Page 12 of Beguiling the Baron

“Mary, no!”

In response, she turned to him, eyes blazing. She spoke slowly, malevolently. “Henry Pelham. I. Hate. You.”

What happened next would return to him in nightmares, relentlessly torturing him. Even when he was awake, he continually relived those moments, trying to determine if she had fallen deliberately or by accident.

The first physician who had seen her after Hal, sick to his core, had her broken, lifeless body conveyed back to the house, had proclaimed the fall an accident. The baroness’s illness interfered with her balance, and the cures she took sometimes did more harm than good. It would have needed no more than a spell of dizziness or fainting when she was so close to the edge, to unbalance and tip her over.

Despite what Hal truly believed—that she had thrown herself from the tower to spite him as well as to end a life already doomed—he’d accepted the doctor’s verdict.

As, luckily, did the rest of the world.

Bodies of suicide victims were not welcome in hallowed soil, and the chapel at Foxleaze Abbey was consecrated. For Mary’s remains to be allowed to rest in the place she had called home, and where she’d borne and brought up her child, her death had to be put down to a tragic misadventure.

He blinked away the memories.

Mary had the power to wound him, even from the grave. She had ruined his life, had killed the man he once was and destroyed any hope of ever becoming the man he’d wanted to be.

His thoughts strayed unbidden to his recent encounter with Miss Wyndham. In some ways she was quite the opposite of Mary but in other ways, too similar for comfort. Galatea Wyndham had shaken him, though he’d refused to show it. He wasn’t used to being disputed with in his own home—Mary was the last person who’d ever dared do such a thing. And that was where the similarity lay. Both women were a mixture of feminine wiles and downright stubbornness.

But if Miss Galatea Wyndham hoped to win him ‘round with her dancing brown eyes and cheerful aspect, she had better think again.