Page 45 of Win Me, My Lord (All’s Fair in Love and Racing #5)

She bit her bottom lip between her teeth and gave her head a slow shake.

But her eyes told a different story.

They shone with understanding—and something else.

Could that be hope he saw in those endless brown depths?

“My love for you,” he said.

She swallowed as opaque emotion passed behind her deep brown eyes. “Bran …”

“Marry me.”

Such bold words he spoke.

But one must be bold in love.

That was the truth.

A hard truth he’d learned the hard way.

Her eyebrows crinkled.

Though he’d ignored the first signal that something was off , he couldn’t ignore this one.

She pulled back, separating from him and arranging herself in a cross-legged seat on the rumpled coverlet.

Yet another off signal.

No, no, no.

How could anything be wrong?

“There is …” She hesitated, as if she were very deliberately assembling the right words to speak. “There is something I must tell you.”

They weren’t the right words.

They were wrong, wrong, wrong .

But she looked determined to speak yet more of those wrong words—and he had no choice but to let her. “What is it, Artemis?” he asked. “You can tell me anything.”

Doubt shone openly in her eyes, and his stomach twisted itself into a knot.

“There is a reason I believed you took Mother’s money and fled.”

Trenches dug into Bran’s forehead. He wasn’t prepared for the direction this conversation was insisting on taking. “I didn’t flee, Artemis.” He kept his voice carefully controlled and measured. “I joined the army.”

She nodded. “Yes, I know, Bran. You didn’t flee. You became a war hero.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

She looked as if she was only holding herself back from taking his hand. “But you are , Bran. You sacrificed so much for our country—almost your life.” Those last words emerged on a sob.

He bridged the distance and took her hand in his. “Artemis, what is this all about?”

She shook her head and swallowed, collecting herself. “There is something you didn’t know all those years ago.”

A feeling gathered in Bran’s gut.

A feeling he’d learned never to ignore.

“And you still don’t know.”

Silent, he waited.

“Ten years ago, there was …” She looked both as if she couldn’t speak the next words and couldn’t not speak them. “Bran, we …”

“Artemis,” he said, gently, even as the knot tightened in his gut. “What are you not saying?”

She inhaled a shaky breath. “We … we made a child,” she said in a near whisper, unshed tears pooling in her eyes.

“A child?” he asked, then demanded, “ A child? ”

Watchful, she nodded.

A strange numbness filled him, even as a barrage of questions demanded release. Yet it was one question that needed an immediate answer. “Where is the child, Artemis?”

She shook her head, swiping tears with the back of her hand when they fell. “I lost her.”

“Lost … her ?”

“It was too early in the pregnancy for me to know for sure, but that’s how I think of our child.” She sniffled. “Selena.”

“ Selena? ”

“Because you and I always met by night.”

This conversation was both happening entirely too fast and entirely too slowly. “Artemis, please start at the beginning.” He braced himself.

“It’s simple, I suppose. You and I fell madly in love and we began our, erm , courtship, and I found myself with child.”

Bran fought the urge to jump off the bed and begin pacing the room. Instead, he remained very still.

“When I started becoming sick in the mornings, I realized I hadn’t had my menses in a couple of months.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He needed to know— now .

A new light entered her eyes— guilt . “You were away when I realized.” She hesitated. “I’d planned to tell you upon your return to London.”

There was more she wasn’t saying. “But?”

She inhaled as if she were struggling for breath. “One morning, after my usual round of vomiting, I returned to my bedchamber to find Mother waiting.”

And here it was—the ax dropping. “She knew.”

Artemis nodded. “She said she would take care of everything.”

“Not your brother.”

She shook her head. “Rake never knew about it.”

In a noxious mélange, dread filled his gut and rage flowed through his veins, as puzzle pieces clicked into place.

It wasn’t a far leap to … “You thought I abandoned you and our child for twenty thousand pounds.” So many lies contained within that sentence.

“And you continued to believe that for ten years.”

“Yes, but also no,” she said. “These last few weeks … I knew that wasn’t what happened.”

“And yet you withheld the truth from me.”

She gave a slow, reluctant nod. “I wasn’t sure it was right to tell you.”

After this night, he would have permanent trenches in his forehead, surely. “Help me understand that line of reasoning.”

“You’ve been through so much, Bran. I didn’t want to add to it.”

His mind, however, kept wanting to go back to the beginning. His fury had naught to do with the recent weeks. “All these years, after all we shared, you thought I was the sort of man who would abandon you and our child.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I was little more than a bundle of feelings.”

But Bran wasn’t in any mood to hear her. “I was going to offer for your hand in marriage.” His voice had gone rough with emotion. “That first night we were together in the flat on Barlow Street.”

She nodded, but kept otherwise silent, giving him room to vent the rush of feelings that crashed through him.

Right now, it was anger.

“ You stopped me.”

More puzzle pieces began clicking into place.

“I didn’t demand twenty thousand pounds from your mother,” he said, stating a truth they both knew, but was key to an additional truth that had yet to be aired.

“She offered it to me if I would leave, and I refused. But now I understand why she offered it. Why she encouraged Stoke to offer for you.”

Artemis’s brow gathered with perplexity. This piece of the puzzle hadn’t yet clicked into place for her.

“She was going to pass off my child as my brother’s. If there had been a boy, her grandson would have been no less a personage than an earl.”

Artemis opened her mouth, as if to refute his words, then slowly closed it. There , within her eyes, he saw it— belief . She knew the duchess would want as much for her grandchild—and would be ruthless in the attainment of it.

Bran exhaled a long, steadying breath.

At last, the truth—all of it—was out, and he had no idea how to proceed in this uncharted territory. In some strange way, it put him and Artemis back where they’d begun—in a place where no lies existed between them.

Ten years on, however, that was a complicated space.

Artemis was the one to break the silence. “The thing about my mother,” she said. “She had what she saw as my best interests at heart. I’m her only daughter, and she loves me.”

“Artemis, love is many things and expressed in many ways, but not like that.” Though he saw very little of this was her fault, this needed to be said. “She denied us a future.”

Resistance sparked in her eyes. “You and I were young and inexperienced, Bran. Too young and too inexperienced. The very distinct possibility exists that we would have married in haste and soured on one another once we got into the weeds of marriage.”

“Is that what she told you?”

Artemis held her silence.

“And you believed her?”

Still, she didn’t speak.

He huffed a humorless laugh. “And here you are, still that na?ve young woman.”

She flinched.

From a certain angle, Bran supposed those words could be viewed as an insult.

But that wasn’t how he’d spoken them. They weren’t hurled so much as voiced observation.

In this way, he was able to view Artemis from a distance he’d never been able to achieve.

“Perhaps the duchess was correct,” he found himself saying from this remove where he couldn’t feel so very much.

Even in the half-light of night, he could see Artemis had gone pale. “She was?”

“Perhaps what we felt wouldn’t have lasted.” And still he kept speaking. “After all, we aren’t now what we were then.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, he said, “Gwyneth and I are leaving Somerton at first light.”

Artemis shook her head adamantly. “Please don’t, Bran.”

But he wouldn’t— couldn’t —be swayed. “Artemis, you need time and …” Would that the world were different and he didn’t need to say, “ I need time.”

“Haven’t we had enough of that?” Her voice skated on the edge of breaking.

The next words were the hardest to speak … “Apparently not.”

She held his gaze for three solid seconds, and his resolve wavered.

If he let her go now, for a second time, he might lose her for good.

But … too much yet remained to be worked out in his mind.

And in hers, too.

This was the right thing.

And the thing about the right thing was that oftentimes it was the hardest thing, too.

She pushed off the bed, retrieved her robe and slid it onto her shoulders, then her feet padded across dense wool carpets the way they’d come, and she was gone.

And he was alone.

Alone with this knot that had formed in his chest.

It wasn’t a knot of anger, he realized.

It was sadness.

It was grief.

Grief for the loss of the child he and Artemis had created.

Grief for the loss of them .

Grief for the loss of his past self.

This grief … In all the last ten years, he’d never allowed himself to feel it.

But oh, he felt it now.

Could one grieve over happiness lost? A whole other life tossed aside like rubbish and not lived?

Yes.

And the future? The one he’d so very nearly held in his grasp? Was that lost, too?

If past predicted future, then the answer was clear— yes .

Every cell in his body rebelled against that answer and demanded he chase after Artemis and take her any way she would have him.

No.

He’d made the necessary decision—or hoped he had.