too close. If you were really a shrew, you wouldn’t care whether you hurt me or not.’
He leaned forwards, and planted a hard kiss on her lips just as she was parting them to give him a piece of her mind. He kissed her until she’d forgotten what she’d been going to say to him. And then, just as she relented and started to kiss him back, he pulled away and sprang out of the carriage.
Only to lean back in, extending his hand to her with a broad smile, which she somehow found herself returning.
‘You are incorrigible,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘That’s me,’ he agreed cheerfully. ‘But you wouldn’t have me any other way, would you? You’ve needed to find a man who is strong enough not to bleed when you try to sharpen your claws on him.’
‘And you think you are that man?’
‘I’m man enough for you,’ he husked into her ear, just at the moment when a footman stepped forwards to take her coat. Which made her blush. And want to do something to make him squirm, the way he’d just made her squirm. Only she couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make her look a fool as well.
‘God, will you just look at this place?’ Nathan tucked her hand into the crook of his arm almost absent-mindedly as he stared up at the queue of people snaking half-way down the stairs. ‘They must have rented the whole building, not just one floor.’
She took note of the disdainful twist to his mouth. In spite of growing up in exalted circles, in spite of having married into another wealthy family, it looked as though he didn’t like people flaunting their wealth either.
‘So...’ he jerked his eyes away from the marble pillars, the ornate chandeliers, the liveried, bewigged footmen, and turned his attention back to her. ‘You were about to tell me what your French hireling said when you told him you knew he wasn’t being honest about his name.’
Was she? Oh, yes. She’d been really annoyed about it too.
‘That was what started it,’ she agreed. ‘But then he had the nerve to demand I tell him who had been talking about him, rather than just give me an honest answer.’
‘What cheek,’ said Nathan with mock horror.
‘Yes, it was, actually. He acted as though I had no right to question him, when I am employing him in a position of considerable trust. And I was just pointing out that if he wished to remain in my employ he had better come clean, when Fenella burst into the room and flew to his side. Saying it was all her fault. Well, he tried to silence her, saying that I didn’t know the truth, but she just said she couldn’t keep it a secret from me any longer and it all came tumbling out. Not about his real identity, not at first, but about how she and Gaston were going to marry as soon as we return to England.’
For one terrible moment she’d thought they’d hatched up some plot to swindle her. After all, they had spent so much time together poring over the correspondence from French firms it would have been easy. The thought of Fenella betraying her trust in that way had felt like a knife-blow. Like her sisters all over again. She’d wondered why it was that no matter how much she did for people, nobody had ever stood by her.
It had been a tremendous relief to find out that what they were hiding was merely a romance.
‘But why,’ he said as the queue shuffled further up the stairs, ‘did they need to keep their betrothal a secret from you?’
‘It was because he’d seduced her,’ she told him grimly. ‘The very first night we arrived in Paris. Oh, Fenella said it was all her own doing. She’d had too much to drink and was lonely. And they’d become such good friends during the voyage and had so much in common. And then she said she had missed the kind of closeness a woman can only find with a man. Which, by her blushes, I took to mean in bed.’
And because of the time she’d spent in Nathan’s bed, she could actually see why Fenella had succumbed to temptation, when only the day before, she would have been horrified. Sickened.
‘Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. Such as the way neither of them could quite look me in the eye any more. And the way he’d gone from being as sarcastic as he dared to being positively ingratiating.’ And the way Fenella blushed when she’d made what were, on the face of it, perfectly innocuous remarks.
‘And all the while he kept trying to shush her. But when he groaned and covered his face and sort of collapsed on to the sofa, Fenella finally realised we hadn’t been arguing about that at all. But it was too late. The cat, as they say, was well and truly out of the bag.’
‘I wish I had been there,’ he said, his lips twitching with mirth.
‘It wasn’t funny.’ Could he take nothing seriously?
‘I beg your pardon, but it sounds highly entertaining. When you have a middle-aged couple behaving like some latter-day Romeo and Juliet, with you cast as both sets of disapproving guardians. It’s preposterous.’
‘To be fair, they were both afraid I would try to part them.’
‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’
‘Because,’ she said, grasping the banister rail with such force it looked as though she was considering wringing someone’s neck, ‘he’d taken advantage of her. If I’d found out the morning after, when she was so upset about it, you may be sure I would have turned him out!’
‘But you said Fenella was as keen as he was.’
‘I know you don’t think there’s anything wrong with jumping into bed with people on the slightest pretext,’ she said coldly, ‘but Fenella was racked with guilt. So much that she couldn’t bring herself to confide in me. And he worked on those fears. And seems to have convinced her that they’re experiencing some grand passion that will end in marriage.’
She didn’t see him flinch when she assumed he had no morals. That he would, as she put it, jump into bed with any woman, on the slightest pretext. It took an effort, but he managed to carry on with the conversation after only the slightest hesitation.
‘And you don’t think it will?’
‘I...’
He watched the fire go from her. Her shoulders slumped.
‘This morning, I would have said not. But having been obliged to watch them...’
‘Billing and cooing,’ he supplied helpfully.
She shot him a brief, narrow-eyed glare.
‘Precisely,’ she said bitterly. ‘He is certainly very convincing in his role.’ Once they’d gone out and Fenella and Gaston no longer felt the need to conceal their relationship, they’d become remarkably demonstrative. Smiling at each other and laughing at silly little jokes that made no sense to her whatsoever. And looking at each other as though, given half a chance, they would dive into the nearest bushes and rip each other’s clothes off.
And yet somehow they’d managed to include Sophie in their happy little love bubble. They were bonding into a family unit, right before her eyes.
Leaving her trailing along behind them. Excluded, as usual. She’d felt almost as lonely as when her family had closed ranks
