The Secret Wallflower Society - Jillian Eaton Page 0,10

mouth creased in a humorless smile. “How many does that make it?”

“I’m afraid I have lost count, my lord.”

“Liar. You’ve never lost count of anything in your bloody life.” But the earl didn’t push the issue. Instead he sighed, raked a hand through his hair, and seemed to brace himself as if against an invisible force. “Send her in, Mr. Cornish. Send her in.”

There were four people Leo never expected to see again.

The first two, most obviously, were Heather and Henry. His wife and his child. His sweetheart and his son. His beloved and his little boy. Fever had taken them from him seven years ago, and although he’d prayed and he’d cursed and he’d threatened, nothing he did had brought them back.

The third was his mother. Alive, but as unreachable now as she’d been when she walked out the door and never returned, leaving her husband and eight-year-old son behind.

And the fourth…the fourth was Lady Helena Grisham. Or Cambridge, as it stood now.

Bloody hell. How had he forgotten she’d been married? Married and widowed all in the same breath. Yet when she waltzed into his study with a dead bird hanging off the side of her head – at least he dearly hoped it was dead; one never knew with Helena – she looked exactly as she had all those years ago when they’d shared a kiss at Vauxhall Gardens.

A kiss that had led him to being engaged to Heather.

“Lady Cambridge,” he said, acknowledging her presence with a wary nod. “You look well.”

“Of course I do. I always look well. You, on the other hand, look like absolute shite.” Moving past him in a flurry of violet skirts, she made herself a drink and clinked it against his glass before wandering over to one of the large windows that overlooked a neatly tended side garden.

Everything in his Grosvenor Square manor was neatly tended, from the red roses just beginning to lose their summer shine to the bookcases in the vast library across the hall. Neatly tended, impersonal, and oddly vacant despite all of the expensive trim and furnishings. In that regard, the house shared a common trait with its owner. They were both impeccably groomed on the outside, but if one dared to look closer they’d see there was nothing but emptiness within.

Clicking her nail against the glass, Helena glanced back at him over her narrow shoulder, green eyes impossible to read beneath long auburn lashes. “It’s been a long time, Leo. Too long.”

“Not long enough,” he corrected as he took another sip of his brandy. It slid across his tongue like honey and burned as it went down his throat. But even as hot as it was, the brandy was unable to warm the coldness within him. Nothing could. His heart, once shattered beyond repair, had enclosed itself in a thick block of ice. And there wasn’t anything – not drink, not opium, not even women – that had been able to crack it.

“You’re still mourning them?” Helena’s gaze flicked to the black pelmets draped across the top of the windows, then returned to Leo. A frown hovered in the delicate edges of her mouth. “I’d heard rumors that you’d become a recluse. Shut yourself off from everything and everyone. Now I see they’re more than rumors. Leo, it’s been seven years.”

Temper flashed in his eyes. Temper he used to disguise the pain. “It could be seventy,” he bit out, his voice raw with thinly concealed emotion, “and I’d mourn them still. What do you want, Helena? Why have you come?”

“You owe me a favor.” Her stare traveled with deliberate slowness down his long, muscular frame and then snapped back to his countenance. Her frown deepened. “But now, seeing the state of you, I don’t know if I want to collect it. What happened to you, Leo?”

Death.

Guilt.

Unimaginable loss.

What hadn’t happened to him?

“You know exactly what happened to me.” He started to lift the brandy to his lips, then slammed it back down on the edge of his desk with enough strength to send a spidery web of cracks racing up the side of the glass.

Helena arched a brow.

“Why do I have a feeling you’ve spent an inordinate amount of that fortune of yours on glassware?” she asked.

Glowering, Leo pinned her with a glare that never failed to send full grown men running for cover. Helena just blinked, then tilted her head on a sigh.

“You’re not going to scare me away, if that’s what you’re trying to do. I’ve