Page 60 of The Heart of an Earl

“You ungrateful little witch.” Just as his fist started to rise to strike her, he pulled back and spun from her, stalking out of the room.

Leaving her. Leaving her alone in her misery.

The side door to the dining room opened and Mr. Charles shuffled into the room, his pace agonizingly slow.

He reached Jules and gently set his crooked fingers on her shoulder. “He shouldn’t have done it like that. I am sorry, child. I didn’t think it my place to tell you. But you deserved better than what his lordship just did. He has been…addled since returning from the West Indies years ago. Losing you, losing her ladyship, it has been…hard. It wasn’t my place, but I should have told you, nonetheless.”

She forced a sad smile onto her face. “Do not fret on it, Mr. Charles.” Her hand lifted, her fingers wrapping over his boney knuckles. “But thank you for saying so.”

“It was a broken heart—he won’t speak to it, but your mother’s heart was broken, never to be repaired. Her ladyship had no will after losing you. She loved you, child. Loved you like no other.”

Jules looked up at him, tears welling in her eyes. “I know, Mr. Charles. I know.”

~~~

Where was Des?

Jules’s fingers played with the edge of the translucent pink drapery as she stared out the window in her mother’s chamber. Clutching the pillow she held to her belly, she sat on the settee she’d dragged over to the south windows two weeks ago. The south windows that faced the drive, the forest.

He said he’d be back.

He swore it.

She had gambled everything—everything on those words.

The only thing she’d wanted—prayed for—for the last six years was to be home. To be normal again. It had been everything. The stupid, naïve dream of a silly girl.

A dream she never should have held onto—for in her heart she’d always known it would never be hers. She just hadn’t been able to admit it to herself.

And now it stared her cruelly in the face.

Everything she had wanted meant nothing. Nothing.

For in that moment in the woods when she turned away from Des to save him from her father, she knew with every fiber of her being that she didn’t want home. Didn’t want normal.

She wanted Des.

Him. He was her normal. He was where she wanted to be. Needed to be.

So where in the hell was he?

Her look moved along the white expanse of snow on the sweeping lawn that unfurled toward the house from the woods along the main road, stopping to trace the gentle curve of the drive to Gatlong Hall as it weaved up the hill.

If Des came—when he came—he would come up the main drive. He wasn’t about to cower from her father—she knew that much of him.

So why hadn’t he shown?

Two weeks and nothing. Nothing.

Not him. Not a note. Not a message from Snowshill.

Nothing.

TheFirehawkwas set to leave port again soon—they had moved on from Plymouth Dock and were about to leave from Portsmouth if she remembered what Captain Folback had told Des. The thought, the doubt—like a dirt-encrusted worm slithering into the back of her brain—surfaced, as much as she had tried to ignore it.

He couldn’t have gone back to theFirehawk, could he?

Abandoned her to go back to the sea?

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