her body to men like this one.
He glared at her French lover again, though his anger was veering wildly from one player in the drama to another with confusing rapidity.
Her parents, for instance. They’d brought her up to London for that Season. They must have known. She couldn’t have hidden a baby from them. They must have told her to pretend to be innocent. At that age, and after what she’d already been through, she wouldn’t have dared defy them. Besides, properly brought-up girls did not set up their will in opposition to their parents.
No more than sons of the same age. He’d only been in London himself at the express command of his own father. Forbidden from exploring his talent as an artist, he’d been pretending to think about choosing some other, respectable profession, whilst really trying to work out if there was any honourable way he could break free from family expectations.
For his father wasn’t a man to cross, any more than he guessed the Reverend Dalby had been.
It had only been last night that he’d started to wonder what had become of her all these years. Before that, he’d refused to allow his thoughts to stray in her direction. But...it didn’t look as though her family had stood by her. Why else would she be sitting here with her daughter in plain sight, a lover at her side and no wedding ring on her finger?
Was her father the kind of man who would wash his hands of his erring child, just because she’d brought disgrace to the family? The way his own father had done? Had her attempt to inveigle him into marriage been her last, desperate attempt to appease them? Had he, Nathan, been her last resort?
No wonder she’d wept when he’d become betrothed to Lucasta instead.
Strange how the years brought a new perspective to the tragedies of youth. There was always more than one side to any story. And before this moment—at least, before he’d watched the child enjoying her ice cream—the only side he’d ever considered had been his own.
‘Are you a friend of Monsieur Le Brun?’
He blinked, to find the little girl was smiling up at him, her wide blue eyes full of curiosity.
‘No, Sophie,’ Miss Dalby hastily put in, while her lover was taking an indignant breath to refute the allegation. ‘This is Monsieur Harcourt. He is an artist. He drew a picture of me last night, while we were out at dinner. I expect he is hoping for more custom from us.’
The little girl’s face lit up. ‘Oh, could he do a picture of me? You said we might buy a picture today. I thought from a shop. But this would be even better!’
‘Yes. It would.’ Miss Dalby gave him a smug little smile.
And all his sympathy towards her evaporated. She’d found a man who did not care that she’d already borne a child out of wedlock. And she was going to take great pleasure in obliging him to sit at her feet and draw the child. The child whose existence had driven them apart. The child whose existence she’d tried to conceal, so that she could entrap him into a marriage that would have been...
At that point, his imagination floundered into a wall of mist. He had no idea what marriage to her would have been like, with an illegitimate child hovering on the fringes of it. Could it possibly have been any worse than the one he’d actually had? With a wife he couldn’t even like, never mind desire, once he’d got to know her? A wife who’d broadcast her contempt for him with increasing virulence.
But one thing he knew. He wouldn’t have wanted to stop bedding her. Even now, ten years later, with a gut full of aversion for her lies and scheming, he wanted her. The reason he’d been so slow on the uptake that morning had been because of the sleepless night he’d spent on her account, either brooding on the past, or suffering dreams of the kind that bordered on nightmares, from which he had woken soaked in sweat and painfully aroused.
Just thinking about the things he’d done to her, and with her, during those feverish dreams had a predictable effect.
Hastily he pulled up a chair to her table, in spite of her French lover’s scowl, pulling his satchel on to his lap to cover his embarrassment.
With quick, angry strokes, he began a likeness of the girl he might have been forced into providing for, had Miss Dalby been successful in her attempts to snare him.
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