Page 23 of Win Me, My Lord (All’s Fair in Love and Racing #5)

A humorless laugh sounded across the table. “Stoke himself.”

“But I … we …” she stammered, stunned and bewildered. “Your brother and I haven’t exchanged more than ten words in our entire lives.”

Actually, that wasn’t exactly true.

Recently, at Blake Deverill’s house party at Primrose Park, she’d had something approaching an entire conversation with the drunken sot.

How could your mother have gotten it so upside down, anyway?

Those had been Stoke’s words when she’d pressed him about their misunderstanding on the night he’d attempted to propose to her. At the time, she’d taken it for a drunken jape, but now she wasn’t sure what it had been about.

Or rather, perhaps she was a little more sure, but what she was becoming sure of was too extraordinary to consider with any seriousness.

Oh.

She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Bran said, “ Oh? ”

She shook her head, but a single word wouldn’t rattle loose.

Mother.

All roads led back to her, no matter which detours Artemis took.

Now more than ever, she understood she must speak to Mother.

There was the ￡20,000.

There was the misunderstanding with Stoke.

There was …

More.

One thing more she’d thought this man had known all these years.

One thing more he clearly hadn’t.

But the paths that logic insisted on following, well, she wasn’t ready to follow.

Not tonight.

Not until she spoke to Mother.

Tonight she would share this meal with a man she’d once known, but no longer did. Over these last ten years, he’d become his own man—and she found she wanted to know him better.

She took another bracing sip of ale. “You had quite the illustrious military career, Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Branwell Mallory.”

An uncertain second ticked past, as if he were weighing whether to allow her to change the subject. At last, he said, “Until I didn’t.”

Relief sheared through her. “The Light Dragoons comported themselves with much valor at Waterloo.” She hesitated. “You were in the thick of the fight.”

“Aye.” He stabbed a bite of mutton and began chewing as if his life depended on it.

“You came through a hero.”

He glanced up, golden eyes questioning.

“I read it in The Times .”

He shook his head. “There were no heroes that day. There were only two hundred thousand men fighting to live until the sun set.” His jaw clenched and released. “Fifty thousand didn’t.”

“But the chargers you trained carried many through and kept many men alive.” She wouldn’t allow him to deny his valor.

“And many of those horses died, too. Is it a good or moral thing to have trained animals to willingly gallop to their death?”

“Napoleon was defeated,” she said. This was important. “You were part of that.”

Bran didn’t acknowledge her words as he took another bite.

Well, then she would keep talking. “And it was on to the south of Africa from there?”

He settled back in his chair, seeming to accept that they would be conversing this evening. “Xhosaland came later. A fair amount of cleaning up needed to happen on the Continent first. Then it was on to Africa.”

“What is Africa like?”

“A place whose lands haven’t been tamed like those of England.”

“How do you mean?”

“England has the land all parceled up into tidy rectangles and squares. In Africa, the sky above and the land below are open and sprawling, which of course is why Europe thinks it free for the taking.”

“ Free for the taking? ” Her brow crinkled. “But doesn’t all land belong to someone?”

A humorless laugh sounded through his nose. “First, we came to sort out the Dutch and Portuguese. But then …” He gave his head a shake as if to clear it of a foul odor. “There was a battle—Grahamstown.”

Artemis understood now was the time to listen.

“Grahamstown wasn’t about the Dutch or the Portuguese. We fought the Xhosa that day.”

“Oh, no.”

“It wasn’t until afterward that I realized the true meaning of the battle. We, the English, were settling in to claim the land as ours. In a self-serving stretch of logic, to keep the Dutch and Portuguese from laying claim to Xhosaland, we also had to keep it from the indigenous populace.”

Now that he’d begun, he looked to have no intention of stopping the flow of his words. She sensed in them a sort of relief.

“Waterloo had been about stopping a tyrant, protecting England and the innocent. But Grahamstown …” He stared unseeing at his hands. “It was a slaughter of the innocent.” Guilt and self-loathing shone in his eyes. “They ran toward the bullets, Artemis.”

A knot formed in her throat.

“They were told the bullets would turn into water,” he said. “It wasn’t only the men, but women and children, too. There was no stopping them from rushing toward the garrison.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. The horror of that day took little imagination, but even so, she hadn’t lived it.

This man had.

“Was that the day you were injured?”

He shook his head. “I was injured a year later during a routine patrol.”

Artemis’s head began shaking and couldn’t seem to stop. The horror was too great.

A march of unnamable emotions passed behind his eyes. “They wanted to take my leg.”

“Was the injury not severe enough to warrant an amputa?—”

“Bones were broken in several places, and my right hip …” He blinked the memory away. “They weren’t taking my leg.”

“Couldn’t that have killed you?” She’d heard any number of ways a leg injury could cause death.

His golden gaze held hers. “Yes.”

She felt suddenly out of breath. “You would rather have died than?—”

“Lose my leg,” he finished for her. A grim laugh scraped across his throat. “Of course, I couldn’t have known that I would still want to die after I didn’t lose my leg.”

“You wanted to die?” She knew the answer, of course. He’d already said as much. But the words spoken aloud imbued them with a certain wretched power.

“I did.” How terrible was his pragmatic tone.

“And now?” she somehow found the courage to ask, her voice a near-whisper.

“Now is …” He searched his mind. “Some days are better, but none are worse.”

Before her sat a man who had made his peace with that sort of half a life.

Yet could half a life lived ever be enough?

His eyes lifted and fixed on her. “I thought of you that day.”

Her mouth snapped shut.

“After Grahamstown and the type of military service I’d transitioned into, I was considering selling my commission and returning to England.” His gaze darkened, and a feeling long lost trembled through Artemis. “And every time I thought of England, it was you I saw.”

Artemis’s voice refused to surface.

“Then a rifle shot tore through my horse, and my memory goes in flashes from there.” The way the words emerged, grim and matter-of-fact, sent a chill through her. “But you, I remember.”

She felt too stirred up to say anything reliably. Oh, what a day for revelations. The last ten years had unraveled in fewer than ten hours, like a ball of yarn. But the thing about an unraveled ball of yarn was that when one wound it up again, it would never be the same. Never as neat and tidy.

“But I’m not the only one who knows loss and grief,” he said. “You know them, too.”

Her heart might’ve stood still in her chest, and she wouldn’t know it.

“What you suffered from the loss of Dido wasn’t insignificant.”

Oh.

Dido.

He would think that, wouldn’t he?

And, yes, she had suffered loss and experienced grief over Dido.

But Artemis had suffered other loss and grief, too.

Her first loss had been him, of course.

But there had been the second loss, too, shortly thereafter.

The loss she kept tucked deep inside and shared with no one.

And for a slow, devastating instant just now, she’d thought he was speaking of that loss.

But he knew nothing of it, did he?

“Dido,” she began and stopped, praying her voice wouldn’t fail her. “Rake warned me not to get my heart involved with horses. Horses will break your heart. He said it over and over, and I didn’t listen.”

“But that’s who you are, Artemis.”

“And who is that?” Less and less, she was sure.

“Someone who leads with her heart.”

“Sometimes,” she began, wondering at herself for the confession she was about to make, “I wish I wasn’t.”

“Do you?” The question, low and resonant, brushed across his throat like warm velvet.

“It would result in less heartbreak.”

He nodded, as if she’d given the answer he’d expected. “Aye, but it would result in less joy.” He hesitated. “And love, too.”

Artemis went very still.

Was she speaking of joy and love and … heartbreak … with this man?

This man who had once been the source of all three?

Oh, this ball of yarn was completely unraveled now, wasn’t it?

She was beginning to doubt she could ever wind it together again.

“But you didn’t listen to your brother.” He had a point to make, and he hadn’t yet made it.

She braced herself. “No.”

“When Dido died, you didn’t take it as a lesson to close yourself off. You went the opposite way. You opened an animal sanctuary. In allowing yourself to lead with your heart, you’ve been able to do good.” His gaze lost none of its intensity. “I admire that about you.”

Even if she’d had words, she wouldn’t have been able to speak them, stunned as she was.

Bran shifted in his chair, and a wince passed across his features.

“You’re in pain.”

She didn’t need to ask.

“I’ve just been sitting for too long,” he said, in that dismissive way of his.

She sprang to her feet. “Would a hot bath help?”

“Artemis, there is no need.”

But his protest fell on deaf ears.

She knew two things.

He was in pain.

And a hot bath would help.

“It’s ten o’clock at night,” he pointed out, trying a different angle.

Her hand was already wrapped around the door handle. “I’ll compensate the servants,” she tossed over her shoulder before exiting the room.

Her footsteps, a swift click-clack across the floorboards of the corridor, found their first steady ground of the night as she set to her task.

The fact was she wouldn’t be stopped.

This was about him, and this was about her.

And, possibly, this was about them .

Of a sudden, the ground beneath her feet felt less certain.

Once, there had been a them .

And it had led to utter disaster and near ruin.

She shook the thought away

She was in no danger tonight.

Surely, she’d learned her lesson, hadn’t she?