Page 167 of The Earl She Once Saved

“Who authorized you to circulate my private affairs?”

“I did,” Verity nodded. “You made mine their concern.”

Roland looked around the room. Cordelia stood near the mantel, very pale. Ezra had risen beside his chair, his cane in hand. Win remained at the door with Tunstall a few steps behind her. No one came forward to reassure Roland that the household would still obey him.

“This remains my house,” he snarled.

“Yes,” Verity answered.

“I am still the Earl of Edgeworth.”

“Yes.”

He seemed to have expected her to fight him for those things. Verity knew what it cost to repair the farms, to pay the debts, and bring men back to work. She would grieve the land when she left it. She still feared for the tenants, but remaining at Roland’s mercy would give her none of the authority she once used to protect them.

Roland could keep the deed and the title. He used her place in them to hold her here. He would find that he could hold neither her nor the trust of the people standing in his room.

His hand closed upon the back of a chair. “Rafe will be pleased with himself. He has always had a talent for persuading others to give him what he wants.”

“Arabella chose to give us the record,” Rafe told him. “You might consider why.”

Roland ignored him. His eyes stayed on Verity. She knew the change in his face. He was looking for some part of her he could still reach.

“There is something your gallant colonel has never told you,” he scoffed.

Rafe became still. Verity felt a warning before Roland spoke again. He had worn the same almost pleasant expression when he showed her the last of her mother’s fortune had gone, as though an injury might pass for news if he delivered it calmly.

“Rafe did look for you once,” Roland divulged. “Years ago. He wrote to surgeons and officers trying to find the daughter who tended him.”

Verity looked at Rafe. He told her he searched. She believed him when he said it, yet for years before his return she lived with the certainty that he had forgotten her. Roland had to know how deeply that old hurt ran.

“I had occasion to see some of his letters,” he continued. “He was persistent. He asked after a surgeon’s daughter whose name he scarcely knew, a woman he could not put out of his head.”

“Roland,” Rafe warned.

She wondered if he felt the same fear, that Roland would use the private details in his letters to humiliate her before the household.

Roland gave a small laugh. “You ought to have told her how near you came. I actually intercepted a reply addressed to you! After her father died, I knew where Miss Calder had gone. I let you go on searching elsewhere.”

The room receded around Verity. She could hear Roland’s voice, but for a moment could not fit his words to the years she remembered.

“I was not going to send my brother to her door,” Roland continued with amusement. “There was her mother’s fortune to consider. And I confess I wanted to know whether she might prefer an earl, if the officer she remembered never came.”

Aunt Cordelia made a faint sound near the fireplace.

Roland glanced at her. “You were relieved when I called, Mrs. Prewitt. She had just lost her father. You wished to see her settled.”

“I did,” Aunt Cordelia whispered.

“You see, Verity? I gave you a place when Rafe could offer you nothing. He did not even know how to find you.”

Roland meant her to hear that he had chosen and taken her, and that Rafe failed. Verity could barely look at him. She saw instead a young officer writing from wherever the army carried him, asking for a name he could put beside the face he remembered. She saw herself waiting for a letter that never came. Between them stood Roland, turning every attempt to reach her aside.

Rafe looked for her.

For years, she carried the belief that he let her vanish because the night at the field hospital meant more to her than it ever could to him. Even when she saw his drawings, some part of her kept that old judgment. Now she knew why he had not come. Roland told one lie, then built a life for her inside it.

She turned toward Rafe. He had gone pale with anger, but when their eyes met, his expression changed. He seemed to understand what she had heard beneath his brother’s cruelty.