"Because Mireille was a child who… wasn't aware of the wrongs she did. She didn't know enough to be ashamed of what she was."
"But Mira does?"
"Yes." She hid her face and began to weep again. Alec let her cry a minute or two, finding that it took incredible concentration to remain where he was instead of scooping her up and cuddling her close. He focused his attention on the puzzling questions, the mysteries about her. What kind of life had she led? What jumbled mixture of experiences had made her into a creature of such bewildering contradictions? She had the strength of a woman and the vulnerability of a child. Constantly he was torn between rampant desire and an alarming feeling of protectiveness toward her. In that moment Alec would have given a fortune for her to have been anything other than his best friend's mistress. Why couldn't she have been the daughter of a respectable family, untouched by any other man? Or a distant cousin, far removed enough to beeligible for his attentions, delicately raised and nurtured… or even the daughter of a merchant? He would have been free to court her in any of those instances, with no doubts and no obstacles in his way.
Mira's tears subsided eventually, and she gathered herself together with a heaving sigh, entirely unaware of the thoughts that lurked in her companion's mind.
"Did Berkeley hurt you?" Alec asked, his voice soft and chilling.
Mira shook her head, drawing the back of her hand across her damp eyelids. "He didn't hurt me. Just the opposite. I hurt him and the woman that he loved. And he would never forgive or forget anyone who hurt Rosalie."
"What in the hell did you do to them?"
"First you must understand about Guillaume, my brother. He had a great deal to do with it. The first time I saw him I was twelve. Our mother had just died, and she was…"
Mira stopped suddenly, realizing that she could not tell him. She looked into his alert gray eyes and realized that her every instinct called for her to keep the secret about her mother hidden from him. He would not understand; he and she were at the opposite ends of an impossibly wide spectrum, and the kind of life she had led was entirely foreign to him. Alec Falkner came from a background of wealth and prosperity. His rightful place was in a world of leisure time, opulence, a world of exquisite manners and carefully protected reputations. He had been educated at the best institutions, he wore expensive clothes, he rode only thoroughbred horses, he drank and ate of the finest fare, he associated with the most affluent people in England. He would be revolted by the knowledge that her mother had been a prostitute. After she told him, he would think of her as something unclean. He would no longer be attracted to her in any way… he would never want to touch her again."Mira," Alec said dryly, "don't turn shy. To be indelicately frank, my expectations concerning your background have never been too high. What were you going to say about your mother?"
"Nothing," Mira whispered.
"What caused your mother to—?"
"Nothing!" she repeated angrily.
Sighing in an exasperated manner, Alec let the subject drop. "All right, then… we won't talk about her. What were you going to say about Guillaume?"
"He took care of me after our mother died," Mira said carefully. "He was my only family. We went everywhere together. He earned money here and there, doing different things, and I worked when I could. But it was not enough money to live on, so we had to… we had to do dishonest things in order to get more. Guillaume taught me many things. We robbed people, lied to them, and conned them." Guillaume had been pleased that she could'make friends so easily, because the more they had liked her, the more easily she had been able to take advantage of them. "I hated it. I always hated what we had to do for money. I hated to hurt people… but it's so much worse to be hungry. You wouldn't understand what it's like."
Alec made no reply as he pinned her with a shrewd stare.
"And even if I hadn't been so afraid of being hungry," Mira continued, "I would have done it all to please Guillaume. He was the only person in the world who cared about what happened to me. He loved me—I know he did—and without him I would have been alone. I was afraid of being alone. But everything changed when I was fifteen, when I was working at a hotel in Paris as a chambermaid. Guillaume would leave me for a few weeks at a time."
A young girl, alone in Paris. Working in a hotel. Alec knew that she must have been uncommonly resilient to have survived that. She had to have been exposed often to danger… yet she was not asking for pity, merely telling him the facts. Reluctantly he felt a twinge of admiration for her—as he had once said, she did not lack mettle.