Page 128 of The Earl She Once Saved

“You.”

“Yes.”

He had not spoken of it in years. The memories returned with an unpleasant clarity.

Their father was always calling Rafe steady and Roland careless. Their father was always handing Rafe the estate maps while Roland was sitting at the same table. Their father, half-drunk after a bad harvest, was always saying that Edgeworth would be safe if only God had reversed the order of his sons.

Roland had been sixteen. Rafe had been twelve.

“He said it before servants,” Rafe continued. “Before tenants. Once, before half the county.”

“A cruel thing to do to both sons.”

“Yes.”

He had not understood that then. At twelve, he had only wanted his brother to stop looking at him as though the boy had stolen his skin.

“Roland made the world pay for it,” Rafe said. “If our father praised me, Roland found some means of proving the praise misplaced. He ran up debts, and the family bought them back. He gambled away horses and blamed the grooms. He took anything he wanted because someone would always prevent the Thornlow name from suffering.”

“And you?”

Rafe stared at the rain. “If I valued something, he broke it.”

The first had been a model ship Rafe spent one winter building. Roland dropped it from an upstairs window and called it an accident. There had been books with pages torn out, a young hound turned loose before the hunt and never found, a mare Rafe loved sold while he was away at school.

Small things, most of them … that had been the point. Each was too small to explain without sounding childish.

“He wanted me to know he could reach anything,” Rafe concluded.

Ezra’s hand tightened around his cane. “And your father?”

“Paid the next debt. Replaced whatever could be replaced. Praised me for not complaining.”

The bitterness surprised him.

“Then Roland inherited the title,” Ezra said.

“And discovered that winning did not feel like victory, because that did not make me miserable enough.”

“So he ruined the estate.”

“He ruined everything.”

Rafe’s gaze found Verity again. She stood beneath the arch now, speaking with the butler. Sergeant waited at her side. The dog looked toward the library windows as if he sensed Rafe’s attention.

“I thought the war had ended it,” Rafe admitted. “I thought the years would have made us strangers.”

“But Roland has seen that you still possess something he might want to break.”

Rafe looked sharply at Ezra. Neither man spoke.

Outside, Verity disappeared into the house.

***

By evening the rain had cleared. Hundreds of candles transformed the Edgeworth ballroom, their light reflected in mirrors and tall windows turned black by night. Music rose above silk, laughter and the steady murmur of the county greeting its resurrected earl.

Roland was perched at the center of it with Verity beside him. She wore dark blue, the color making her skin appear pale and her hair almost black. No pendant rested at her throat. The bare hollow there drew Rafe’s attention each time he looked at her.