The Duke's Perfect Wife(86)

Hart felt himself falling down, down, down, into an abyss of his own making. “El!” he’d called, his voice cracking, pathetic.

Eleanor did not stop and did not turn back. She walked on, never looking at him, until she was lost in the shadows of the overgrown garden. Hart had put his hands on top of his head and watched her go, his heart aching until he thought it would burst.





He hadn’t let it go at that, of course. Hart tried over the next weeks to make Eleanor change her mind. He’d attempted to recruit Lord Ramsay, only to find that Eleanor had told him everything… every embarrassing detail.

“I’m sorry, Mackenzie,” Lord Ramsay had said sorrowfully when Hart approached him. “I’m afraid I must stand behind my daughter. You did play a rather bad game.”

Even Hart’s argument that he’d taken Eleanor’s virginity brought him nothing.

“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 fucking 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.”