Chapter 7

Bella froze at the sound of her own name, her eyes snapping open and her heart leaping into her throat. I thought I was alone!

It took her a moment, in the disorienting moonlight, to know who had spoken her name, and when she registered the tall form standing at the entrance to the hedge maze her heart thudded. She recognized him at once, even in the moonlight, with five years between them.

"Simon," she breathed and then, catching herself, "Mr. Lyndon."

For a long moment, he didn't move. He simply stood, as one entranced, and stared at her. There was something about the darkness of the garden that made the scene feel surreal, as though they weren't really in London at all, as though Lady Ellory's ball was a distant and unimportant thing, and as though all the history between them had never happened.

For that brief moment, Bella almost went to him. Her heart was full of the pure longing that she had felt as a young girl. But then, like a wave crashing onto a shore, memories of all that had passed between them rushed in on her unbidden. She took a step back, then gathered up her shoes and tried to walk past him out of the maze.

He seemed genuinely confused, reaching out to catch her hand in his and halt her progress. His touch was as gentle as his words. "Bella? Where are you going?"

She pulled her hand away as though she had been burned. "Move aside, Mr. Lyndon," she said stiffly. "This is highly improper."

"I don't mean to be improper," he said, clearing his throat. "Let us walk back to the veranda where we might speak in safety—"

"We have nothing to say to each other," she said coldly.

"Nothing to say?" There was confusion in Simon's voice. "How can that be? I know that you thought it best to give up our correspondence, but surely two friends encountering each other by chance in a garden might share a few words."

"A married gentleman has no place sharing words with any young woman but his wife," Bella said stiffly.

"Wife?" he stepped back as though slapped.

Bella met his gaze for the first time, tipping her head up and looking at his eyes in the silvery moonlight. "Go back to her, Mr. Lyndon. I hear she has captured the attention of every one of Lady Ellory's guests this evening. It is a wonder you can be separate from her."

She pushed past him into the hedge, her bare feet trampling the cool grass. She had to leave before he saw the hot tears threatening to burst forth. He followed her, raising his voice as he did so.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Isabella…" she did not miss the way he resorted to her official title, "but your implication that I am married is entirely without basis."

"What an interesting tactic to take," she said, whirling on him. "Instead of explaining your absurd silences over the last few years, you choose to deny the one thing I know with a certainty—you and Amelia Lafleche were married not two years ago. I saw her just now in the ballroom, surely you are not going to claim she has left you a widower?"

He opened his mouth in astonishment, and then crossed his arms. "You are as hot-headed as you ever were, Bella, going on with insults as though you held all the facts, when you are in fact grossly misinformed."

"Oh, what are ‘the facts'?" she asked, letting sarcasm leech into her tone. "What is it, Mr. Lyndon? Are you angry with your wife? Was she not everything you'd hoped she'd be? Have you grown bored of her after such a short time?"

"The fact is she is not my wife!" he snapped. "I am not married at all, Bella. If you would slow down for half a second, I could have told you that already."

Bella paused a second, taken aback. She was disoriented by this alteration of events. For the past few years she had thought of Simon in the arms of another woman, and that agonizing image was not so easily displaced from her mind.

"I don't understand," she said, taking a small step backwards.

"Then please let me explain," he snapped, annoyance flashing on his features. "We wrote back and forth for years after…" he stopped, wincing, and then finished quietly, "…after James' death. Then you stopped responding to my letters." He hesitated as though he wanted to say more, but must have determined against it in the end. Instead, he added coolly, "Your father explained to me that you were much to taken up with your studies to engage in long-form communication, and I accepted his view of the situation. Shortly after that I joined the British army, and my work overseas did not leave much time to reflect…"

She shook her head in disbelief. "That is so far from the truth of my own experience that I hardly know where to begin." She took a step towards him, the walls of the hedge seeming to close in on either side, and extended an accusing finger. "Allow me to paint a much different picture for you, Simon."

He said nothing, but he did not step away from her either. Instead he let her finger rest on his chest and watched her coolly as she proceeded.

"I clung to our correspondence after losing James." Against her better judgement, tears sprang into Bella's eyes. "I think you know how much it meant to me to have someone who remembered him, and who seemed to know me as he knew me. I thought we shared a common bond, Simon." She knew she had slipped out of the propriety of using his proper title, but as they were standing alone behind the screen of a hedge maze, propriety was already slipping in more than one degree. "Then, quite suddenly, you stopped writing me." She shook her head in anger at the memory. "You stopped, not I. I would never have stopped. I even sent you more letters without receiving responses, but each was met with silence."

"And so you naturally assumed I was married?" he wrinkled his brow in confusion.

"I assumed you were married when I was told you were married," she snapped. She could still remember the heartbreak that had accompanied that news, the day her mother's letter—so rare anyway—had come for Aunt Nellie. It was laying out on the table when Bella happened to pick it up and scan the contents. "Mother wrote saying the rumors were all over London—you and the illustrious Amelia Lafleche had been married in a common law ceremony just north of the border. You were very happy together. She even included specifics about Miss Lafleche's trousseau, and when I wrote to ask Grace how you were doing, she said only that you had gone overseas after all the excitement with Amelia. It was confirmation enough, especially when I found out your bride was a Frenchwoman."

Understanding seemed to dawn on Simon's face, and he tilted his head to one side, looking down at her with something like endearment sparkling in his eyes. "You always were quick to jump to conclusions, Bella."

"If I am incorrect, set me right," she said, torn between a feeling of annoyance and something deeper and stronger that made her want to step forward into his arms. "Don't speak vaguely of my failings and leave me in the dark."

"I confess to knowing Miss Lafleche, but nothing more. There was never an attachment, although I suspect she would have been willing enough to pursue such an arrangement were I to ask." His voice was quiet; sober. "When I made it clear that nothing would happen between us, she married some older viscount and disappeared from the social scene for a year. She only resurfaced, in my understanding, after he died suddenly of dropsy. I suspect the talk of her trousseau was quite real… but the identity of her husband was not."

"Mother was certain—"

"I don't know what to tell you, Bella," he said, running a hand through his thick curls. "Perhaps your mother had some reason for leading you astray in this matter."

"What can you mean?" she asked, confused.

Regret flashed in his eyes. "Nothing, forget I said anything to that end." He sighed. "It is all the past, after all. There is no need to dredge it back up, now that we both know the truth. Our letters must have been misplaced for some reason, and the silence left room for a host of misunderstandings."

Bella let out her air in a shaky breath, wrapping her arms around her. "I have spent so much time being angry at you, I hardly know what to do now."

"You're cold," he said, noting the way she cradled herself. "Here, take my coat." He moved to shrug it off and place it around her shoulders, but she put out a gloved hand to stop him.

"No," she said quickly. "It would do no good for us to return from the gardens with your coat about my shoulders. People would suspect us of some scandalous behavior."

He raised his eyebrows, but did not take the coat off. "You have changed," he said at last.

"Not so very much," she said, laughing uncomfortably. "I'm sure I look a little older, but—"

"No." There was conviction in his voice. "You are entirely different from the girl who left London five years ago. I would hardly have recognized you if I had not caught you dancing in the garden without your shoes moments ago."

She looked down at the shoes in her hand, a hot blush coming into her cheeks. "I had forgotten." She stepped away from him, steadying herself against one wall of the hedge while she balanced to slip her shoes back on a foot at a time. "Please don't tell anyone about that. It was a slip-up on my part, the result of too much time dancing inside… such mischief won't happen again."

"There," he said, gesturing as though her words proved his point. "That is something the Bella of before would never have said. A little barefoot dance in a secluded garden? Hardly even worthy of the title mischief." He looked at the mask still clutched in her fingers. "When we danced together earlier, I did not have any idea it was you. You were so elegant and proper. You could have been any woman of the ton."

She wanted to thank him, but something in the wistful turn of his tone hinted that he had not meant the statement as a compliment. He spoke almost as though she'd lost a part of herself in Ireland—a part of what made her who she was.

"Well, you're much changed yourself," she said, clearing her throat to clear the awkward tension between them. "You are a proper gentleman now, just as I am a proper lady, and Grace wrote that you were a captain in the army. It is a wonder you did not wear your uniform tonight."

He took a small step towards her, and extended his hand ever so slightly as though he meant to take hers again, but then seemed to think better of it and let his hand fall back to his side. His jaw worked and then he said hoarsely, "It is good to see you again, Bella. I have missed your company."

She could not keep the tears back this time. They welled up and a few escaped down her cheeks. "Simon," she said softly, "you were all I had after James died." She hesitated and then amended her statement, "You are all I have, even now."

In a flash he reached out, drawing her into a gentle embrace. He was very tall—taller than she remembered—and his arms felt strong and steady about her waist and shoulders. He reached up with a thumb and brushed one of the tears off her cheeks.

"I'm sorry, Bella," he said. "For everything."

For a moment, Bella thought about staying there in his arms. She even thought about rising up on tiptoe to kiss his lips, so close and so inviting. There was something in his eyes that told her, whatever their history, he would kiss her back.

But in the next moment she remembered that she was not just Bella anymore—she was Lady Isabella, a woman of propriety and sophistication, not some girl drug by her passions into the midnight embrace of handsome young captains. Her own feelings for Simon terrified her. Even after all these years, when she had convinced herself that she needed nothing from him, she was still drawn to him.

She pulled back, noting that he released her at once. "I have to go." She blinked back the tears, fastening her mask securely back into place. "I'm so sorry… I… I must…"

She turned and fled the maze, leaving him behind her. This time, he made no move to follow.