proving Lucasta a liar, over and over again. Nobody has any doubt about my masculinity, not any longer.’
‘Oh,’ said Amethyst faintly. That made perfect sense. She could see exactly why he’d gone out and proved his manhood, over and over again, in as flagrant a way as possible. He hadn’t let her leave his bed that first time, until he’d demonstrated his ability to take her to the heights of pleasure. He took pride in his prowess as a lover.
‘That’s right. Your sexual career made all the papers.’
His face darkened.
‘Yes. All of it. I made sure it all got published, even though my father tried his damnedest to suppress it. It was my way out.’
‘Your way out?’ She injected as much cynicism into her voice as she could muster. She couldn’t believe that in a few short minutes he’d practically demolished beliefs she’d held firmly for ten years. But she wouldn’t let him convince her he had any excuse for being involved in that Season’s most lurid scandal. Lifting her head, she looked down her nose at him. ‘The way I heard it, they threw you out.’
‘Precisely! If I hadn’t done something that drastic, my father would have picked another girl, from another political dynasty, and it would have started all over again.’
Dammit! She knew he’d come up with something to make even the end of his political career seem justified.
‘So, those last affairs you had, with...’
‘Two of the most influential women I could seduce,’ he agreed with a cold, hard smile. ‘At the same time, too, so that even if their husbands could overlook the affairs, the offended wives could not. If there is one thing a certain type of woman will not tolerate, it is infidelity in her lover.’
‘Indeed?’ She’d thought he would at least tell her that the stories about that last scandal had been exaggerated. Instead he was confirming them. She shuddered.
The thought of him coldly seducing two women, married women at that, concurrently, made her feel sick.
His face shuttered.
‘You didn’t question a single word of it, did you? You read it in print, so you thought it must all be true.’
She glanced up at him as he huffed out a bitter laugh.
‘But you’ve just told me that it was...’
‘And you were ready to condemn my behaviour without knowing what lay behind it. Or considered there might have been people whose sole aim in writing the stories was to blacken my name.’
She drifted blindly away from the chair behind which she’d been cowering and sank down on to the nearest available sofa she could reach without having to walk past him.
‘I can excuse you for not seeing my true motives for the way I’ve behaved,’ he said. ‘Because you knew nothing of my misery, my sense of utter failure. So now, will you have the honesty to think about my earlier failure to believe in you? Remember, all I knew of you was that although you professed to be from a very strict background, you never protested when I crossed the line. You did not put up even a token protest that first time I kissed you. You wanted me to kiss you. You didn’t seem to care if we got caught, either.’
‘But that was because...’
‘You loved me. I know that now. And I should have believed in it at the time, too. But what Fielding told me put a very different complexion on your behaviour. It was all just credible enough to make me wonder. So before you condemn me for not being able to somehow discern that you were totally innocent of all the charges laid at your door, let me ask you this: When the situation was reversed, did you believe in me?’
No. She hadn’t. She’d been so angry with him for the way he’d cast her aside that she’d wanted to believe the worst of him. Stoking up her hatred had given her the strength to go on living. She’d pored over those newspaper stories, believing the very worst of him without a shred of evidence to back any of it up.
So how could she condemn him for believing what a true, honest, good friend had told him, from the best of motives? Especially when, now she looked back on it openly and honestly, her own behaviour might have made the accusations against her seem plausible?
She’d been so bowled over when the handsome, charming young son of such a notable family had paid her attention that she’d forgotten every principle she’d ever had. She had encouraged him, as much as she’d dared. When he’d snatched that first kiss, a hasty peck on the cheek, she hadn’t protested. She’d blushed and giggled, and let him engineer situations where he could do it again. They’d rapidly progressed to kisses on the lips. Then heated kisses on the lips.
She caught her lip between her teeth.
‘What a pair we are,’ he said. ‘Neither of us can quite believe in love. I couldn’t believe you loved me ten years ago and you cannot believe I love you now. Or perhaps you are just looking for excuses to escape me. I’m not much of a catch, am I? You’ve made it clear that I’m good enough for a fling, but not a lifetime.’
He walked over to the window and stood with his back to her for some time, in complete silence. When she darted a glance in his direction, it was to see his shoulders hunched in an attitude of defeat.
She wanted to cry out that she’d been too hasty. That, perhaps, if he gave her time to think it over, she might be able to...
To what? Believe in him? Trust her entire future to his hands? When by his own admission he’d proved himself capable of the vilest kind of behaviour?
‘I may as well go,’ he said, whirling round and making for the door. ‘Forgive me for haranguing you. I hope your voyage back to England will be uneventful and that your memories of your stay in Paris are...sweet.’
And with that, he walked out.
Leaving his hat lying on the floor where he’d dropped it.
Amethyst stared wide-eyed at the closed door through which he’d gone. He’d given up. He’d seen that she couldn’t ever trust him fully again and he’d given up. And gone.
Just like that.
She got to her feet and ran to the window. One last look. She would take one last look at him as he walked away until the crowd in the street swallowed him from sight. She laid her hand flat on the window pane, as though she could reach through it and touch him. Knowing she couldn’t.
She’d blamed him for destroying what they’d had, before. But this time, he was right, she was the one who’d destroyed it. She hadn’t been prepared to trust him. To forgive him. Worse than that, she hadn’t even tried.
She could justify ignoring that first proposal. The night he’d discovered she was still a virgin and guilt had reared up and slapped him round the head for what he’d done. But the subsequent ones? If he didn’t know about her wealth, if he was really trying to get her to marry him because he loved her...
She shook her head, tearing herself away from the window and returning to her chair.
Where her eye fell on the portrait that he’d brought to her. For no other reason, according to him, than that he thought it might be a way to get to speak to her again. Was
