Chapter Two

Of all Louisa's friends, her favourite was Caroline, the widow of Lord Augustus Spenser—a lady of voluptuous beauty and dubious reputation. Louisa delighted in the way Caroline toed the line of scandal again and again, entertaining lovers as and when she chose, but the thing that had initially bonded them was their mutual disinclination to marry. Their continued determination to remain widowed despite the pressure on them to enter matrimony's unglamorous fold.

It was Caroline, therefore, to whom Louisa turned when she was still seething from Mr Knight's proposal.

"My mother ," she said as they strolled along the paved walkway of Hyde Park's promenade, the trees bare and stark beside them.

"Having met your mother, I'm hardly surprised," Caroline said, patting her hand. "Although at least she has not near cut you off like mine has."

"Is that a blessing or a curse?"

"Both, I suppose, in equal measure."

Once, Louisa had asked why Caroline's mother had cut her only daughter off, and had been greeted with a wave and a "oh, you know, darling" that was so airy, she had not dared ask again. Caroline had her past, and she had hers.

"Well, I doubt he'll come sniffing around again," Caroline said. "Nothing like a bruised ego to dash a man's ardour."

Louisa cast her friend an amused glance. "It was not his ardour that inspired him to propose."

"What was it, then?"

"My fortune."

"Ah, greed. Man's old companion. But if that were a gentleman's only motivation, I would have had no offers of marriage. Perhaps he has fallen madly in love with you."

Despite Louisa's best attempts, the words reminded her irrevocably of the only man who had ever, to her knowledge, fallen madly in love with her. And the way that had ended.

As usual, a surge of bitterness accompanied the thought. Nine years had not been enough to dampen her hurt, or her anger.

"Like your suitors do with you, you mean?" she asked, doing her best to keep her tone light.

"I do my best to dissuade them, darling, but sometimes all it takes is a good tumble and they've decided I might be the next mother of their children." She wrinkled her nose.

Caroline had not conceived with her late husband, although whether that was due to his failing or hers, Louisa didn't know. She, too, had thankfully not borne Lord Bolton any children, though that was almost certainly due to her defect; his bastards were scattered across London. That was another reason she disliked the thought of marrying again: either she would be expected to play mother to someone else's children, or she would be inevitably disappointing a lord who expected offspring from her. Offspring she strictly did not want.

"I would not object to a child of my own if I happened to have married well the first time around," Caroline was saying, "but I have no interest in someone else's brats. And despite my age, you know, some gentlemen seem to think the breadth of my hips means I am particularly fertile. A monstrous thought."

Caroline was five-and-thirty years old, with grey eyes and a delectably plump figure. Her hair was a soft blonde impervious to grey, and she had the perfect little rosebud of a mouth. A positive Venus, as the gentlemen she'd graced with her company had apparently claimed. If Louisa had ever been given to envy, she might have been jealous.

As it was, she was merely amused by Caroline's exploits.

"If you charmed them less, you might be propositioned less often," Louisa said, smiling.

Caroline waved a dismissive hand. "And where would be the fun in that? But enough of me—I would much rather talk about your situation." She squinted ahead of them, though Louisa couldn't see what she was staring at. "I have it on excellent authority that Lord Eynsham is on the hunt for a wife."

Louisa almost shivered at the sound of Henry's title. Once, she had craved the sound of it; now it was like swallowing something bitter. "What has that to do with me?"

"Nothing," Caroline said in a voice that meant everything . "Only that I know you were betrothed when you were younger."

Louisa clenched her fingers in her pretty fawn gloves. "Nothing could prevail on me to marry that man, Caroline, and you know it. Besides, it was never an official engagement—it was just an agreement between two children who knew no better."

"You were twenty," Caroline reminded her.

"And a fool."

"All of us in love are fools."

Louisa glared at her friend. "One day you will fall in love, and then you'll be sorry."

"What a dull premonition. Although you are quite right, of course. If I were to fall in love, I would indeed be sorry." She laughed and snaked her arm through Louisa's. "But we are talking about you. Have you met him since his return?"

"Only once." Louisa frowned at the memory. That had been last summer, when she'd been assisting his sister in marrying Lord Sunderland. "It did not . . . We never spoke of the past."

"Well," Caroline said brightly, steering Louisa abruptly left, "now is your opportunity." With a speed Louisa had not hitherto suspected she possessed, she weaved past a large gaggle of young ladies and stopped before two gentlemen deep in conversation, who were obliged to stop and acknowledge them.

One of the gentlemen was Mr Comerford, a dear friend.

The other was Henry Beaumont, Viscount Eynsham, the man who broke her heart.

He looked, irritatingly, just as she remembered him, if a little taller and broader. The war had taken what was already handsome and given it a battle-honed air she could not deny was relentlessly appealing. Crisp and cool as the frost-laden air; stern and unforgiving as the weathered stone of the house. Remote, so remote, except when his gaze landed on her. Then there was a flash of awareness, perhaps even of heat.

He had vowed to wait for his wedding night, and she wondered if he had kept his promise, if he had remained chaste despite the temptations that were no doubt thrown his way.

She hoped he had; she hoped he had not. It ought to have made no difference to her.

Yet as his eyes dropped to her mouth for a heartbeat too long, she felt as though she were a girl again. Utterly under his spell, so in love with him that the sensation was painful in her chest.

He blinked, and the illusion was gone. Her hurt flooded back, her confusion and her anger.

"Lady Bolton," he said after only the barest hesitation. His throat worked, the lines of it tightening. "I was not expecting to see you here."

Louisa glared at Caroline, who gave an innocent smile in response.

"Lord Eynsham," Louisa said, giving him a cold nod before turning to George and smiling. "George!" She used his given name in the hopes it would annoy Henry. "It's good to see you. May I introduce you to Lady Augustus Spenser."

"Caroline," she said with her habitual throatiness. "As you are a dear friend of Louisa's." She aimed her words at George, but both men bowed. George with a level of flamboyance that almost hinted at foppishness, and Henry in crisp, clean lines. Every movement he made looked planned in advance and carried out with military precision.

I have it on excellent authority that Lord Eynsham is on the hunt for a wife .

No doubt that, too, had been a pre-thought-out decision.

Which, naturally, did not concern her at all.

George, the devil take him, immediately offered his arm to Caroline. She accepted with a coquettish smile, and Louisa was left to bring up the rear with Henry. He fell into step beside her, hands clasped behind his back.

Silence, thick and heavy, settled over them.

Their encounter nine years ago, when he had refused to flee with her to Gretna Green, played out in vivid detail before her. Her pleas, and his certainty that he could not do it.

Her anger burned in her throat.

"Say it," he said. "You may as well."

She glanced at the stern resignation on his face. "Say what? Have you been anticipating this meeting all these months?"

"I would be a fool to think we could both be in London and avoid each other."

And yet she had hoped for precisely that.

He loomed beside her, his coat cut so sharply across his shoulders that if it were any tighter, the seams might burst. But though he would have been close enough to touch if she'd reached out, he maintained a careful distance between them. Evidently whatever emotions he had once harboured for her were long gone.

"What would you like me to say?" she asked.

"That you hate me. Say it and be done."

She made a tiny, bitter sound at the back of her throat. "As though it's as simple as that."

He turned then, looking down at her with a frown, his eyes a soaring ice-blue, the deepest shade of the winter sky. Just as frozen, just as distant. Yet there was a steadiness within it that grounded her, a sense that he was as immoveable as the sky itself. "Is it not simple?"

Yes.

And yet no.

"Very well," she said, her throat tight. "I hate you. Are you satisfied now?"

He held her gaze for another long moment, and she felt restless underneath it, as though he was seeing more than she would ever have wanted him to.

"Do you truly think I want you to hate me?" he asked quietly.

Anger rose in her, quick and endless as a rolling wave. "I don't know, Henry. When I went to you then, I thought I knew you. And yet evidently I was wrong. How should I presume to know you now?"

His mouth pressed into a hard line—his mouth that ought to have been bestowed on an angel or the devil incarnate; a mouth for sin that she had tasted in her youth and never forgotten. "If I had loved you any less, Louisa, I would have taken you to Gretna Green when we were first betrothed and made you my wife."

Hurt flared, sharp and bright as fireworks. "Then why didn't you?"

"You know why," he said, voice low. His eyes were blue flame. "Because I wanted our union to be honourable."

"And so you waited until it was too late," she said. "How convenient for you."

"What would you rather I had done? Begun our life together in debt and scandal?" He was impassioned now. Henry Beaumont, he of the iron restraint, had his teeth clenched and his jaw tight and his fists balled by his sides. Henry Beaumont, whom she had supposed to have had all passion disciplined out of him by the army, was looking at her with so much heat in his eyes that it was a wonder she was not singed. "I was merely a boy, barely into adulthood, who wanted you so badly I could not tell what was selfishness and what was love. I was not ready for marriage when you first asked me, and so I bid you to wait. Had I known that Bolton intended . . . but I did not know until you came to my home and begged me to run away with you. I had not a penny to my name. What was I to have done? Ruined you? With your mother to support, is it a surprise that I believed—as I did—that Bolton would have been a better match for you?"

Ahead of them, George and Caroline strolled and laughed, oblivious to the scene behind them. Louisa's chest tightened.

"If it had not been for your mistaken sense of honour," she said. "If you had just married me when I first desired you to, we might have been happy."

"We would have been penniless."

"At least you would have loved me."

He shook his head. "And how long would love have fed us?"

"Why, have you been starving all these years?"

The look he gave her then surprised her a little; it was devouring, hungry, an expression that truly did speak of starvation and denial. His jaw was tight, but when he spoke, his voice was gentle. "My mother would not have accepted us, at least not for the first several years. We would have been outcasts with no home we could flee to, at least at first. We would have had even less than I had when you came to me—and I had little enough then."

Her throat burned and her eyes stung, but she forced the emotion back. Henry may have taken her heart, but he would never have her tears. "Understand this," she said, her voice so low he leant in to hear her. "I would rather weather a thousand scandals, I would rather have lived as your mistress, than marry Bolton again." A line appeared between his brows and his eyes darkened with consternation. Perhaps even regret. "Comfort yourself with the thought that you did the right thing. Console yourself with talk of duty and honour. But I went to you with my eyes wide open. I knew precisely what it was I was risking, and I was prepared to face the consequences."

"Knowing what I did then, I thought the consequences of ruin were worse than marrying a man who could provide for you."

"I had already decided otherwise," she said, raising her chin to look him in the eyes. "And you dismissed me."

Her words echoed in the space between them, and his nostrils flared as though her words had been a blow. The unnatural paleness of his face was more acute in the light, the lines drawn more firmly across it.

"I would have risked everything of mine," he said, his voice low and rough. "Everything, Louisa. But I could never have risked everything of yours."

"That's what you don't understand." Her voice was sharp, because if it had been anything other than cutting, she might have let him see her hurt. "In abandoning me, that is exactly what you did."