Sometime after she had come to grips with the fact that he was living in the house they had once meant to share.
Dear God, Reese. There was a day she thought never to see him again. Rumors had surfaced. Reese, a major in the cavalry, was missing in action somewhere in the Crimea. There were whispers he was dead. Then he had returned and the news had swept the countryside.
He was back at Briarwood, wounded in the war and retired from the army. He was home, living just a few miles from Aldridge Park. She should have been prepared and yet seeing him today … seeing the hatred in his brilliant blue eyes, made her chest squeeze with guilt and regret.
She knew how much he hated her. If she hadn’t already been certain, she would have seen it in his icy stare today. Every pore in his sun-bronzed face exuded loathing. Every angry thought seemed to reach her across the distance between them. She hadn’t seen him since that day nearly eight years ago that he had come home on leave and discovered she had wed another man.
Not since the day he had called her a whore and vowed that one day she would pay for her lies and deceit.
She had paid. Dear God, she had paid every day since she had married Edmund Holloway. She had done as her father demanded and wed a man not of her choosing.
But she had never stopped loving Reese.
Her heart squeezed. She thought of his hard, handsome features, so masculine, so incredibly attractive. In some ways, he looked the same as he had as a young man of twenty, tall and black-haired, his body hard-muscled and lean, his features sharply defined.
And yet he was a completely different man. He had been a little shy in his courtship of her, a little uncertain. Now he wore his masculinity like a comfortable shirt; it was clear in his unwavering stare, the way his gaze too boldly assessed her. There was a harshness in his features that hadn’t been there when he was young, and a confidence and raw sense of authority that only made him more attractive.
“Mama …?”
Jared’s small voice reached her from across the carriage. “Yes, sweetheart?” A headache had begun to form behind her eyes and she rubbed her temple against the pain.
“Who was that man?” Her son sat quietly on the opposite seat, his voice little more than a whisper. He wouldn’t be talking at all, she knew, if he hadn’t sensed her distress.
She forced herself to smile and patted the seat beside her. Jared scooted next to her and she settled an arm around his small shoulders.
“Major Dewar is an old friend, sweetheart.” A complete and utter falsehood. The man loathed her and she didn’t blame him. “He just got out of the army and he is returned to his home.”
Jared just looked at her. He didn’t ask more, simply gazed at her with his deep-set brown eyes, soulful eyes, she thought. Eyes far too worldly for a child so young, and far too full of loneliness.
Managing a smile, she began to point out the sights along the road as the carriage moved down the lane that cut through the rolling fields. It was mid-September, the leaves turning orange, gold and red. Two small boys played along the roadside tossing a ball back and forth, and Elizabeth pointed them out to Jared.
“Doesn’t that look like fun? You like to play ball. Perhaps one of Mrs. Clausen’s sons will play with you this afternoon.” Mrs. Clausen was the housekeeper, a dear woman raising her daughter’s orphaned grandsons, boys eight and nine years old. They liked Jared, but because of his shyness, rarely sought him out. “Why don’t you ask them when we get home?”
Jared said nothing, but his gaze remained on the boys and the look in his eyes made a lump rise in her throat. As long as he remained at Aldridge Park, Jared would never come out of the shell he had built to protect himself. It was one more reason she had to leave.
Not leave, Elizabeth silently corrected. Escape.
As long as her brother-in-law and his wife, Mason and Frances Holloway, lived at Aldridge Park, she was a prisoner in her own home.
Her headache continued to worsen, pounding away inside her skull as it often did these days. She was afraid of Mason. He was the sort of man who stood a little too close, touched her a little too often. She needed to leave, but she was certain he would simply come after her. She had no idea how far he would go to keep her and Jared—now the Earl of Aldridge—under his control. But she was certain there was little he would not do.
She was frightened. Not only for herself but for her son.
An image arose of Reese Dewar, strong, capable, a veteran of the war, the sort of man who would protect his family no matter the cost.
But Reese wasn’t her husband and never would be.
And she had no one to blame but herself.
Reese returned to Briarwood, his mood dark and brooding. He tried not to think of Elizabeth but he couldn’t seem to get her out of his head. What was there about her? How had she managed to keep a stranglehold over him for so many years? Why had no other woman been able to pierce the wall of his heart as she had done?
His manservant, Timothy Daniels, a brawny young corporal who had served with him for several years before being injured and sent home, arrived in the study just then.
“You are returned,” Daniels said. “Is there anything you need, sir?” Tim had been out of work and hungry when he had appeared at Reese’s door. In a few short weeks, he had become dedicated to Reese’s welfare. With this damnable leg slowing him down, Reese was glad to have a man he could count on.
“I’m fine, Tim.”
“Let me know if you need me.”
Reese scowled. “I imagine I can survive a few hours studying these bloody damned ledgers.” Though in truth, he hated paperwork and would far rather be out of doors, which Timothy, being a military man, seemed to understand.
“Aye, sir. Like I said—”
“That will be all, corporal.” Growing tired of the young man’s overprotectiveness, Reese snapped out the words in his firmest military voice.
“Aye, sir.” The door closed quietly, leaving Reese alone in the wood-paneled room. The study was his sanctuary, a comfortable chamber lined with books, a warm, inviting, masculine place where a fire blazed in the hearth and he could insulate himself from the memories that crept into other parts of the house.
In the days of their courtship, Elizabeth had been to Briarwood more than once. She loved the ivy that covered the white plaster walls of the manor and hung from the porch outside the front door, she had said. She loved the steep slate roof with its whimsical chimney pots that made the house look like a fairy tale dwelling.
She had made plans to paint the drawing room a pale shade of rose and add lace curtains, to hang flowered silk wallpaper behind the sofa. She loved the master’s suite, she told him, loved how sunny it was, the way it looked out over the garden. She couldn’t wait to share his big four-poster bed, a gift his grandfather had commissioned for his bride-to-be.
That thought led to one he didn’t wish to recall and his loins began to fill. Bloody hell. All these years and seeing her once made him want her again. He forced himself to remember the way she had told him how much she loved him and how happy she would be to live at Briarwood as his wife.
Lies. All of them.
Just weeks after he had left for his assignment in London, she had broken her promise to marry him. Instead she had wed an earl, a man of untold wealth, and abandoned the younger son of a duke, a man who could provide a pleasant home and sufficient income but would never be extravagantly rich.
Reese ground his jaw. Since his return, thoughts of Elizabeth had begun to haunt him, memories he had buried years ago. Two days after he had discovered the news of her marriage, he had left Wiltshire County for good, gone back to London and asked to serve in the cavalry, knowing he would be assigned to duty somewhere far from English shores.
If he hadn’t