Teasing Your Wicked Heart

CHAPTER 26

I apologize for inconveniencing you with such matters, and I hope you can forgive my father and his disorganized ways.

With gratitude, Mr. Collins.

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Anthony reread the letter twice, then thrice, as his eyes focused on the words that caused tiny cracks at his soul.

You are relieved of your duty to marry your ward...

I am to collect her off your hands...

His hands started shaking, his fingers taking their own mind and crushed the thick offending paper beneath his palms.

She's leaving, and there's nothing he could do to about it.

Anthony felt his limbs stiffen, finally numbing as he sank to a nearby chair. He allowed the deafening silence of his room to engulf him, and for what seemed like an eternity, he watched the furnace glow of spitting embers as it turned itself into blackened smoke.

The letter laid still in his hands, its edges folded, its center unforgivably distorted, and its weight growing heavier by the second.

His mind worked, a vein convulsing on his temple as he struggled to decide on what could be best for him, and best for Sarah Jane given this situation.

Having never met Mr. Collins, he had no idea if he was to be trusted. Everyone knew of the elder Mr. Collins, the capable and aging solicitor of most of the ton in East of England, but no one knew his children—he spoke so rarely of them that Anthony could not even gather the correct information regarding the number of his offspring.

How much can you trust a man in letters?

Mr. Collins, as he claims to be, might not even be a true son of the elder Mr. Collins and could be a blackguard who aspired to make something of himself by robbing another man's possessions and identity.

Or, he thought with a grim smile, Mr. Collins could have been a lonesome man who had his own designs on Lady Sarah Jane. He might take the relinquishment of the Rosenberg title as his opportunity to be able to corner the woman for himself.

There were so many possibilities of deceit, and Killsworth cannot fathom how much of it may cause Sarah Jane irreversible harm.

The letter found itself in a tight ball. Even if someone were to pry it open, the creases had already damaged its readability.

No. Anthony could never trust Sarah Jane into any man's hands. He cannot turn her over and allow her to be under a stranger's power and devices without as much as sending an entire fleet to investigate the man's past, present, and future embodiments.

After all, Sarah Jane is unmarried, and is a lady of the ton. She cannot just go off scampering and traversing with another unmarried gentleman, even with Mathilda as a servant and guardian, all the way to Yorkshire!

Suddenly, his chest tightened painfully. Anthony could feel his heart slamming into his ribs, his mind reeling from the revelation and his lungs squeezing the oxygen out of him.

It has been the strangest and most powerful emotion to ever assault his body. For all the power of his mental faculties, his bones up to the tips of his hair felt entirely useless.

He used to think that seeing Sarah Jane married to another will cause him a bit of anxiety. But the m image of her imprisoned to a passionless marriage to an elderly Lord Holt, had him reconsider his feelings towards her. And after allowing himself to accept that she had never been a mere ward to him, the news of her departure for Yorkshire to be in the mercy of a Lady Martin—who she never had even spoken of—could not be, in the longest stretch known to man, the best solution to this madness.