“You were the orphan spurned, I take it,” he said. “Did they not try to marry you off young?”
Fleur thought of the two gentlemen farmers, both over fifty, who had offered for her before she reached even her nineteenth birthday, and of Cousin Caroline’s fury when she refused both.
“Yes,” she said.
“But you resisted. I suspect you are made of stern stuff, Miss Hamilton,” he said. “Stubborn to a fault. Is that how you were described by your guardian and his family?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Frequently, I would imagine,” he said. “Have you never met anyone you wished to marry?”
“No,” she said hastily. And she thought about how Daniel had been in her nightmares lately, his image fading in and out with the duke’s.
“And did he wish to marry you too?” he asked.
She looked up at him sharply and down into her glass again.
“He was ineligible?” he asked.
“No,” she said dully.
“It was spite, then?” he said. “You were not allowed to marry him? Do you have a dowry?”
“Yes.”
“But you have no control over it until you marry or reach a certain age, I suppose,” he said. “And your guardian decided to cut up nasty. Why did you run away, Fleur? Would your beau not elope with you? Was the money more important to him than you were?”
“No!” she said, looking up at him fiercely. “My fortune was of no interest to Daniel at all.”
“Daniel,” he said quietly.
She swirled the dark liquid in her glass. She did not think she would be able to raise it to her lips.
“Did you love him?” he asked. “Do you love him?”
“No,” she said. “That is all a long, long time in the past.” Like something from another lifetime altogether.
He downed the brandy that remained in his glass and got to his feet. “Drink up,” he said, his hand stretched out for her glass. “It’s time for bed.”
She took one more sip and handed him the half-empty glass. He set it with his own on a table beside her chair and offered her his hand. She looked at it, at the long, well-manicured, beautiful fingers, and set her own resolutely within it. She watched his fingers close about hers. And she got to her feet.
He did not move. “You won’t confide in me?” he asked. “You won’t let me help you? It was not of your own free will, was it? This was not consented to, was it?” He ran one finger lightly along her upper lip.
She grabbed for his wrist and gripped it.
“There is nothing to confide,” she said. “There is no mystery.”
“And yet,” he said, “you preferred your life as it had become in London to the one you left behind? And your Daniel would not come after you to rescue you?”
“He did not know I was leaving,” she said, still gripping his wrist. “He did not know where I went.”
“If I loved you, Fleur,” he said, “and knew that you loved me, I would turn heaven and earth upside down to find you if you disappeared.”
Her eyes followed his scar up from his chin to his mouth, up his cheek to his eye. And she looked into his eyes.
“No,” she said. “No one loves that much. It is a myth. Love can be pleasant and gentle. It can be selfish and cruel. But it is not the all-consuming passion of poetry. Love cannot move mountains, nor would it wish to do so. I don’t blame Daniel. Love is not like that.”
“And yet,” he said, and his dark eyes burned into hers, “if I loved you, Fleur, I would move mountains with my bare hands if they kept me from you.”
She laughed a little uncertainly. “If,” she said. “Make-believe is a children’s game. It is very easy to live with ifs. But real life is different.”
She knew he was going to kiss her several moments before his lips touched hers. She supposed afterward that she could have avoided it. He did not imprison her with his arms or back her against a wall. But she did nothing to avoid it. She was rigid with shock, her hand gripping his wrist like a vise. And there was a certain fascination, too, in seeing that dark harsh face, not hovering above her as in her nightmares, but bending close to her own face until she was forced to close her eyes.
And his kiss was so startlingly different from either Matthew’s or Mr. Chamberlain’s that she did not for the moment think of springing away. There was none of the grinding of lips and teeth that there had been earlier up in the gallery, none of the firm pressure of the night before, but a light and gentle warmth, a living movement over her own lips. And a parting of the lips so that her own were enclosed in moist, brandy-flavored warmth.