No, he had not been. It was time for another, more painful layer of truth. "The problem was not what you did to me, but what I did to myself." She looked at the hairbrush without seeing it, turning the handle restlessly in her hands. "I loved you so much that I was crippling myself by trying to please you. My sense of who I was, my independence, all of the things you liked about me—I could feel them eroding away. I didn't want to live that way, and I didn't want to become one of those boring, pliable women whom you said you could never love."
He crossed his arms on his chest and simply looked at her. At length he said, "It's wonderfully flattering to think that you were that madly in love with me. But even if you were concerned about your independence then, I can't believe that will be a problem now. You're a forceful woman, not an unsure girl. Your character isn't going to crumble because some overbred dowager looks down her nose at you."
She stood and paced across the room, the green silk swishing around her. "You're trying to reduce what I say to simple issues that can be refuted, but it's more complicated than that." She turned to face him. "The question is not whether I can tolerate England—I can—but I like Serevan better. I've built something of value here, helped people who lived in poverty and fear achieve prosperous, happy lives. How can I abandon them?"
He sighed. "I feel the shade of Lady Hester Stanhope hovering over us. I can't fault you for being concerned for your dependents, but you have built a strong, healthy community here—it won't collapse if you leave. Give Serevan to Saleh when he returns from Bokhara. He's as capable of guiding it as you are."
The fact that Ross was right didn't make Juliet's position any easier. Defensively she said, "But I don't want to leave Serevan. I have so much freedom here."
"It's the illusory freedom that comes from being a permanent outsider, insulated from the realities of Persian society by money and foreignness," he said, exasperated. "Is that how you want to spend the rest of your life, as a woman who can do what you choose because you're so eccentric that you're dismissed as if you were a force of nature, not a real person?"
She shrugged. "Lady Hester seems to have managed well."
"It is time to destroy some of your romantic illusions." He uncoiled from the divan and stalked over to her. "Yes, Lady Hester Stanhope was a remarkable woman, but she was also a monster of vanity and self-obsession. She settled in Syria not for freedom, but because she loved power and it satisfied her sense of self-importance to become a petty tyrant. You've collected stories about her; did you hear about the time your heroine decided it was her duty to avenge the death of a reckless French explorer? She bullied the local pasha into razing dozens of villages, and for the rest of her life she boasted about what a strong, forceful leader she was. She was proud to be responsible for slaughtering hundreds of innocent people!"
Shocked, Juliet stared at him with widened eyes. "Lady Hester wasn't like that! She was a woman of compassion who sheltered refugees from injustice."
Ross's mouth twisted. "I'll grant that sometimes she had compassion for the persecuted, but she was totally without consideration for those who were closest and most loyal to her. The greater the loyalty, the more cruelly she rewarded it. She preferred the admiration of ignorant villagers to the respect and friendship of her equals. She was incapable of living on an income several times the size of yours, so she borrowed huge sums that she didn't repay, then complained bitterly that no one would support her in the style she thought she deserved. At the end, having alienated everyone who ever cared for her, she died alone, dunned by her creditors and robbed by her servants."
Juliet wished she could believe that Ross was lying, but his revelations had a horrible ring of truth. She turned her head, not wanting to hear more, but she could not shut out his hard voice. "Is that what you want for yourself, Juliet? To die alone and loveless, an alien in a foreign land, surrounded by the tattered trappings of power? If so, I wish you joy of it."
"If Lady Hester was as you say, I am not much like her, nor will I end like her." Juliet made a confused gesture with her hand. "Why are we fighting about a woman I never even met?"
Ross's chest expanded as he took a deep breath. Then he said in a quieter voice, "Quite right, I wandered rather far afield. It's time to go back to basics, such as the fact that I love you, and in Bokhara you said that you loved me. Was that true, or were you just being effusive in a moment of passion?"
Juliet felt a rush of dizziness as the emotional ground began disintegrating beneath her feet. She had wanted him to love her. Now that she knew he did, everything was infinitely more difficult. "I was speaking the truth," she whispered. "I love you. I never stopped, not for a moment."