course the child had a father, it was just that he’d been too angry, before, to think of anything beyond the way Miss Dalby had deceived him. The night Fielding had told him about the rumour he’d heard about Miss Dalby’s having an illegitimate baby, he’d felt as though he’d been robbed at gunpoint. Those words had stolen his whole life from him. The life he’d planned on having with her. The house in the country, the children he’d imagined running about in the orchard where chickens scratched among the windfalls. Gone in the blink of an eye. He’d been incapable of thinking about anything beyond his own loss.
But she hadn’t come by a baby on her own. There had been a man. A man who must have had fair hair and blue eyes.
And no conscience whatsoever.
Damn it all, Miss Dalby had only been seventeen when he’d started to think he was falling in love with her. So she could not have been more than sixteen when...when some rogue had seduced and abandoned her. Nor made any provision for his brat, if she was obliged to hire out 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.
Grimly determined not to reflect on how handsome her father must have been to have produced such a pretty child, he concentrated instead on capturing what he could see of her own nature. With deft sure fingers, he portrayed that eager curiosity and trusting friendliness which had so disarmed him.
‘Oh,’ the child said when he handed her the finished sketch. ‘Do I really look like that?’
‘Indeed you do, sweet pea,’ said Miss Dalby, shooting him a look of gratitude over the top of the sheet of paper.
She was many things, but she wasn’t stupid. She could see he’d restrained his anger with her so as not to hurt the child.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Frenchman reaching for his purse. He held up his hand to stall him.
‘You do not need to pay me for this picture,’ he said. Then turning to the little girl, because he was damned if he was going to let either of the adults know that he would rather starve than take another penny of the man’s money, he said, ‘It is my pleasure to have such a pretty subject to draw.’
The girl blushed and hung her head to study her portrait. Her mother gave him a tight smile, while the Frenchman openly smirked.
And all of a sudden, it was too much for him. He was burning with an unsavoury mix of frustration, anger and lust as he stowed his materials back in his satchel.
A waiter provided a very convenient diversion at that moment by arriving at the table to ask if they required anything else, or if they were ready to pay their bill. While the Frenchman was preoccupied, Nathan leaned towards Miss Dalby and muttered, ‘Is he really the best you can do? You are still young and attractive enough to acquire a protector who could at least dress you in something approaching last year’s fashions, couldn’t you?’
Her eyes snapped with anger as she opened her mouth to make a retort, but then something stopped her. She subsided back into her seat.
