Regency Surrender: Passion And Rebellion. Louise Allen

a few opinions of my own. Once or twice I even had the unmitigated cheek to vote according to my conscience. A young pup like me, who had no experience, no brains, no judgement... They kept telling me I shouldn’t think for myself. That I should let older and wiser heads guide me. Which had the opposite effect. I made a couple of dramatic, rebellious gestures that made me look more of a fool than ever.’

      In spite of her determination not to believe one word he said, this rang so true she couldn’t help it. Hadn’t she made the dramatic, rebellious gesture of going to live with her spinster aunt rather than back down when her family had told her she hadn’t known her own mind, that she’d misunderstood his intentions?

      ‘And as soon as Lucasta saw she’d been sold a pig in a poke, as she put it, she started to try to punish me.’

      He gave a bitter laugh that tugged at a place deep inside her that had long lain dormant. She swallowed it back down, nervously.

      ‘Her opening gambit was to start spreading tales about her disappointment with my prowess between the sheets. I suppose in a way she had cause to complain. I’d never had that much enthusiasm for her, and what little I managed to muster waned remarkably swiftly once I realised what she was like. But still, I had this stupid, unfashionable notion that what went on between a husband and wife was private. She didn’t. She wanted a life lived in the public eye. And when I refused to employ the kind of tactics she wanted me to take in order to start climbing the greasy pole, she took her revenge in public.’

      His cheeks flushed dull red as she recalled some of the things she’d read about him in those days. The hints that he wasn’t much of a man. The cartoons depicting him as a sort of wilting flower, blowing about with every breeze as he voted not according to the party line, but with the prevailing wind of public opinion.

      ‘Even the fact that I wouldn’t break my marriage vows made her despise me more. I made it a point of honour, you see, to show the world that I wouldn’t sacrifice my integrity for my own comfort, let alone her ambition. But she even managed to twist that into something...foul.’ His mouth twisted with bitterness.

      ‘When, eventually, I suggested we might both be happier if I retired to the country, out of her way, she reminded me that her family had paid a great deal of money for me and I owed it to them to at least go through the motions. Even if I couldn’t be a husband she could be proud of, I had no right to make her forfeit the life she loved. Hosting political gatherings, being in the thick of all the intrigue...

      ‘She was right, of course. I stayed in London and...endured. My God, but I was relieved when she died. That makes me sound heartless, doesn’t it? But you have no idea what it’s like to live with that level of contempt, day in, day out.’

      Actually, she rather thought she did. She’d had a taste of it from her family, before her aunt had swooped in and rescued her. Only she hadn’t had to endure it for years. Only a few months.

      ‘I wasted no time in embarking on a very public affair with a notoriously rapacious widow,’ he said with a touch of defiance. ‘A notoriously gossipy, rapacious widow, who was not averse to telling anyone who showed any interest that I was most definitely not a disappointment between the sheets. And after her, I went a little mad, I suppose. Taking whatever was on offer, 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