LoveBetrayed by Samantha Kane Page B

you’ve got?” James taunted him.
    Harry groaned as he wiped the back of his hand across his
mouth, feeling the warm stickiness of blood on his lip. “Yes, actually, I’m
afraid it is,” he admitted ruefully. “I’m not much of a scrapper. So could we
please stop doing that?”
    James laughed. “I’ll have to add that to your faults—liar,
coward, fool, weakling.”
    “What are you talking about?” Harry asked, allowing his
exasperation to show. “I never lied to you. Are you mad? Is that what this is
about? Dragging me off in the middle of a battle?”
    “I told you, I made a promise,” James said coldly. “I am a
man of my word, no matter how much it galls me.”
    “You promised to keep me safe,” Harry said slowly, trying to
rein in his anger and distress. “To Daniel?”
    “I can’t think of anyone else around here who cares if you
live or die,” James said sarcastically.
    “You’re in love with him,” Harry said. “I suppose that
should surprise me, but it doesn’t.”
    “You are a very lucky man, Ashbury,” James said. He reached
down and yanked Harry up with a hand on his upper arm. He shoved Harry ahead of
him. “There are very few people I give a damn about, and even fewer I would do
this for.”
    “I’m sure,” Harry said with complete honesty. “I believe
that.” Harry stumbled through the brush, in an awkward crouch to avoid
detection by the French troops around them. He’d lost his sword and his horse,
and in that private little skirmish, his dignity. “How do you plan to get out
of here?” he asked as calmly as possible. “We are surrounded by an enemy army,
you know.” He looked through the trees and saw the Seventh Division and the
cavalry nearing the other side of the plain. Their retreat was now a sure
thing, and Harry could see that the number of dead and wounded lying on the
ground wore more French colors than British, although a fair number of
light-blue jackets like his lay there, unmoving. No matter how foolish and
ill-advised James thought their maneuvers, they’d done it. They’d saved the
flank and the Seventh Division, by God.
    “The day has not come yet that I cannot evade a French
army,” James said arrogantly.
    “Good,” Harry told him. “Then for the first time today, I’m
actually glad to be in your company.”
    James led him further away from the final stages of the
battle. “When were you going to tell him?” he asked Harry.
    “Tell him what?” Harry asked, confused. “About you? I won’t.
That’s your secret to keep if you wish.”
    “No, you dolt.” James motioned him down into a crouch again
and a small French patrol went dashing past them on their horses, the tall red
plumes on their cuirassiers’ helmets bobbing in the wind as they passed. “About
your fiancée back home in England eagerly awaiting your return,” he ground out,
glaring at Harry over his shoulder.
    Harry’s heart began pounding in his chest and he felt
lightheaded. “What?”
    “You heard me.” James kept walking, his pace quick, his head
moving constantly as he scanned the brush around them and led Harry further
away from the fighting and the British lines.
    “England seems so far away,” Harry stalled, panicked that
the truth was out at last. “The life I led is a faded memory.”
    James made a strangled sound and then Harry was slammed
against another tree, struggling to breathe with James’ arm across his throat.
“I should kill you right now, you lying son of a whore,” he hissed, his eyes
narrow and simmering with hatred. “You are a liar and a coward.” He yanked his
arm away and Harry doubled over, coughing and gasping for air. “You have done
what the French—and the English dogs with their constant baiting and
bullying—failed to do in the last few years. You’ve broken him. I’ve seen it.
He knows there’s no future for the two of you, though he doesn’t really know
why. I shall hate you for that always, and make you pay for it at