“Milena?”
“His wife. His late wife.” Rowena’s face, if possible, grew even more bleak. “He would not have mentioned her.”
Braden hadn’t mentioned it. Cassidy felt a jolt of unwelcome surprise and thought back over the past few days. She’d once mistaken Rowena for his wife, but since then nothing about him, or in the words of others in London or at Greyburn, hinted that he had been married.
Milena. It was a beautiful name.
“Now he doesn’t care who he hurts,” Rowena said. “I am to marry an uncouth stranger who has the proper lineage, so that we can…” She flushed. “So that our children will be of the ‘true blood.’ ” She mocked the words Braden had spoken so seriously. “My wishes don’t matter. And neither do yours, Cassidy.” Her expression hardened to something like cruelty. “He has planned your future, as well. You have walked into his trap. You wished to find a home and family, and you will have them. As he commands.”
“I…” Cassidy stammered. “I can’t believe—”
“Guard your heart, Cassidy Holt. Do not let it be touched. Save yourself the grief I and others have suffered.”
Cassidy stood, feeling as breathless as if she still wore the imprisoning corset. “Why don’t you go away?” she said recklessly. “If you’re so unhappy—”
Rowena shook her head. “You don’t know his power. I am a prisoner here, but there is a chance for you. Go back to America, if you can, before it is too late. Before Braden destroys you.”
There were tears in Rowena’s eyes again, and that more than anything convinced Cassidy that she spoke from her heart. She suffered, and she blamed Braden. But if he was responsible for her unhappiness, if he were as cruel as Rowena said…
Then everything Cassidy had felt from the very first moment she’d met Braden Forster, earl ofGreyburn, was hopelessly mistaken.
With a whispered apology to Rowena, Cassidy turned and ran for the woods.
Isabelle heard the voices in the garden and quickly turned away, walking across the manicured lawn toward the burn. She didn’t stop to think who had reached the garden before her. She had been trying, without success, not to think at all.
Not to think of this grand house, so much like the other she remembered with such pain. Or of Lord Greyburn’s arrogance and pride and easy mastery, the very essence of what she despised in the aristocracy.
Or that here she was more an outsider than ever. A pariah posing as a respectable widow, a human among werewolves. Doubly damned.
Cassidy had asked her if she wished to return to America. She had lied, as much to disguise her own cowardice as to spare the girl. How could she hope to protect Cassidy when she was here on sufferance, as the earl had made so abundantly clear before their departure from London?
But she had made a promise, to herself as much as to Cassidy. Break it now, and she would forfeit the last slivers of self-respect she had left.
She climbed the fell behind the house, breathing in England’s moist evening air. In spite other unease, all the memories of her girlhood in the country came back to her in this place: picnics in the little wood beyond the vicarage, Sundays when Papa would read from great works of literature as well as the Bible, quiet times in the evenings when all the world seemed at peace.
The world seemed deceptively peaceful now. Northumberland was very different from Surrey, but it was still the land where she’d been born. And where a part of her had died.
She sat on the rough, sheep-cropped grass near the crown of the fell. The sun was sinking to the west behind her, the last light striking off the tops of the trees in the small wooded vale below. Sheep were just visible as pale blurs against dark landscape, scattered on the surrounding fells.
Solitude was both familiar and foreign—familiar because she had long since become used to loneliness; foreign because she had almost forgotten what it was like to have a few moments of real peace.
Closing her eyes, she let the cool evening breeze caress her temples more gently than any man could have done. “Ah, Cassidy,” she murmured. “If only I were stronger—”