The Earl of Hearts by Donna Lea Simpson

Author:Donna Lea Simpson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Beyond the Page
Published: 2014-07-04T21:00:00+00:00

Eight

Two days of stony silence were all Charmian could stand. She wrung her hands together and stood outside of Hart’s library, undecided, and yet knowing she had to do something to repair the damage she had unwittingly done. Again, she had already taken a step and would do more, but it was in the nature of a desperate act now, and not with any real hope that it would solve things. For all she knew the situation, as bad as it was, could get worse. But she couldn’t do anything if he would not talk to her.

She abruptly pushed open the door and strode in but then stopped, bleakly staring at her brother, sitting by the fireless grate, his head in his hands in a position of abject misery. Her heart spasmed in shared pain. She crossed the floor and knelt by him.

“Hart, please forgive me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“How could you think that?” His voice was muffled.

“It’s been eleven years! Hart, I thought that if you could just meet face–to-face you would get over it, could move forward with your life instead of remaining mired in the past.”

“What do you know?”

She stood. “I know what it is like to lose someone I loved.” Damn him and his self-pity! Angry, she paced to the window and glared out at the frosted landscape. Clamping down on her lip didn’t help. She was still just as angry. She whirled. “For God’s sake, Hart, she was seventeen, a child! Your wounds were raw and ugly and she was frightened.”

“I know that,” he said wearily, raising his face. Sunlight touched the puckered edge of the scars and he closed his eyes. “But I can’t forgive it. I just can’t. She had promised to love me forever. I should have known it was all just words, but I was a sentimental fool at two-and-twenty. Even then, if she had met me as an adult and an equal after all these years I could have forgiven her, but instead she hoaxed me, made a fool of me by pretending to . . . I thought . . .” He groaned and buried his face in his hands again.

Charmian returned to his side and knelt by him. “What did you think, Hart? What?”

He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t confess that just for a moment, before she revealed herself, he thought he might have found a woman to love again, to care for and who could care for him. Fool! He didn’t believe in love. All sentimental claptrap, as he was fond of saying. He stayed silent.

“She said she was not going to do that. She said she would not continue the charade after the first few minutes, that she wanted to confess who she was almost immediately so she could talk to you.”

“I knew you did not put her up to it. It was all her own selfish plan.” He missed the guilty expression on his sister’s face as he still stared into the empty grate.

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