The Problem with Seduction - By Emma Locke Page 0,50

elbow jutted out, her only barrier between them.

Nicholas stopped suddenly. His arms went limp at his sides. He looked like a man headed to the gallows. She paused, momentarily conflicted, but quickly regained her senses. She couldn’t let him hold his son. She didn’t trust him not to run.

Her quick steps crunched along the gravel path, broken only by the occasional happy cry from her son. His small hands shoved against her and his feet kicked at her waist, but she relished the squirming weight of him in her arms. She went perhaps twenty feet before the sound of boots digging into the rocks sent alarm through her again. Nicholas didn’t catch up to her this time, though she didn’t doubt he could. Instead, he dogged her heels.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. His unseen presence behind her set her on edge. She wanted to have him in her sight. Oh, how she wished she’d brought Mrs. Dalton, or even better, a footman, as she ought to have done. She looked again for a nearby man or group of women who might help her. If Nicholas tried to snatch Oliver, she’d scream. Surely someone would help her.

“He wants to see me.” Nicholas didn’t sound high-handed so much as anguished. “I knew you’d come eventually. You always liked to bring him here, back when…” He didn’t finish his sentence, but she thought he’d been about to say, back when we were together.

She angled her chin toward Oliver’s dark head and hurried on, ignoring the guilt building in her breast. She wasn’t the one who’d ended their liaison. If he had some idyllic memory of their past, it was only what he’d created out of the sordid truth.

“That Corinthian isn’t his father,” Nicholas sneered, changing tack. “I’ve made enough inquiries to know he wasn’t even here when Jonat—Oliver,” he quickly corrected, “would have been conceived.”

Her teeth ground at his poorly-executed attempt to pretend he cared about her feelings. He’d wanted to name their son Jonathan Thomas, after his own father. He hadn’t cared a whit that she’d been calling him Oliver since his birth. Nor had he cared that Oliver was the name of all the firstborn sons in her family, because it had been about his lineage. Now he wanted to act as though he approved of her choice?

“Conceived is a rather large word for a soldier,” she shot back. Not because he deserved it, though he did. She was scared and angry. Would he ever give up?

Would she, if he were the one withholding Oliver from her?

No. Never.

“You weren’t petty when we were together.” His easy lope quickly gained on her until they were walking elbow to elbow, just as she’d known he could do. He leaned in front of her as if to look into her face. “Stop. Seriously, Beth, stop this.”

She did stop. Not because he’d asked. “Never call me that again.”

He appeared confused. Handsomely confounded. But she no longer cared what he looked like, because he had one goal: to separate her from her Oliver.

“Beth was a different girl. A victim of your games,” she said with all the bitter venom still in her.

He looked taken aback. He was tall, though not as tall as Con. His dark hair was shot through with gray and he had the beginnings of a portly belly she’d never noticed before. He seemed tired, more than angry. “You’re a good liar. I think you even believe that. It’s not true, is it, though? I was the one who was played for a fool.” His gaze settled hungrily on Oliver.

Oliver cuddled closer to her shoulder.

A flicker of hurt darkened Nicholas’s eyes. “You knew I was married,” he said to her in a low, steady voice. “You knew my wife is likely barren. And you knew, didn’t you, that I had everything I wanted but a son.” The anger came back for just a moment. “What you didn’t count on is that I never wanted you.”

She reeled. She had no words to throw in the face of such cruel rejection.

“I know Lord Constantine was in Devon at the time you and I were…reuniting,” he said, stepping closer. “At his family seat near Brixcombe. I have proof.”

Her blood ran cold. No.

She curved her lips instead of forming a horrified O. She couldn’t let Nicholas see how scared he’d just made her. “You mean when he was looking in on the progress of the canal?” she bluffed. “I saw him just before he left