Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(45)

When the news of his father’s death had been forced upon him, it had been like something coming from another lifetime. One in which he was no longer interested. He had treated it as mere information, to be dealt with later. Now later had come. Though he had still not dealt with that death emotionally. Just as he had not dealt with thousands of other deaths he had witnessed. He had killed emotion while he was driving his curricle away from Ravenswood and then Cartref all those years ago.

He had not thought of Cartref or any of the people living there since.

It was impossible to know what sort of welcome he would receive at Ravenswood. Or what he would have to offer in return. They were all strangers to him now, the people living there, as he would be to them. People he had once loved. But what was love? He no longer knew or wanted to know. He thought suddenly of Idris Rhys, his closest friend while they were both growing up and a little beyond their growing years too. If Idris had written to him after he left, it was Ben who would have opened the letter and perhaps replied to it. Though it was doubtful Idris had written. He had not been happy during their final encounter. And his very words came back, as though they had been spoken yesterday.

Dev, he had said just before Devlin climbed to the seat of his curricle beside Ben on that final morning, you have broken her heart, and it will go hard with her. Don’t do it, man. Find some other course of action. There is bound to be something. Dad will help you. I will help you. Just don’t be an idiot. It always has to be all or nothing with you, though, doesn’t it?

Her.

You have broken her heart.

And just like that, his thoughts landed where they had always least wanted to go.

Upon Gwyneth Rhys.

She would be twenty-four now. Undoubtedly married. But not to someone local, he hoped. He would rather not see her again. Perhaps she had married someone from Wales, where she had gone each year with her parents and Idris to visit relatives. Or where they had used to go. Who knew what changes might have happened in the past six years?

. . . and it will go hard with her.

If she had allowed her heart to be broken after a one-day courtship and one inexpert kiss, then the more fool she. He did not think Gwyneth was a fool, though. She would have shaken him off, like dust from her bare feet, and run laughing into the wind, her dark hair streaming out behind her. Then she would have found someone else. Not Nick, though. His brother had left home soon after he had, and unlike Devlin, he had not sold out when the wars ended. He was probably in Paris with his regiment at this moment.

The carriage brought them inexorably closer to Ravenswood, and Devlin thought for the thousandth time that he really did not want to be doing this. But he no longer had any choice. The wars were done, he was no longer Captain Ware of the 95th, and duty was calling him in another direction. He was the Earl of Stratton.

He could not even think of Ravenswood as his. He could not imagine his mother as she might be now, forty-six years old and widowed. He could not picture his brother and sisters, the younger ones, who would all have grown up since he left. Even Stephanie would be on the brink of womanhood.

Had he changed the course of all their lives beyond recognition? Perhaps even beyond bearing? But how could he not have? On one perfect day at the end of July in 1808 they had all been at a Ravenswood fete, living the grand illusion—one close, happy family in the midst of happy extended family members and neighbors. Not a cloud in their sky, either literally or figuratively. But before that day was over, the illusion had been shattered, possibly beyond repair. And the very next day the two oldest sons, one the heir to the earldom, the other the steady, competent steward of the estate, had been gone, never to return. Not for six long years anyway. How could everything not have changed drastically from that day on? Even before the death of the earl. And certainly after it.

And had he, Devlin, been solely responsible for it all? Or had that been on his father? Devlin still did not know the answer. Perhaps because in six years he had not asked. Nor had he seen the effects of what had happened on that fateful evening—or heard about them. By his own choice.

A man of extremes, Ben had once called him, with no tolerance for what went on in the middle, between the two extremes, where most people did their living. Was he still that man of extremes? He did not even know.

He glanced at the child asleep on Ben’s lap beside him, her cheeks flushed, her mouth partly open, her cocked thumb fallen out of it. She was now almost a year and a half old. Ben had played with her with what seemed to Devlin like infinite patience after their stop for luncheon until she succumbed to the motion of the carriage. Ben loved that child with all the quiet passion of his steadfast heart. For a moment Devlin felt the soreness of unshed tears at the back of his throat because he had not loved for a long, long time. He had lusted and enjoyed, liked and respected, but he had not loved. He did not believe he ever could again. He had not died on the Peninsula, but something in him had.

Ben must have felt his brother’s eyes on him. “I will not be staying for long, Dev,” he said.

Ah. Devlin had wondered about that but had been a bit afraid to ask. It had become too ingrained in them that nothing concerning home be as much as mentioned between them. Almost as though their history as brothers had been erased and only the fact of it remained. They were brothers. Ben had tried a couple of times in the first year or so to mention a letter that had come from some member of the family, sometimes addressed to him, sometimes to Devlin, but when his brother had not asked for details, he had not volunteered any. Soon he had stopped even mentioning letters.