Free The Baron Next Door (Prelude to a Kiss) by Erin Knightley Page A

It was easier to think he was just an unpleasant man. A wounded heart would mean sympathy, which she wasn’t quite prepared to give.
    No, Grandmama must be mistaken. Deciding to let the topic drop, she nodded and took a sip of her now-cold tea.
    Unbidden, the purplish smudges beneath his tired green eyes flashed through her mind. A teeny, tiny, insignificant whisper of doubt ghosted through her.
    She somehow didn’t think she’d be able to write him off so easily from now on.

Chapter Seven
    H e had known it was too much to hope that the quiet from next door would last.
    Three days, three blessed days of relative peace, of not having a single headache, and now the proverbial shoe had finally dropped. Doing his damnedest to block out the noise, Hugh lifted the crystal tumbler to his lips and drank deeply of the clear liquid it held. It might look like water, but it burned a wicked path to his gut. It was a sensation he had not only grown accustomed to in the past four years, but one that he looked forward to. More so, even, since his brother’s death.
    And especially so now that
she
was his neighbor.
    He supposed he should be impressed that the music somehow managed to reach all the way to his study. Perhaps he should also consider himself fortunate that it was well into the afternoon, and he was fairly well rested. It was possible he should be grateful that she had given him three days’ reprieve from the noise.
    But he wasn’t any of those things.
    He was too damn frustrated to be. He’d been here two and a half weeks now, and the tantalizing taste of freedom kept dancing away from him. Every time he felt the immense relief of nothingness, the blessed lack of pain that sharpened his mind and softened his dried and hardened soul, hope would rush in, bringing with it the long-dormant dreams for a normal life. But the thing about hope was, the more one had, the harder one fell when it was dashed.
    Like now, when he could feel the slow but inevitable build of tension at the base of his skull. It gave him ample warning of what was to come, but no method by which to thwart it. It was like standing in the middle of a battlefield with the enemy visible from miles away, but having no means with which to either fight or flee.
    Dropping his chin to his chest, he abandoned the tumbler on the desk and massaged the back of his neck with his hand. He was
trying
to fight. He was here, was he not? He was doing everything in his power to climb out of the darkness that had descended upon him years ago on that hellacious day at Waterloo. The fact of his continual setbacks just made his efforts that much more arduous.
    He glanced down to the letter on the desk in front of him, its looping script overflowing with his sister-in-law’s enthusiasm. The baby was doing well, continuing to thrive under the overprotective watch of nearly the entire village. Felicity was eager to hear word of how the dinner with her cousin had gone, and if the waters were working their magic. She mentioned her brother would soon be in town, and unapologetically admitted that she had written to an old friend to inform him of Hugh’s arrival, so he should expect another invitation, which she insisted he must accept. She had so much hope for his therapy and was delighted he was “moving forward in his recovery.”
    Instead of making him feel better, as he was certain his sister-in-law had intended, it just exasperated the feeling that he was a bloody failure. Or perhaps the proper term was
more
of a failure. She was so certain that if he could just trust in the waters, trust in the doctors and their know-it-all advice, that he’d be healed. Never mind that in the past four years he had seen at least a dozen doctors—quacks and sawbones alike—who had a dozen snake-oil remedies for what ailed him. She just couldn’t accept that he might not get better.
    The problem was, he very well might not.
    After all, a broken clavicle could mend in time and wounds could