The Blood of a Baron - K.J. Jackson Page 0,12
to the door, stepping out into the hallway.
Five steps to her door, and she slipped into her room.
Five of the stiffest steps she’d ever taken, but she made it. Made it to her room.
Made it and managed to close her door before she crumpled to the floor.
Made it before she was weak.
For she wasn’t about to let Wes ever see her like that again—weak.
She’d fight until the end before ever descending into that humiliation again.
{ Chapter 6 }
Wes leaned against the frame of his doorway, watching Laney sway, her blond hair in a loose braid swinging across her back. She nearly tripped on her own rigid toes as she made it back to her room.
He doubted she even knew he was watching her.
Truce over.
Just where he wanted her. Exhausted. Beaten.
It would hearten his commitment to vengeance more if she hadn’t looked so tired. So damned forlorn.
The hollow in his heart that had stuck firmly in his chest for the last seven years didn’t budge at seeing her like this. If anything, the emptiness only gouged deeper.
The woman had betrayed him—taken his title, his estate, his entire life away from him. She’d been the one person that could crush him—and she’d done just that. In the mess of it all, it’d been her callous betrayal that had been the impetus sending him onto a fury-fueled journey around the world, the sea the only thing offering him battles—blood—at every turn.
He’d needed those battles, needed to down men without regard to right or wrong.
He’d needed it so he didn’t come back to England and kill her.
If it had been anyone else that had taken him down—he could have accepted it, accepted everything that had happened.
But it wasn’t just anyone. It was Laney.
The girl he’d fallen in love with when he was just thirteen.
The woman he’d bedded days before their wedding because neither one of them could hold fast against the carnal air between them—whether they’d been alone or in a roomful of people. It’d always been the same. A current of lust running between them that had tuned his every nerve, every muscle to every movement she made, every word she uttered. Her smile. Her laugh.
Everything he now wanted to destroy in her.
He’d done all he could in the last seven years to wash her from the fabric of his being. Drowned himself in drink, women, brawls and battles.
He’d thought he’d done an admirable job of ridding her from his soul until he saw her standing in front of Gruggin Manor.
Just as she would stand and wait for him all those years they spent betrothed.
Thank the heavens for the long drive up to the manor house.
It had taken those precious minutes of the horses and wagon slogging up the drive to steel his mind, steel his thoughts.
No softness. No mercy.
He’d been delivering her dead brother and he wasn’t about to offer her pity at this juncture. Never again.
Yet he had.
Of all things, he wasn’t about to let her see Morton’s half destroyed face. No. He’d take that image, hold it for her so she didn’t have to. He couldn’t have her haunted by it.
For as much as he would enjoy breaking her, he wasn’t a monster. Not quite. Yet.
Her door closed down the hall from him. A thunk, and he was positive she’d just collapsed backward against the door.
Good.
She was exhausted by him—off kilter. Just as he’d planned.
Even if pity had once again wormed its way into his mind tonight, offering her port of all things. A bloody truce. Unacceptable.
But no more.
A momentary lapse of rationality, fueled by glimmers of sentiment from the distant past. He needed to gird his loins. He was far from done with her and he would need all the rage from the last seven years boiling in his gut to get through this.
Heaving a sigh, Wes stepped back into his room, his palm going flat on his door and pushing it quietly closed.
{ Chapter 7 }
“It’s dark.”
Covering a yawn, Laney leaned forward in the carriage, peering out through the window at the smooth, creamy facade on the four stories of her family’s Mayfair townhouse. She was desperate to crawl into her bed after the journey from Yorkshire and suffering three days’ worth of Wes’s glowering stares. But she hadn’t imagined she’d be stumbling about in the dark.
Hide. She just wanted to hide away—from him, from the fact that her brother was dead.
Hide at least for the night. Ten hours of peace.
It didn’t seem like too much to ask