to be generous.’
‘That’s a horribly cynical way to look at life.’
‘I prefer to say realistic. Amy, I spent years amongst these people. I know how they operate. Believe me, the more cynical you are about them, the less likely you are to be hurt by them.’
She frowned. ‘I wonder you bothered to come tonight, then. They all sound perfectly horrid.’
‘They have their uses,’ he said darkly. The most urgent being to send a message to his father. Somebody, from this gathering, was bound to return to England with the news that his reprobate youngest son had taken up with the very woman he’d done his utmost to separate him from. And, for once, he would taste defeat. Know that all his machinations had been in vain. Amethyst had found her way back to him.
‘Uses? What do you mean?’
Nathan rubbed his nose with his thumb. He couldn’t admit that he wanted to flaunt her in his father’s face. That he was using her.
She didn’t deserve to become a pawn in his ongoing battle with his father. Pawns got hurt. His father certainly hadn’t hesitated to blacken her name ten years ago. To him, she was nothing. A mere inconvenience to be swatted aside like a pesky fly.
‘I shouldn’t have brought you here,’ he said, a cold knot forming in his stomach. He could have taken her anywhere. Why had he exposed her to the possibility of getting hurt all over again?
‘You are no match for these sort of people. It is like throwing a lamb to the wolves.’
‘Nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘Do you think I am a country bumpkin with straw for brains?’
‘No! That is not what I meant at all. You are just too...straightforward to know how to survive in this kind of environment. You have no idea how to smile while uttering a threat, or make someone believe you are their friend whilst plotting how to stab them in the back.’
Simple. He thought she was simple. Not up to cutting it in his world.
Well, why should she be surprised? It was what he’d thought ten years ago, too. Well, she’d show him.
But before she had the chance to work out exactly how she was going to prove that she was not the simpering, weak-willed kind of ninny that needed a man to protect her from all the big bad wolves in the world of politics, the stout couple in front moved away and she and Nathan were finally standing face to face with their host and hostess.
‘Oh, Mr Harcourt, what an unexpected pleasure to see you here,’ gushed the bejewelled woman, flashing a lot of teeth and bosom in his direction. Though how it could be unexpected, since she must have sent him an invitation, Amethyst couldn’t imagine.
‘I would have thought our sort of gathering would be much too tame for you,’ she said archly, before going off into a peal of shrill laughter.
So why invite him, then? Because my father is, and always will be, the Earl of Finchingfield and he wields enormous political influence.
‘And who is this delightful young lady you have brought with you? I don’t believe I have seen her about anywhere, have I?’
Nathan paused, only very slightly, but the woman promptly leapt to her own conclusion.
‘Oh, how very naughty of you,’ she said, flattening one hand to her impressive bosom. ‘To bring your latest chère amie into such a gathering. Oh, but isn’t that just like you!’ She rapped his arm with her fan. ‘Always courting scandal one way or another. But I shall not be cross with you. This is Paris, after all, so what does it really matter? Algernon, dearest,’ she rattled on, while Nathan seemed to have turned to stone at her side, ‘look who it is. Mr Harcourt and his lovely young...French friend.’
‘Harcourt, you dog.’ He grinned. ‘Still the rake, I see! But do you have a name, you lovely young thing?’ Mr Wilson, who looked exactly as she’d imagined a minor politician with delusions of grandeur would look, seized her hand and pressed a wet kiss on the back of it.
She flashed Nathan a swift, challenging glance from under her eyelashes, dropped Mr Wilson a curtsy and, summoning up what little French she knew, said, in a little, breathy, voice, ‘Moi, je suis Mademoiselle D’Aulbie.’
Nathan let out a choking sound and turned to her with a look of complete shock.
‘It is such the honour to meet the very important man of whom I hear so much,’ Amy simpered, batting her eyelashes up at her host, the way she imagined a woman of pleasure, who did not know when she was being insulted to her face, would do. ‘And Monsieur ’Arcour, he does not want to attend at all, but I did so want zis treat.’
‘Did you, my dear?’ Mr Wilson puffed up to almost twice his not-inconsiderable size. ‘Don’t suppose young Harcourt could resist, eh? Don’t say I blame him.’ He winked at Nathan over the top of her head.
‘But what is zis rayk you say of eem?’ she said, her execrable accent getting thicker by the second. ‘He is the artist, n’est-ce pas? Not some kind of gardener.’
At that point, Nathan abruptly came back to life, grabbing her elbow and tugging her into the room, whilst muttering something to their hosts about making room for the next couple in line.
‘What the hell,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘has come over you? Putting on that ludicrous accent and letting them think...’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said airily, beckoning a waiter who was circulating with a tray of champagne. ‘Perhaps I just couldn’t resist showing you that I could very easily disguise not only what I am thinking, but also my very nationality, if I put my mind to it.’
He snagged a glass of champagne himself and knocked it all back in one go.
‘But why would you want to do any such thing?’
She sipped her champagne whilst considering how to answer him. And then decided to plump for the truth.
‘Do you know, I’m not entirely sure. But I’ve felt on the verge of...revolution ever since I arrived in Paris. I have the strangest feeling that I can be anyone I want to be here. And just for a moment, I rather fancied the idea of letting that stupid woman think I was your chère amie. You have to admit it was rather amusing to see the judgemental, pompous, narrow-minded bladders of wind both run to the lengths of their boorishness, wasn’t it? Far better than having to explain that actually I am—’
‘No. You don’t need to say another word.’ He’d frozen in horror when Mrs Wilson had expressed curiosity about her. He’d hesitated to give her real name, knowing it could signal the eruption of another battle between him and his father, with Amy at risk of getting caught in the cross-fire.
He’d been relieved, if a little stunned, when Amy had started to poke fun at their hosts. And now that they’d escaped the danger that people who still had connections to his father’s world might find out who she was, he had to admit that he would have found her performance amusing if he hadn’t been frozen solid with horror at the danger he’d so foolishly exposed her to.
It reminded him of the rather tart sense of humour she’d displayed ten years before. The perceptive and witty comments she’d made about people they met that had chimed so exactly with his own feelings that he’d felt as though he’d found
