Page 95 of A Duke for Hire

“Why are you doing this?” She asked, her voice breaking as her heart cracked in two. As much as she despised him for the pain he’d caused, she realized that she hated seeing him in pain much more.

“Because I do love you, Seraphina,” he confessed, “And because you deserve to know the entire truth.”

Seraphina drew in a shaky breath and looked away from him, unable to take the pain in his eyes. She took in the staggering difference of the warm, beautiful garden surrounding them and the cold, ugly pain that consumed them from within. Something needed to end. One way or another.

“Very well,” she agreed at last. “Let us walk. Let us talk. And let us discover what we are to do about our futures.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“The morning I left? I found you cold and bloody beside me.” Hugo began.

Seraphina’s brows flew up in surprise as she leaned back in the ivy-covered gazebo he’d brought her to.

“I believe I would have remembered if such a thing had happened, Hugo.”

A small ripple of relief fluttered through him. She was calling him Hugo again. That was something.

“Not in reality,” he conceded. “But in my nightmares, I had done the worst possible thing a man could do to a woman he loved.”

“A nightmare,” Seraphina sighed, relaxing if only a little, “So you murdered me in your nightmare.”

“No, I don’t even think I did that,” Hugo ventured, still trying to find the right words. The dream started out with me as a young boy, being beaten by my father. Then it shifted to the night I nearly killed Charles- Leah’s former beau. In the final shift it transformed into you. It was like a—a vision. A warning that someday I could do that to you. That the rage I felt then would consume me now.”

He looked over at her, and saw Seraphina staring at him in rapt attention.

“The anger, the fury that resounded in me that night. It showed me what I was capable of. Before it had happened, Leah and I were living together again, making our way back to knowing one another after years of being apart. But after that night I sent her back here. I pushed her away like I pushed you away, terrified I would unleash that ferocity again without being able to control it.”

Seraphina seemed to contemplate what he said for a moment.

“Do you have these nightmares often?”

He nodded.

“Almost every night. That is why I insisted we not sleep together before. But you had never been in them until the night we made love.”

Hugo pressed his eyes shut tightly, bracing himself for his next admission.

“There’s one more thing,” he rasped, forcing his eyes open.

Seraphina tried to meet his gaze but this time he couldn’t. The shame was too great.

“One night, several years ago when I did drink, I was at a certain type of party with Everett and Dominic. I was having fun in the way young men do with certain ladies of the evening and for the first time in my life, I fell asleep in the same bed as someone else.

“I was too drunk to stop myself and just…passed out beside the woman.”

Hugo’s stomach roiled as he recalled that night, but he forced himself to continue.

“My nightmares came, and though I was asleep, my body acted as it did that night of the duel. The woman had been able to—to escape me, but I had completely destroyed that room in my sleepwalking. I woke up to Everett and Dominic restraining me, screaming at me to wake up.

“I never drank in excess again, nor did I sleep in the same bed with another person. Until you. Until that night.”

“So when you saw me in your nightmare, bloodied and beaten,” Seraphina worked out aloud, “You thought you had actually done it.”

Hugo nodded.

“It took several minutes to distinguish reality from dream,” he explained. “I cannot begin to explain the panic and heartache I felt in those moments. Seraphina. When I thought I was responsible for hurting you like that and I- I…I lost my mind.”

“Oh,Hugo,” she whispered.

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