The Blood of a Baron - K.J. Jackson Page 0,51
stare unable to veer from her face as much as he wanted to look away. “I didn’t slide that blade across Morton’s face, but I killed him just the same—I knew what was out there waiting for him in the night, what could happen if I let him walk alone down that street. And it did happen, just as I knew it would. I failed to protect him when I’d sworn I would do so. I killed him.”
Her eyes glassy, her head shook, disbelief making her words vibrate. “You knew what could happen to him and you let him go?”
“I did.”
“Wes…how…how could you do that?”
He’d known the answer the whole time. He’d tried to blame it on his fatigue with Morton’s drinking and gambling and whores, but that wasn’t the whole of it.
Not by far.
During the last weeks he’d tried to wrestle the reason of it out of his mind. Attempted to ignore it. Refused to admit to it. But he could never escape it.
His eyes closed, his head hanging. A breath and he lifted his chin, his look centering on her green-flecked amber eyes. “It was May tenth, Laney.”
“May tenth….May tenth…” The date whispered from her tongue, her lips barely moving.
He exhaled with a nod. “We would have been married seven years on that day.”
Her head shook, her eyes closing to him. “But you forgave him—he said you forgave him.”
His arms flew up at his sides, his voice exploding. “How could I forgive him for taking everything from me—for taking you from me? Tell me how I was ever supposed to forgive that?”
“But you said…but…” She stumbled another step backward, doubling over slightly at the middle as her arms clamped along her belly. Her look jerked up to his. “You haven’t forgiven me either, have you? This week—last night—you haven’t forgiven me?”
His right hand curled into a fist he had to forcibly unflex. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Her words shrieked through the thick air.
“I thought I’d forgiven Morton.” He shrugged, unable to defend himself against it. “I thought I had, but then on that night…he knew the date as well. And he was deep in the swill—so drunk he could barely keep his head up.” A caustic chuckle stuck in his throat. “Did you know that he confessed it to me that night, the real reason why he did it?”
“What are you talking about, Wes?” Her look narrowed at him. “What real reason?”
His eyebrow cocked. “He never told you?”
A hesitation in her movement and then she shook her head.
Wes heaved a sigh, running his fingers across his eyes. “That night that he told me, he was barely conscious. Guilt must have been eating him, for I don’t think he ever would have admitted to it.” His hand fell from his face and his stare bored into her. “He needed to remove you from our engagement. End it before we were married.”
Her head snapped back. “He what? No, he would never.”
“He spent your bloody dowry, Laney.”
“No. He couldn’t have touched it.”
“Yet, he found a way.” His look lifted from her, staring at the crooked branches of the elm trees swaying above them. What he was doing was wrong—the pain it would cause her. Pain he didn’t want to see on her face. But she needed to know. No more secrets.
His gaze centered on her and hardened. “Morton spent it all—wasted it away—and he needed to hide it. From me, from you. From everyone. There wasn’t anything left at that point. He needed to end us and he hadn’t been able to manifest a way to break us up—though he tried. The women he sent my way, hoping I’d slip—the men he’d have approach you at dances. Nothing worked. And then a week before the wedding, you told him.”
Her right hand slid up, over her chest to clutch her bare neck, her words barely audible. “I told him. I told him everything he needed to know to break us.”
Wes nodded, all thunder taken from him. “You told him I was a bastard. The title wasn’t rightfully mine. My parents weren’t married when I was born.”
Her eyes closed and she sank, doubling over. She landed to balance on her heels, her body curling into itself.
Wes stared at her, wanting to go to her, to pick her up, to tuck her onto his chest and take all the pain of it away.
He couldn’t.
Not for how he’d failed Morton. Failed her.
He watched the river next to them for long seconds, watched the foam