’t still love another woman. The only woman I love is my wife.

All he said, however, was, “Thank you.”

Nick nodded. Tension seemed to leave his broad shoulders and he managed a half-grin for Adam. “Tony bade me give you a message.”

“Oh?”

“He said you’re a bloody fool, and he can’t come around because if he did, he would lay you low.”

Adam grinned. “Oh, he did, did he?”

Nick smiled back. “He’s quite taken with your wife.”

Adam was saved from answering by the reappearance of the servant with a tray bearing a steaming porcelain pot and three fragile chintz glasses.

As Adam sat down to take tea with his family, he was forced to silently acknowledge to himself, that Tony wasn’t the only one taken with Georgina.





Chapter 24





Georgina wished her orders from the duke had come another day.

She wished Jamie’s note had never arrived.

If they hadn’t, she would have remained ensconced in her chambers and wouldn’t have been on the main level of the house. If she hadn’t been on the main level of the house, she wouldn’t have heard the voices coming from her husband’s library.

The earl exclaimed, “You merely married Georgina because you were nursing a broken heart for Viscount Blakely’s daughter.”

Adam’s reply ripped through her. “That’s right. I’m bitter because I loved and lost Blakely’s daughter.”

Georgina stood, back pressed against the wall outside the library. She fisted a hand against her mouth, biting the top of her hand to keep from crying out as she listened to the very candid exchange between brothers and mother.

“Excellent!” the countess said. “I shall call for tea.”

The words jolted life into Georgina’s petrified legs, jerking her from the trance that had held her immobile. Nothing, however, could drive back the easy camaraderie between Adam and his family as he’d so casually spoken of his love for Grace. It shouldn’t have come as any great surprise that he still loved her. Georgina had watched him toil over a sketchpad, filling page after page with the woman’s haunting beauty.

What cleaved Georgina’s heart in two was the loathing Adam reserved for her. She could never win his heart. It had seemed like an impossibility before when she’d been Georgina the maid. Now…nothing she could do or say would ever ease the repugnance her husband had shown since he’d learned the truth of her paternity. Choking on a sob, Georgina ran down the hall and all but collided with a servant.