Odd, before this she’d never believed Nicholas had much truck with the idea of love. She stared him direct in the eye and spoke with complete certainty. “I don’t love Johnny Benton. I didn’t love him at the time, although I convinced myself I did. What I loved was the excitement of playing at grand passion.” Her voice lowered into self-loathing. “I was stupid to run away with him. I realized my mistake within a couple of days. And it was a mistake I couldn’t fix by offering my parents contrition and the promise of better behavior.”
Nicholas frowned into his wine. “You were very young.”
“Old enough to know better,” she bit out. “At least my father prevented a scandal. He kept everything quiet. In all these years, I’ve never heard a whisper. Not that hushing everything up would have been difficult. Almost nobody outside neighbors and family knew I existed. I didn’t go to school, I had governesses instead. I hadn’t been to London. Goodness, I hadn’t been as far as Newcastle.”
His regard was searching. “No wonder you felt stifled. It’s cruel to shut a high-spirited, intelligent female away like a pariah.”
“That’s very progressive of you,” she said with a hint of cynicism. And surprise. Yet again Nicholas confounded her easy expectations. She’d never pictured this reprobate as an advocate of women’s rights.
“I have a gaggle of sisters and half sisters. I know the trouble an inadequately occupied woman can cause. If your father possessed a modicum of sense, he’d have realized a dazzling creature like you needed a wider stage.”
Her heart stuttered at his swift defense. Still Nicholas sought to excuse her rashness. And called her a dazzling creature besides. “Thank you.”
He touched her cheek with a glancing caress that she felt to her toes. “You’re welcome, my darling.”
He’d called her his darling once before, when he’d kept her from running headlong into Johnny at the Merriweather ball. The endearment still set her trembling with yearning. Before she could summon any response, pleasure, gratitude, protest, he continued. “Given nobody knew, why didn’t your family take you back?”
“Because I’d rebelled and had to pay the price,” she said bitterly. She swallowed to ease her tight throat. The pain of her banishment stabbed, even a decade later. “My father didn’t want a headstrong trollop as his daughter.”
“So he abandoned you to Benton?” Censure weighted Nicholas’s question.
She shrugged, although she felt anything but indifference when she remembered that awful day Lord Aveson slammed into their shabby room in Vicenza. He’d been so determined to forbid her from coming anywhere near the family again, he’d undertaken the arduous journey through Italy to tell her himself. He wanted no doubts in her mind that he’d ever relent and accept her back at Blaydon Park.
He vastly underestimated his daughter’s understanding. Antonia immediately realized when he arrived and addressed her as if she were lower than the dirt beneath his feet that her actions forever severed all links between them. The revelation of Johnny’s secret marriage had tolled the final grim note in her grand adventure’s death knell.
As long as she lived, she’d never forget the repugnance in her father’s face when he surveyed their squalid bower. He’d found her half dressed trying to mend one of Johnny’s shirts so he was fit to be seen on the street. Johnny lolled in their tumbled bed as the sun rose toward noon.
“My father flung some money at me and told me not to contact anyone from my former life. He told me . . .” She swallowed again as excruciating recollection surged. “He told me he’d shoot me himself if I dared approach the family.”
His face vivid with compassion, Nicholas sat on the bed and took her hand. Immediate warmth flowed into her, combating icy desolation. “But what was to become of you?”
“I doubt he cared.”
Nicholas frowned. “What about your mother, your brother? Surely they weren’t so inflexible?”
“I’d humbled my father’s pride. There was no chance of insinuating myself back into the family.” She smiled sadly and returned the clasp of Nicholas’s hand. Ridiculous really how his touch eased old hurt. “Without Godfrey Demarest, I don’t know what would have become of me.”
Abruptly a bristling silence descended. An unfamiliar expression crossed Nicholas’s face, replacing compassion and warmth. An expression that lanced a chill through her. She couldn’t be sure but it looked like a flash of pure hatred.
Briefly he wasn’t the man who had made love to her. He became a stranger. A frightening stranger.
“Nicholas?” she asked uncertainly, tightening her grip on his hand.
“Yes?” He was back to looking like her ardent lover.
“Nothing.” She must have imagined the loathing. She withdrew her hand from his and steeled herself to finish her sorry tale. “Without Johnny’s protection, I couldn’t stay in Italy. I came back to England.”
She quailed to recall the horrors of that journey. She’d been heartbroken, frightened, almost penniless. Only once she left Vicenza did the full implications of her reckless actions sink in. When she ran away with Johnny, she’d told herself she was daring and brave. After her father disowned her, she knew herself for a foolish wanton, at the mercy of any man who looked her way.
This time she couldn’t mistake the fury blazing in Nicholas’s face. “That bastard Benton could have made sure you were safe.”
“My fathe
r threatened Johnny with ruin if he set foot in England.”
“No excuse. I wish I’d bloody shot the worm.”
She’d forgotten what it was to have a champion. “Thank you.”