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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“ S top dodging me!” Lysander growled as he took a wild swing at Julian. “Stand and fight!”

“And as I told you already, I have no wish to fight you.”

“You’re scared, is why!” Lysander danced forward and swung for his friend’s head. Julian, seeing it coming, leaned back so the punch missed him by several inches. “Coward!”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is what I know!” He charged Julian, this time predicting that Julian would simply try and dodge him.

To counter this move, he overextended his reach, getting right into Julian’s large body so his friend would have nowhere to go.

As he’d hoped, the move worked a charm, and Lysander’s glove fist found the side of Julian’s face.

“Urgh!” Julian stumbled back. “Where did that come from?”

Lysander didn’t bother himself with a response, taking advantage of his friend’s shock and throwing a second wild swing. This one, too, found its mark, striking Julian square in the side of the head.

Julian cried out and darted back further so he was out of Lysander’s reach. An ex-boxer, and far larger than Lysander in all the ways that mattered when it came to a physical brawl, perhaps angering the man was not a smart idea. But smart ideas were not exactly Lysander’s forte of late.

“Are you going to fight me?” Lysander held his gloved hands up, readying for his friend to accept the reality and to quit playing with him.

Julian’s expression darkened, and he too held up his gloved hands. “Just remember, Lysander, you asked for this.”

Julian came at him with more speed than a man of his size ought to possess.

He feigned a jab, which saw Lysander raise his arms to block, only for Julian to redirect and wallop him hard in the right side of his body.

Lysander groaned and attempted to swat him away, but Julian countered again, this time striking him on the left side.

Pain ripped through his torso, and Lysander buckled, but he did not break.

“Better,” he growled. “But try this on for size!”

He charged Julian and swung with messy haste.

Right. Left. Right again. Julian backed away, dodged effortlessly, waiting for an opening that came when Lysander let his guard down.

Face exposed, too angered and fired up to realize it, Julian found it only too easy to strike hard and strike true; a punch found his nose, knocking him back as pain tore across his face.

“Argh!” Lysander gasped, head snapping back. That left him open further, and Julian struck him again in the face. “Owe!” Lysander cried out, stumbling and nearly falling. He did not go down, however, swinging his arms wildly to keep Julian back as he found his balance. “Is that all you’ve got…”

“Lysander…” Julian dropped his arms and looked upon him pitifully. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“It looks to me like you are trying to get yourself killed.”

“You are not so tough as that. Now, come on!” He raised his gloves again, even as his body swayed and his face begged for mercy. “Again!”

What am I doing? Perhaps Julian is right, that I am trying to get myself killed. Would that be such a bad thing? With how I have acted, it would be the least that I deserve.

He was still reeling from the conversation had two days ago with Margaret. The pain he felt in his body and his face was nothing compared to that which touched his heart so that it might never heal.

To think how close he had come to admitting his true feelings to her. It had been right on the tip of his tongue, seconds from being spoken, a weight inside of him lifted in ways that he had not realized he needed until it was right there… only for his world to come crashing down.

Lysander was not such a fool that he had not understood why Margaret said what she did.

She was trying to protect him – she was trying to protect his daughters.

Frustratingly, that only made him love her more, for it was what he would have done, and what he might have expected of her.

She was not at all who I thought. Better than me.

She deserved more than I could ever give her.

He had spent that night deciding what to do, settling on cold disinterest and cutting her off so there was no chance that more pain could be brought to him.

He reasoned, too, that she was right, and what he had told her two days ago was just the same.

An action taken to protect his daughters, even if the result was chaos the likes of which he was still struggling to come to terms with.

It was the look on her face that did it. The pain. The disgust. He had never meant to hurt her. Dammit, from day one, he had tried to avoid getting close to her for that reason exactly! The irony of this was not lost on him.

“I am not going to fight you…” Julian removed his gloves and dropped them at his feet.

“Coward!”

Julian snorted. “Call me what you will, but this is not the answer. Believe me, a lifetime of the sport, and I know better than any man that punching your way through torment is not a healthy means by which to deal with it.”

“I am not tormented,” Lysander snapped. “I just… I just want to box. What is wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Julian said. “If that is what I thought this was about. But you and I both know that boxing has nothing to do with any of this.” He looked about them and shook his head. “And to think, I thought you brought me here because you wanted to see other men hitting one another.”

Indeed, it had been Lysander’s idea to visit Julian’s old boxing gym, dragging the man along because if he was going to get his brain punched in, he wanted it done by a man twice his size who knew how to hit.

Tormented by guilt, feeling broken and filled with shame, getting beaten bloody seemed as good a way to deal with his worries as anything else.

“If you’re not going to fight me, I will find someone else who will.”

“Lysander…” Julian approached him while also being careful not to get too close. “I am not a fool. I know this is to do with Her Grace and the letter –”

“Don’t speak about that,” he snarled. “I did not bring you here to talk.”

“And I did not come here to kill my best friend,” he said, rightly. “Tell me, what happened? Did you show her the letter? Was she upset?”

He grimaced, desperate not to revisit that moment. “Not as upset as I was. I knew I never should have married her. I… it was a mistake…” Even saying the words, the lie, stung worse than the punches.

“You and I both know that is not true.”

“You know nothing!”

“I know how you looked at her,” Julian said, his voice soft for a man so large.

“I know what I saw with my own two eyes. Lysander…” He sighed and he reached for his friend, resting a large hand on Lysander’s shoulder.

“That letter does not matter – as we said, we will squash those rumors. There is no reason to get this upset.”

“That is not what this is.” He shrugged off the hand and took a pitiful swing at Julian.

Julian dodged it easily, frowning as he studied Lysander.

“Then what… oh, no. Do not tell me. Lysander…” He saw in Lysander’s face the truth of it all, able to read him like a damn book because in this instance, Lysander was doing a terrible job of hiding how he felt.

“It has ended? Your marriage, she has –”

“I ended it,” Lysander snapped. “As I had to do. I had no choice!” The gym was near empty, save a few random men across the floor boxing.

A good thing, as they paid Lysander’s exclamation little attention.

“I warned her when we wed that I would do anything to protect my daughters. She knew it, and still she… she… she…” He tried to find the rage that had sat with him for two days now.

He tried to hang onto it, needing it to fuel the lies.

But the anger withered inside of him as if a bucket of water had been tossed on the flames, and he dropped his hands, shoulders slumping, the fight leaving him as if it had never been.

“She ended it, Julian. That is what happened.”

“She did?” he sounded as if he didn’t believe it.

“At first,” Lysander admitted and then chuckled bitterly. “She was worried she would be a bad influence on my daughters, so she took the initiative and announced that she would go home rather than risk making things worse.”

“Lysander…”

“And you want to know the worst part? The next day, when she tried to apologize and change her mind, I refused to listen.” His stomach twisted at the memory of that moment, how stubborn and stupid he had been.

“She hurt me, Julian. More than… more than I knew possible. So, rather than listening, I agreed with her, asking her to leave – and not at the end of the Season…” He looked pleadingly at his friend as the emotions swelled.

“But on that day. I kicked her out like a damn coward such that I cannot bare to be in that house because everything reminds me of her.”

“She’s gone?” Julian leaned back. “Truly?”

Lysander shrugged. “For two days now.” His stomach continued to twist and knot, and he thought he might be sick. “Even if I wanted her back, it is too late…”

No… it isn’t too late. I know that, which is what makes this so much harder. I know I could go to her, apologize, confess my feelings, and we could pretend none of this happened. But although I called Julian a coward just now, I am the true coward here.

Lysander’s life was one surrounded by death.

His mother had died while giving birth to him, and his father had always blamed him for it.

His first wife had died giving birth to Lenora, and for that, Lysander had blamed himself.

Too many times he had suffered through that sort of pain, and he refused to suffer it again.