Regency Surrender: Passion And Rebellion. Louise Allen

made me look...beautiful. Which is very flattering. But it is not me, that woman there. It makes me feel as though you don’t really know me. Or as though you have been looking at me through a...through a prism.’

      ‘That is the most perceptive thing I have ever heard you say.’ He turned her round when she couldn’t tear her eyes from the vision of womanly submission on the canvas, obliging her to look directly into his face. ‘In a way, I have been looking at you through a kind of prism. I have been looking at you through the eyes of a man in love. Desperately in love.’

      Something coiled in her stomach and slithered its way up her spine. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

      There was only one thing that could account for him saying such a thing. Somehow he must have found out how wealthy she was.

      ‘Love?’ She shook her head. ‘Do you take me for some kind of fool? You don’t love me. You don’t even know me,’ she cried, waving her hand at the portrait of a woman who was a far cry from the person she knew herself to be.

      ‘But I do know you, Amy. I know better than anyone else how badly you were hurt as a girl and that it made you close yourself off from the possibility of ever getting hurt again. I understand why you have become a cynic. I also know you don’t want to hear what I’m going to say next, but I’m going to say it anyway. I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when you leave here and return to England. I can’t bear to lose you again. Marry me, Amy.’ He went down on his knees. ‘Please. I asked you before if I could come back to England with you because I couldn’t bear the thought of you being lonely. But now I can’t bear the thought of you finding someone to save you from that loneliness, if that someone isn’t me.’

      She drew back.

      ‘I am not going to be taken in by you,’ she hissed. ‘I won’t let you deceive me. You chose your last wife for what you could gain and I—’

      ‘No! That is not true.’ He got up. ‘I’m not going to let you believe that lie for one second longer.’ He clenched his fists. ‘I did not marry my first wife for gain.’ His face leached of colour. ‘I married her to wound you.’

      ‘You...what? But why? Why would you want to wound me?’

      ‘I was deeply in love with you, Amy. Well,’ he hedged, ‘as deeply as a boy of that age could be. I’ve already told you that I wanted to marry you. I confided as much to one or two people, one night, at one of my clubs. They’d been teasing me about what a stranger I was becoming there and how I seemed to be spending all my time mixing with, forgive me for repeating their words, but they described your set as the shabby-genteel.’

      She flushed. It was true that he’d seemed out of place at most of the gatherings she’d attended. That she’d always known he was way above her own more humble station. But that was no excuse for doing what he’d done.

      ‘You stopped courting me because your friends teased you about marrying below your station?’

      ‘No! How could you even think I’d do something so...shallow?’ He turned away, took a few paces away from her, then turned back, his face implacable. ‘I’m just trying to help you see how it must have all come about. I paid no attention to the teasing, knowing it was nothing compared with the opposition I’d have to face from my father. And probably yours. I was plucking up the courage to approach him and ask for your hand in form, knowing that I had little to recommend me. If I could get him to look favourably on my suit, I would have been more than capable of braving my own father’s displeasure. I had reached a crossroads in my life. I’d always been something of a disappointment to him, whereas my brothers had all made him proud. So I stopped asking his permission to travel to Italy to study art. I’d agreed to spend that Season in London considering professions he deemed suitable for a man of my background. And then I met you. And—’

      He broke off, paced away, paced back again.

      ‘Well, before I got round to approaching either of them, one of my friends told me he’d heard something that made it impossible for him to stand back and let me throw myself away on you.’

      He was shaking, she noted with surprise. Actually trembling. He licked his lips, with what looked like nervousness, before saying, ‘He told me that he’d heard, from a reliable source, that you were no innocent. That you’d actually borne a child out of wedlock and had come up to town for the sole purpose of luring some poor unsuspecting male into the trap of providing for you and your child. Preferably a man with a title, a man powerful enough to protect you from the scandal.’

      She gasped. ‘But that’s absurd! You know it is. Why, I was a virgin when we...’

      The edges of the room seemed to blur and darken. There was a roaring sound in her ears as her mind flew back to his shock, the night he’d first taken her to bed. How his attitude towards her had gone from scornful and aggressive to remorseful and caring.

      ‘You believed it,’ she whispered. ‘You believed I would be that wicked.’ Now her own legs were shaking. For a moment, she wondered if she was going to faint. But then fury surged through her veins, giving her strength to stand and speak her mind, instead of crumpling under the weight of hurt and shock.

      ‘You didn’t even demand proof from this so-called friend of yours. You couldn’t have done. You didn’t confront me with the tale either. You just...you just spurned me!’ Why had everyone, at that period in her life, been so ready to assume the worst of her?

      ‘I was devastated, Amy. I was so angry and hurt to think you could deliberately set out to deceive me that I lost my head.’

      ‘Because you believed it. How could you?’

      ‘Because Fielding, the friend who plucked up the courage to come to me with the tale, had been well chosen,’ he said bitterly. ‘He was the one friend I had who I knew would never tell a deliberate lie. He was not only too honest, but also not bright enough to spin any kind of yarn. He’d never have been able to keep all the threads straight. And he was torn, Amy. He hated having to speak ill of a lady. He only did so because he was convinced someone had to do something to save me from the clutches of an ambitious schemer.’ He huffed out a strange, bitter laugh. ‘That was what made him so convincing. The fact that he believed it so completely. The poor sap was such a slow-top that he couldn’t imagine anyone inventing a deliberate lie about a lady. He was so gullible he genuinely believed that if my father had breached the gentleman’s code by repeating such a foul tale about a lady, it could only have been from the best of intentions.’

      ‘You have a nerve to describe him as a slow-top,’ she breathed. ‘You fell for exactly the same lie he did.’

      ‘Did I? I’m not so certain any more. Deep down I think I always knew my father was behind it. I knew what my father was like. I should have known he would thrust a spoke in my wheel, if he were to discover I’d decided to marry you, rather than tamely submit to the plans he’d started making for me. He must have been livid when his spies brought back tales of me planning to marry a nobody, and settle down in obscurity, just as he thought he’d finally got me to knuckle under. And even if it wasn’t true, about you...but I told myself it must be. It made sense, you see.’

      ‘What do you mean? How could it make sense? What had I ever done to make you think I was...that kind of woman?’

      ‘You’d appeared to fall for me practically at first sight,’ he said bleakly. ‘When everyone else knew there was nothing special about me. I was only the youngest son of four. The runt of the litter. The one with no ambition. The one whose only talent was for drawing, a subject more suited to women than to real men.’

      ‘That’s utter nonsense.’

      ‘It was what I felt, at the time. That you couldn’t possibly have seen anything in me to admire, apart from my susceptibility to your charms. I could believe you might have seen me as a pigeon ripe for plucking. And then there was the matter of your behaviour.’ The corners of his mouth pulled into something very like a sneer. ‘You were the daughter of a vicar. At first you seemed so prim and