flinched and walked away from her to stare out of the window.
‘Exactly. You hurt me so badly that I lost my ability to trust men. Well, actually, it wasn’t all your fault. My father’s attitude played a large part in it, too. And then my aunt fostered that suspicion. Because she really, really hated men. She said I’d had a lucky escape anyway, because marriage was nothing but a trap for women. A cage in which some despotic male would lock her. I could understand why she thought like that, but I never wanted to end up like her. She was so...so miserable! She had so much money, but it never did her any good. It didn’t make her happy. It didn’t compensate for whatever it was that had set her off on her quest for revenge on the entire male sex.
‘When she died, I almost slid into the trap of becoming like her. Partly because I had to fight the men around me to hang on to what she’d left me. And I enjoyed winning. I won’t deny that I liked it a lot. I liked seeing bullies having to back down, rendering them powerless and sending them away with a flea in their ear.
‘But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to sit here like—well, you said it—like a spider in my web, holding all the threads together. I didn’t want to shrivel up inside, like she had, just because things hadn’t turned out the way I wanted.
‘Which was why I went to Paris in the first place. I needed to...break out. Find out what I wanted to do with my life. And then I met you.’
She walked across the room to stand behind him. Tentatively she placed one hand on his shoulder.
‘I thought you were a penniless artist. And believing that of you was what gave me the courage to take you as a lover. If I’d known you were still comfortably off and only taking a sort of...holiday, I would never have been able to open up to you the way I did. Your privileged background had come between us before. It would have felt like an unbreachable barrier if you’d been swanning about Paris, trading on your right to be treated with the deference due to the son of an English earl. When you started making advances I would have been afraid you were only toying with me, the way I believed you’d toyed with me in the past.’
He made a sort of growling noise and, though he didn’t turn round, she could see his cheeks flush. He might accuse her of lying, but he hadn’t been completely honest with her either.
‘And you wouldn’t have pursued me at all, had you known the extent of my wealth, would you?’
‘I thought I’d just made that perfectly clear.’
‘It wasn’t just my wealth that would have kept you away, Nathan. You didn’t know I was a virgin, either. You jumped to the conclusion that because I was with a man, I must be his mistress. You most definitely wouldn’t have got so jealous of poor Monsieur Le Brun if you’d known I was innocent of everything they told you about me. I suppose you might have still wanted to paint my portrait, perhaps as a memento of the girl you once loved, before I broke your heart and shattered your dreams, but not the rest.’
‘I—’
‘No, Nathan. Don’t you see? If we hadn’t both been trying to conceal some aspect of our lives, we would never have got together at all. There were too many obstacles. Too much hurt and suspicion on both sides. The way we got together was the only way it could have happened.’
‘But—’
‘But none of the things that would have kept us apart mattered one jot when we became lovers, Nathan, and don’t you dare try to say they did! We were just a man and a woman, rekindling a love we’d both mourned as lost. And it was a deeper, more meaningful love than the naïve, tentative relationship we started the first time round. Because we were both free to spend every moment with each other, untramelled by chaperons, or restrictions imposed by class. You cannot give up on it, just because you’ve found out I’m wealthy. It’s...stupid. And I know exactly how stupid because I did it first. I rebuffed you in just such a welter of suspicion that you are suffering from now. And I’ve spent the last few weeks working out that I’d been wrong to cast you as the villain of the tragedy I endured as a girl. You were as much a victim as I was.’
‘That was then,’ he growled. ‘This is different,’ he said harshly, spinning round so abruptly that it knocked her hand from his shoulder.
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘We fell in love with each other in Paris and that hasn’t gone away. It cannot. Ten years and gallons of suspicion weren’t able to drown it. The moment we set eyes on each other again, neither of us could rest until we’d come together, in the fullest sense possible.’
‘It is no use, though,’ he said. ‘It cannot work.’
‘Of course it can work. It worked in Paris, didn’t it? So we can make it work again. If I can forgive you for believing the worst of me, if I can believe that you never proposed to me because you secretly wanted to gain control of my money, if I can stop fearing the loss of my independence, then surely you can see that I am not going to try to control you either? I know I wasn’t completely frank with you when we first met in Paris, but surely you can see I’m nothing like Lucasta? I want to marry you because I love you. You, Nathan. The man you are. I don’t want you to become something else. I don’t want to mould you, or push you, or treat you like a puppet by pulling your strings. I just want to make you happy.’
‘And what of all your money? What of that?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Doesn’t matter!’ He made an angry, impatient gesture. ‘I have my pride, you know. In fact, it’s about damn near all I do have left.’
‘No, it isn’t. You have my heart, too. It’s yours whether you want it or not. And there’s nothing else of any value at all. Without your love, my life is completely empty. Hollow. Money cannot fulfil me.’
She stepped right up to him and grabbed his lapels. ‘I made a mistake leaving you behind in Paris. As soon as I got back here, I saw that without you, I will only ever just...exist. I have been so lonely without you. I need you to be...my companion. My soulmate. Nathan, marry me. Make my life worth living again.’
‘I am not the man to make any woman’s life worth living,’ he said bitterly. ‘All my life, people have been telling me that. And I’ve proved it. My first marriage failed—’
‘Because you didn’t love each other. You married for all the wrong reasons. Marry for the right ones this time. Because you want a companion and a soulmate. Someone to complete you and make your life worth living.’
He took a breath as though about to say something. Closed his mouth. Shook his head. ‘It’s no use. I was just chasing a dream. Paris was—’
‘Paris was a taste of what we could have, if we both trust in the love we found there. When you learned that I hadn’t been an unmarried mother, that I hadn’t tried to deceive you, I saw the pain etched into your features fade away. And I became a better person when I was with you, too. The anger I’d carried around for so long, like a shield, melted away. I thought that lowering it would make me vulnerable. Instead, it freed me to be myself. And that was the person you loved. The real Amethyst. The one I’d never suspected I could be. It wasn’t the girl you knew all those years ago. It was someone I’d become as a result of all I’ve been through. Just as you’d changed from the boy who swept me off my feet, then broke my heart. You’d grown into a man. A man who’d suffered, and sinned, then finally found a path you could walk with your head held high.
‘Money didn’t
