The Duke's Perfect Wife
Page 74

“I’ve not started a child,” Eleanor had said when he’d argued this. She’d not even blushed when Hart had laid out the fact that he’d ruined her to her father. “I know the signs. I’ll likely not marry anyone else anyway, so it does not matter, does it?”
Eleanor and her father, the pair of them with their stubborn, steadfast, unyielding Scots stolidity, had defeated him.
End of Act III, Hart, the villain, exits. Never to return.
Act IV had to be Hart’s life since Eleanor—his father’s death, marrying Sarah, losing her on one day and his son the next. Hart, who never cried, had stretched across the floor of his bedroom and wept brokenly after he’d laid Sarah and Hart Graham Mackenzie to rest in the overdone Mackenzie mausoleum.
This then, was Act V. The heroine returns to drive the villain insane.
“Hart?”
Eleanor saw Hart blinking at the light as he jerked around to face her and the lantern she carried. His hand was on the chiseled letters of his son’s name, and he was holding on to them for dear life.
Chapter 17
Hart’s gaze was unfocused, his golden eyes glittering and moist. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “It’s too damp. You’ll take sick again.”
Eleanor walked to him. Hart kept his hands on the plaque, as though loathe to take his fingers from the letters.
“What are you doing here?” Eleanor asked. “You have a perfectly good fire in your bedchamber. I saw it.”
Hart turned his face back to the tomb. “I was afraid.”
“Of what?” It was cold, which made her hurt arm ache, but Eleanor did not want to leave him here. “Tell me.”
“Losing you.” Hart looked at her again, his eyes anguished. “I was remembering you throwing the ring at me and telling me to go away, how arrogant I was.”
Eleanor shivered, thinking of that terrible day and how enraged and how proud they both had been. “That was a long time ago.”
“No, I’m still f**king arrogant. I should have sent you home when you came bleating to me about a job. But, no, I coerced you into staying with me, and you almost died for it.”
“Not everything in the world is your fault, Hart,” Eleanor said.
“Yes, it is. I manipulate the world, and then I suffer the consequences. Others more so than me.”
Eleanor’s gaze went to the tomb, where lovely, shy Sarah lay, along with her tiny son, Lord Hart Graham Mackenzie, one day old.
“You blame yourself for their deaths too,” she said softly.
“Of course I do.”
“Sarah would have died carrying someone else’s son,” Eleanor said. “It sounds cruel to say it, but she wasn’t strong enough to have a baby. Some women are not.”
“She didn’t want to have a baby at all. She hated being with child. She did it because that was what she’d been raised to do.”
True enough. Perhaps if Sarah and her son had lived, Sarah would have changed her mind about wanting a baby. Perhaps she would have realized how much she could love her son, and thereby brought Hart some measure of happiness.
Hart caressed the letters of baby Graham’s name. “Mac likes to say, We’re Mackenzies. We break what we touch. But this little Mackenzie… he broke me.”
Eleanor’s heart squeezed. When she’d received the black-edged card from Hart with the formal words, His Grace, the Duke of Kilmorgan, regrets to announce… she’d cried. Cried for Hart and for Sarah, and for the child who’d never grow up. She’d cried for herself, for what hadn’t been, and what could never be.
Hart finally let go of the letters. “I held him in my hands,” he said, showing her his broad palms. “Graham was so tiny, and he just fit into them. I held him, and I loved him.”
“I know you did.”
Hart looked at her, his eyes still dark in the lantern’s glare. “I never knew I could love like that. I don’t know to this day where the feelings came from. But looking at him—so small, so perfect… I realized, that moment, that I’d never entirely be like my father. I’d feared and fought being like him all my life, but when I looked at Graham, I knew I was safe from that. Because I could never hurt this little boy.”
Eleanor touched his arm, which was steely hard beneath his coat. “No.”
“He was so frail. I would have done anything in the world to keep him safe. Anything. But I couldn’t.” The pain in his eyes cut her. “I couldn’t save him, El. I should have been able to. I’m a strong man, the strongest I know. And I couldn’t save him.”
Eleanor pressed her forehead to his shoulder. “I know, Hart. I’m so, so sorry.”
He laughed a little, the sound bitter. “Do you know, people tried to tell me that Graham’s death was part of God’s plan and that he’d gone to a better place? I nearly punched someone for telling me that. A better place. Rot that. I needed him here.”
“Yes.”
“When I looked at Graham, I saw what I’d become. You showed me part of the truth when you threw me over, but this tiny boy made me face myself. The blackest, deadliest part of me.”
His words ran out, but Hart remained still, staring at his hands, head bowed.
Eleanor stepped in front of him and put her unhurt hand across his palms. “Come to the house,” she said. “You’re too cold out here. It’s time to get warm.”