Nicholas pulled the protruding corner of white linen. With horrible inevitability, the snake necklace uncoiled itself and lay gleaming in a shaft of sunlight. Her sharp intake of breath was the only sound in the room as he stooped and picked up the jewel, letting it run between his fingers.
‘How did you…’ he began slowly, then as he looked at her betraying face, realisation dawned. ‘It was you. You connived with that wh– ’ He bit back the word, his fingers white on the metal coils. ‘Why, Cassandra? To get back at me because I had been angry with you? It must have seemed very amusing to humiliate me.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ she began.
‘To let it go so far?’ he queried dangerously. ‘I am quite sure you didn’t. I hadn’t thought you would be so spiteful.’ He looked at her through narrowed eyes, angry recollection blazing in their depths. ‘Nor would I have suspected you capable of such seductive wiles.’
Cassandra felt the fiery blush rising as she recalled just how willingly her body had answered his. His face changed, hardened.
‘What a fool I’ve been, worrying about your chastity all those weeks, when you knew full well how to rouse a man. Where did you practice, Miss Weston?’ he sneered. ‘With your father’s ploughboys? Or the stable boy who was so willing to lend you his clothes?’
If he had struck her, the shock could not have been greater. She expected, deserved, his anger but his contempt burned like acid. Yet how could she tell him that her responses had been instinctive, driven by her love for him? He would think it a lie, a subterfuge to extricate herself.
‘Still no excuses? No convenient story to account for it? No, I suppose even your fertile imagination baulks at explaining this away.’ The necklace swung from his fingers, mocking her.
‘Nicholas…I…’
‘No more, Cassandra,’ he said icily.
The necklace moved in the sunlight, stabbing her eyes. ‘Here.’ He held it out. ‘Take your whore’s device. You can always sell it. Or you may have need of it again.’ He smiled humourlessly at her. ‘Why, I almost find it in me to feel sorry for Lord Stewart.’
Cassandra snatched it from his hand and ran from the room. Her heart thudded and she felt sick with the force of Nicholas’s attack. Yet she could not cry.
Fortunately, no one was about. She needed fresh air, to get away from these enclosed, silent rooms, the corrosion of Nicholas’s contempt. On an impulse, she tugged the bellpull in her room and summoned her maid.
Five minutes later, in bonnet and pelisse, Maria dutifully at her heels, Cassandra was strolling heedlessly down one of the wide promenades, in company with a throng of fashionably dressed people. She soon found herself in the Prat, which Godmama had mentioned to her as being an unexceptionable place to walk.
As she walked, she brooded on Nicholas’s reaction. She could not blame him for his anger, nor for the conclusions he had drawn from her behaviour. At that moment, if the pavements of the Prat had opened and swallowed her, she would have been grateful for it. But she had to think about it, she would have to face him again, behave as if nothing had happened, knowing that every time he looked at her, he would recall her body quivering against his.
With her maid silent beside her, Cassandra walked on, deep in thought. After a while, Lucia’s words at that first meeting in Venice returned to her, Lucia saying that, if Nicholas had been indifferent, he wouldn’t become so angry with her. Anyone would have condemned her for her behaviour, she condemned herself, but would someone who was uncaring have reacted so bitterly, have thrown such wild and wounding accusations at her?
And if he cared for her, that explained his actions last night, and his bad temper this morning. He was jealous of the attention shown her by other men. The thought was so startling that Cassandra halted in her tracks, causing Maria to trip over the edge of her pelisse.
When she thought of him with other women it made her feel hurt and angry and thoroughly un
reasonable. Could it be that seeing Cassandra as the centre of attention, especially from his friend Stewart, was arousing jealousy in Nicholas? But he couldn’t be in love with her, or surely he would have said something.
Cassandra wandered on, her frown of concentration making her look fierce enough to discourage the young bucks, who were out to ogle the passing young ladies.
Perhaps he hadn’t realised how he felt. In novels, so she had heard, men were notoriously slow in recognising a dawning tendresse for the heroine. Well, if he hadn’t realised, she would make him. There was no point in flirting with the younger men, Nicholas had already dismissed them as puppies. But Lord Stewart was different. His mild attentions last night had already roused Nicholas to a display of bad temper and if she really tried to attach Stewart, there was no knowing what he would do.
Cassandra had a momentary qualm about toying with Lord Stewart’s affections, then concluded that if he were dangling after a well-connected wife she was hardly likely to break his heart. She turned on her heel and began to walk home. If challenged now, all Nicholas would admit to was a brotherly desire to keep her out of the clutches of a well-known roué. It was up to her to make him see things differently.
That afternoon, she sat in the Blue Salon with her godmother, writing out the gold-edged invitations, while Lady Lydford reviewed the prospective guests for the ball she intended to give in honour of her goddaughter’s come-out.
‘I suppose I must invite Regina Cooper and that bracket-faced daughter of hers.’ She paused. ‘I always wished for a daughter, my dear. I am enjoying this.’
Cassandra smiled at her. ‘I fear I am very expensive, Godmama.’
‘Fiddlesticks, child. I love the excuse to spend money on clothes, and I am enjoying your company. Your mind is as sharp as your mother’s, and I have missed my dearest friend.’ She gave herself a little shake. ‘I shall be getting sentimental, and we must press on with this list. A week is short notice, but I doubt if we will be short of company.’
The pile of invitations grew steadily. Cassandra had just paused to sharpen the point of her quill when the butler announced, ‘Miss Hartley, Miss Lucy Hartley, my lady.’
‘Charlotte, Lucy, what a pleasure. You will stay for tea? Hector, the tea tray in twenty minutes.’
‘We have come with a note from Mama and to thank you for the party last night,’ Charlotte said. ‘Are you sure we are not interrupting, Lady Lydford?’
‘Not at all, sit down, both of you, and I will tell you my plans for Cassandra’s coming-out ball.’