‘Oh dear God. I don’t remember,’ he said, his face pale in the lamp light. ‘Dita, I swear I don’t remember. I kept having dreams, but they were so confused I didn’t believe them. I just thought they were fantasies. Hell, I might have got you with child.’
‘Fortunately not,’ she said with as much calm as she could muster. ‘That never occurred to me until years later. I was very innocent, you see.’
‘Innocent! You don’t need to tell me that,’ he said bitterly. ‘You might have told me all this before I made love to you on board,’ he said. ‘Damn it, all that held me back was my fear of getting you with child. Now I know I should never have laid a finger on you at all.’
She stared at him. ‘But you thought I had slept with Stephen. Why would this make any difference?’
‘Because it makes you my responsibility. Don’t you see that?’
‘No, I do not. It was eight years ago, Alistair. And you were drunk.’
‘That makes it worse. Why didn’t you tell me straight away?’ He paced the small hut, ignoring his nakedness.
‘In Calcutta? What would you suggest I should have said? Good evening, Lord Lyndon. Don’t you recall the last time we met? You were kicking me out of your bedchamber after taking my virginity?’
‘No! I mean before we made love.’
‘I did not want to talk about it. I wanted, not to forget it exactly, but to put it behind me. And then it got rather out of hand,’ she admitted. ‘I was not expecting to feel like that: so overwhelmed. I hadn’t got much experience, even now, remember?’
‘Don’t rub it in,’ he said with a bitter laugh, as he turned away to pick up his breeches. ‘Thanks to me, you have now.’ He hauled the damp, clinging fabric over his hips, picked up the remnants of his shirt and tossed it away again. ‘Get dressed, you are shivering.’
She was, Dita realised, and not just from cold. Why was he so angry with her? Was this her fault, too?
‘Pass me my clothes, then,’ she said, suddenly shy of her nudity. He gave them to her and she wriggled into the camisole and then the petticoats. They had fared better than Alistair’s breeches; their thin cotton had dried in the warmth from the fire, although the salt made them feel unpleasant against her skin. The corset was still damp and she tossed it aside with a grimace of distaste.
‘We must get married as soon as possible. It is fortunate your parents are down in Devon and not in London; we can organise something quietly.’
‘Marry you?’ She sat there in her damp undergarments and shivered at the tone of his voice. ‘Why?’
He did not love her, for if he did, surely he would have said so. And when he had made love to her not one word of love or tenderness had passed his lips, only desire.
‘I told you. I as good as raped you and that makes you my responsibility.’ This was not what she needed to hear in his voice.
‘So I must be yours because of one drunken incident eight years ago?’
‘Exactly.’ Alistair turned and began to rummage around the shelves and dark corners of the hut while she dressed. ‘There’s nothing to drink, but I’ve found a knife.’ He took a blanket and cut a slit in the middle, then dropped it over her head. ‘That’s better than trying to walk with it wrapped round you,’ he said, doing the same for himself. He opened the door. ‘Come on.’
In the full daylight she could see his face clearly. Unshaven, bruised, grim. And, no doubt, he could see her very clearly, too, as she stood up. Did he realise that she was not shivering, but shaking with anger?
‘I will not marry you,’ she stated flatly. ‘I cannot believe you would insult me by offering it.’
‘Insult?’ He stopped in the doorway, every muscle tense.
‘Yes. I would not marry you, Alistair Lyndon, if you went down on your knees and begged me.’
‘You will have no choice. I will tell your father what happened.’
‘And I will say that you got a blow on the head in the shipwreck and are having delusions. They know the truth about Stephen, but they also know that no one else believes I did not sleep with him. I will tell them you are being gallant as an old friend, but that I do not want to marry you. They are going to believe me—what woman in her right mind would turn down Lord Lyndon, after all?’
‘So when you made love with me on the ship, when you returned my kisses—what was that?
’
‘Desire and a curiosity to see if there was any difference in the way you make love sober and with some experience.’ That was not the truth, of course. She must have been in love with him for weeks. But it was not her feelings that were at issue here. ‘You don’t think I was in love with you, do you? No, of course not—you’d have avoided me like the plague.’
He could have had no idea how she felt about him, she supposed, seeing his mouth tighten into a hard line and his head come up. But then, neither had she, until a short while ago.
‘And do I make love better sober?’ Alistair made himself drawl, made himself sound cynical and blasé when all he wanted was to shout and rage and shake her until her teeth rattled. How could she have kept that from him? Everything he believed about himself seemed to crumble. He had been capable of behaving like that and had not even remembered it.