‘Good point. Here, let me...’ He shuffled his body backwards, trying not to notice the soft weight of her breast against his arm, and stood up, offering her a hand which she pointedly ignored.
He coughed, racking his brains to remember why he’d gone up there in the first place. ‘I really am sorry.’
‘So you said.’ She rolled herself to a sitting position.
‘Not just about that—about all of it. That’s why I’m here, to apologise. Don’t blame Nancy.’ He held a hand up as she opened her mouth. ‘I waited until she was distracted. She’ll probably be here to throw books at me any second.’
‘I would never blame Nancy.’ She didn’t smile at the joke. ‘You shouldn’t have followed me.’
‘You’re right, but I wanted to explain. I should never have listened to gossip.’
‘No, you shouldn’t have.’ She turned her face away with quiet dignity. ‘I trusted you. I thought we were friends.’
‘We are.’
‘Friends don’t think things like that about each other. They’re supposed to know each other better!’
‘I didn’t think about it, not really. It didn’t matter to me what happened.’
‘It matters to me!’
‘I know. I’m not explaining myself well. What I mean is that I knew it wasn’t who you were. Are.’ He paused. ‘Nancy says it was the other way round and Mr Willerby was in love with you.’
She gave a short laugh. ‘No, he only thought that he was.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because we never had a single real conversation. All he ever did was stare at me and tell me how pretty I was. He never asked me a si
ngle question about where I came from or what I liked to do. It was as though I was just another mannequin in the shop window.’
‘If his mother was the owner, then she ought to have done something to stop him.’
‘She blamed me.’ Henrietta pressed her lips together tight and then sighed. ‘And maybe I wasn’t entirely blameless. Maybe I was friendlier than I ought to have been, but I thought I was being polite. No one ever told me that smiling was a bad thing!’
‘It’s not. It wasn’t your fault.’ He reached for her hand, but she stood up, stalking across the room away from him.
‘Yes, it was! Because I didn’t learn my lesson even then. I kept on smiling because I was young and foolish and flattered by compliments. Anna tried to warn me it could get me into more trouble, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand that my appearance was all most men ever saw or cared about. I didn’t realise that they’d take a smile for a promise either.’
He tensed. ‘What do you mean?’
She looked back at him, her jaw muscles clenched tight. ‘Do you remember what I told you about the Earl’s friend, Mr Hoxley? He came to the shop a few times to see me. He was handsome and charming and I liked him better than any man I’d ever met before. I knew he was a gentleman, but I was still naive enough to believe in daydreams and I thought he truly liked me, too.’
‘What happened?’ Sebastian heard his voice darken. Hearing another man described as handsome and charming was bad enough, but he had a feeling he was about to get even angrier.
‘One day he invited me to meet him alone. He said he had something important to ask me and stupidly I believed him. I even lied to Anna about where I was going. I felt terrible about it, but I was so excited. I thought that he wanted to marry me like Mr Willerby, only it turned out he had much baser motives. It never occurred to me that he meant to seduce me, but fortunately a lady, the Earl’s grandmother, in fact, intervened. She made his intentions very clear.’
‘I see.’ He was clenching his fists, Sebastian realised, so hard he could feel his fingernails digging into his palms.
‘So there it is. Yes, I’ve been foolish and naive in the past, but I changed on that day with Mr Hoxley. I stopped smiling at men. I stopped doing anything that could be taken for flirtation or encouragement. I’ve done everything I can to prove I’m not the woman the rumours paint me as and yet people still want to believe the worst! I’m not a flirt and I would never try to seduce a man into marriage.’
‘I know.’ Several aspects of her behaviour all made sense at once. ‘That’s why you objected to me calling you beautiful that first day, wasn’t it? You were afraid I was trying to flirt with you?’
‘Yes.’ Her chin jutted upwards a notch. ‘I thought that maybe I’d given you the wrong impression during the night and that was why you’d invited me to walk with you.’
‘And the clothes?’
Another notch. ‘They weren’t so bad.’