Chapter Twenty-Two
Sara didn’t care if people stared, nor did she care that her hair had fallen out of place. Upon entering the ballroom, she immediately found Lady Fenton and was escorted into her carriage. She sobbed the entire way to Nicholas’s house in Lady Fenton’s arms. When they reached their stop, Lady Fenton lifted her off her lap and looked at her.
“He’s not upset at you, my dear. He’s upset at himself.”
Sara cried even harder. “If you heard what he said, if you were there, you would know!” She tried to catch her breath. “He said he never wanted me, that he never wanted to marry me!”
Lady Fenton wiped away some of Sara’s tears. “My dear, we both know that’s not true. He’s just afraid of how you make him feel. He loves you; I know he does.”
Sara shook her head fiercely. “He told me he would never give me his heart, and now I’ve ruined it. I should have told him! I was so afraid it would kill him, he doesn’t even know who my father is, and that’s the worst part. He only knows part of the story if he knew the other part he would…he would never forgive himself!”
Sara couldn’t live with that. She had lived with rejection, fear, pity all her life—she would die before she would let Nicholas feel guilty over something he did so long ago. The man needed to forgive himself before he could ever be whole again. How was it possible to still love him after all the hurtful things he said? She sniffled some more before Lady Fenton took her inside. She explained to the servants that Lady Renwick was sick. They brought her to her adjoining chamber and put her to bed.
Sara cried herself to sleep and dreamt of little boys with blue eyes; little boys that she would never have the opportunity to have. It made her cry all the harder. Her dreams—everything shattered in an instant because Nicholas couldn’t trust her.
It was still dark when she woke up. She felt something next to her head and turned to see what it was. She nearly screamed in agony as she saw the thick pieces of paper. It was the annulment papers Nicholas had talked so much about, and at the bottom it was signed, “Lord Nicholas Devons, Seventh Earl of Renwick.”
She was starring in her own personal nightmare, and Nicholas had thrown the final punch. It made her ill, so ill that she threw up in her chamber pot several times before she was able to focus on getting food into her stomach.
She dressed with as much care as possible in hopes that Nicholas would be there for her to speak with. When she asked the footman where he had gone, he gave her a guilty look and said that Nicholas had some business to attend to in Scotland. He wouldn’t be back for another month.
So Sara went upstairs and cried some more until there were no tears left. Nothing left except a hollow ache in her chest. An ache that she feared would never go away.