she accepts as the truth in order to satisfy your own need for forgiveness?’
‘No! I need her to understand she is loved—’
‘She knows that already.’
His fingers encircled her wrist, not tightly, just keeping her there. Laura tugged. ‘Let me go, you are hurting me.’
‘It hurts when you resist me, not when you do as I say.’ He waited until she stopped pulling and established his point for him. ‘In our marriage you will find the same thing. Obey and you will be happy enough. Run counter to me and suffer the consequences. Now swear.’
He did not spell out what those consequences were. To banish her from Alice, she supposed. He was intelligent enough to know an unspecified threat would work more uncertainty on her mind.
‘I am surprised you would accept my word, but, yes, I swear not to tell Alice the truth about her parentage. Let me add another promise. I will never let her realise that the man she loves as her father is a blackmailing, unscrupulous tyrant.
‘Now, let us go and tell her our joyous news.’ She smiled at him, the glittering smile that had always masked her deepest hurt. And I swear you will never discover my greatest weakness: my love for you.
They sat together on a broad garden bench under a lilac bush, well away from the laughter and shrieks of the playing children. Alice stood in front of them and listened, wide-eyed, her hand clasped in his as Avery told her that he had found her a stepmama and that Lady Laura would be his wife. He had hoped she might be pleased, but he was unprepared for the emotional kick in the gut when she wriggled her hand free of his and threw herself into Laura’s arms with a shriek of delight.
Alice’s joy should not have been a shock, he knew she liked Laura, had seen their rapport when the child had grown to know her Aunt Caroline. Surely he could not be jealous, or worse, resentful that the child had found another adult to love? Avery shifted that uncomfortable, unworthy thought away and watched Laura. He was not prepared for the tears on her cheeks, nor the fierceness of her embrace in return for Alice’s. She had protested all along that she loved her daughter and now he knew he had to accept that was the truth. No actress, however skilled, could feign the depth of her emotion and, in his heart, he had always known it.
And, despite her fierce independence, her dislike of him and her desperate need to be with Alice, she had yielded on every occasion when he had put pressure on her for the sake of the child.
Now, against his every prejudice, he had to accept she would do anything for Alice. Even, it seemed, marry a man she detested. But why leave it so late to try to claim her child? It could not even be that she had refrained from making contact while her parents were alive for their sake, because it was not until over a year from their deaths that she had sought Alice out. And the conventions of mourning would not have kept her from the child, he could see that. There had to be some good explanation, he wanted to believe that.
But could he trust her with anything else? She had turned on Piers, furious and full of spite, when he had simply been doing his duty. She had flaunted herself amongst the fastest set in society for years, earning a reputation that had been an inch from ruin. And she had lied to him, disguised herself, wormed her way into Alice’s affections with a charade she could never have sustained. Even when she had come to him, acknowledging the dangerous sensual attraction between them, it had been a lie, a stratagem, a cold-blooded manoeuvre to trap him. It had not been her fault that she had delivered exactly what he had decided he wanted.
No, he could trust neither her word nor her virtue. She was a danger and he knew he did not understand her. Last night as she lay in his arms and had yielded with passion and fire to his lovemaking he had almost believed he was falling...
Avery gave himself a sharp mental shake. He could not afford weakness. He had gone to her room this morning when it was empty and he had taken that pair of evening slippers. Now one was locked in a dresser drawer, a physical reminder of a deliberate betrayal.
‘May I call you Mama?’ Alice asked.
Laura looked at him over the top of the child’s head, her face tranquil, her eyes stark. ‘Of course, darling. As soon as I am married to your papa, then I will be your mama.’
‘Do you love Papa?’ The innocent question startled him, and Laura, too, from her expression. Her gaze switched instantly to Alice’s face and she smiled. It was not the smile she kept for him, edged with icicles, and not the genuine warm one that transformed her face whenever she looked at Alice. This, Avery realised, was a smile that hid something very deep.
‘He will never know how much,’ she said.
There was nothing he could return for that, not with Alice listening. For a moment he had thought it sarcasm, directed at him, and then he saw the glimmer of a tear as the dark lashes lowered to veil Laura’s eyes. Her teeth caught her lower lip for a second and then she was calm again. She had not responded about her feelings for him, but for Piers, Alice’s real father. But then she had written that letter to Piers. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Had he somehow misunderstood her? The woman tied him in knots.
‘Is it a secret or may I tell everyone?’ Alice was already off the seat, hopping from foot to foot in her eagerness.
‘Yes, you may tell,’ Laura said and sat, her hands lax in her lap, watching Alice as she raced across the lawn to the other children.
‘You loved him, then?’
She turned to stare at him, a frown of puzzlement between her arched brows. ‘Him?’
‘Alice’s father.’
‘Piers?’ Her confusion puzzled him. ‘Why, yes, of course I did. I would never have lain with a man I did not love.’
‘Really? And last night?’
‘What do you think?’
‘That you overcame your revulsion very well.’ He got to his feet and took a few angry paces away from her, furious that he was letting his guard down, that she might suspect he cared.
‘I am not an innocent girl barely eighteen years old any longer.’ She kept her eyes on the children, over by the house. ‘And you are an attractive man and, as I expected, skilled in bed.’
Avery felt himself flush at the dispassionate description. ‘I am glad I gave satisfaction.’
She looked at him then and this time there was more than a hint of tears in the brown eyes. ‘You know you did. Stop trying to sound like a...a...as if I was paying you.’
‘You do not have much good fortune with your lovers, do you?’ He had not meant to mention Piers, ever again, but that last accusation splintered his resolve. ‘How did you feel about Piers when he left you? Went back to do his duty?’
‘Bereft,’ she said and stumbled as she got to her feet. Avery put out a hand to steady her and she hit it away with a swiftness that betrayed the depths of her turmoil. ‘In the moment when I read his note I felt betrayed, alone and frightened. You would have been proud of what you had achieved, sending him back to his honourable death and making me hate him, if only for a second.’
Laura
