Lady Fenton wiped away some of Sara’s tears. “My dear, we both know that’s not true. He’s just afraid of how you make him feel. He loves you; I know he does.”
Sara shook her head fiercely. “He told me he would never give me his heart, and now I’ve ruined it. I should have told him! I was so afraid it would kill him, he doesn’t even know who my father is, and that’s the worst part. He only knows part of the story if he knew the other part he would…he would never forgive himself!”
Sara couldn’t live with that. She had lived with rejection, fear, pity all her life—she would die before she would let Nicholas feel guilty over something he did so long ago. The man needed to forgive himself before he could ever be whole again. How was it possible to still love him after all the hurtful things he said? She sniffled some more before Lady Fenton took her inside. She explained to the servants that Lady Renwick was sick. They brought her to her adjoining chamber and put her to bed.
Sara cried herself to sleep and dreamt of little boys with blue eyes; little boys that she would never have the opportunity to have. It made her cry all the harder. Her dreams—everything shattered in an instant because Nicholas couldn’t trust her.
It was still dark when she woke up. She felt something next to her head and turned to see what it was. She nearly screamed in agony as she saw the thick pieces of paper. It was the annulment papers Nicholas had talked so much about, and at the bottom it was signed, “Lord Nicholas Devons, Seventh Earl of Renwick.”
She was starring in her own personal nightmare, and Nicholas had thrown the final punch. It made her ill, so ill that she threw up in her chamber pot several times before she was able to focus on getting food into her stomach.
She dressed with as much care as possible in hopes that Nicholas would be there for her to speak with. When she asked the footman where he had gone, he gave her a guilty look and said that Nicholas had some business to attend to in Scotland. He wouldn’t be back for another month.
So Sara went upstairs and cried some more until there were no tears left. Nothing left except a hollow ache in her chest. An ache that she feared would never go away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nicholas tried to set his emotions at ease as he crossed the border into Scotland. He had done the right thing. She had trapped him, humiliated him, made him vulnerable. He was right about her all along, yet one part of him couldn’t help but feel guilty over the fact that the first hill in their relationship sent him running to a foreign country. In all honesty, he would have liked to talk to Sara about everything but his pride, the ever-looming presence in his life, kept him from doing so.
It was so hard to believe that she would trick him in this way, after her knowledge of his mistrust of women and much more his mistrust of himself. His heart had been broken in two and now he had not only a son to worry about, but the rest of his life. How was he to put the pieces together? Sara had effectively rendered him destroyed, utterly and completely undone. He had nothing to give whatsoever. At the moment, his only companion was his pride, nothing more. Well, that and the ever-convenient talent for quoting Scripture at the worst moments. “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” seemed to repeat over and over in his brain.
He saw the way the servants scowled at him when he left that morning. Sara had naturally been their favorite person since her taking to Duncan just a few days before. In fact, Sara treated them all so well that Nicholas would bet half his fortune that they would side with her rather than him.
What hurt the most was that Sara hadn’t confided in him. She had either been manipulative or she had been afraid. Part of him wanted to wish she was merely scared of what he would do, but the other, saner part figured she just wanted to trap him into a marriage. But why would she need to? Was it merely for the sport of trapping someone like Nicholas?
The very thought of it made him want to punch the first bloke he came into contact with. Now if he could only get his body and his mind to agree that Sara was deceitful and manipulative He’d been in physical pain since leaving her in the garden. His body ached for her. Just by them spending only twenty-four hours together, his body now had a permanent memory of what it felt like to have her skin pressed up against his own. If he didn’t watch himself he would start panting like a dog right there in the carriage. It took every ounce of self-control he possessed not to run back and grovel at her feet. But what would he say? “Sorry that I hurt you Sara, but it was only because you lied to me, and I felt vulnerable and afraid. By the way let’s go to bed and—“