“I’m not accustomed to this much prattle from men after we make the beast with two backs,” she lied, knowing it was childish and yet wanting to hurt him just the same. Needing to lash him with her words as he had done to her. “I am growing weary of the noise.”
His nostrils flared at her insult. “Do not think to fool me. You were a virgin when I took you.”
“Rather conceited of you to think yourself the first,” she taunted. “You didn’t really believe I’d give myself so easily if I hadn’t already done it many times before, did you?”
In truth, she and Daniel had kissed and otherwise touched. But he had never claimed her body as Garrick had. No other man had done, for she had never wanted it with them. When she had loved Daniel, she had been far too young, and he had chosen Gertrude Cholmley over her when she had refused him further liberties.
But she would sooner throw herself from the window to the putrid streets below than admit as much to the man who had just made love to her and then called it a mistake.
“It matters not if you did,” Garrick told her, moving toward Pen once again. “You could have taken a hundred lovers before me, and what I did still would have been wrong.”
“Wrong,” she repeated, the word joining all the others before as yet another barb to pierce her heart. “So you have said. A mistake. Wrong. I understand, my lord. You regret lying with someone such as myself, whom you perceive as so far beneath you that the notion your brother would have wished to make me his wife meant I was some sort of fortune-seeking whore.”
He flinched as if she had slapped him. “You mistake me, Pen. What happened between us is wrong because I am meant to be marrying someone else.”
I am meant to be marrying someone else.
Marrying someone else.
Someone else.
Another woman. Someone who was not her. But then, once again, why should she be surprised? He was the heir to the Duke of Dryden. Of course he would have found the loveliest diamond of the first water to become his future duchess. Likely the daughter of a duke herself.
His words echoed in Pen’s mind, taunting her, this round far more jagged, sharp, and likely to make her bleed than the first. She swallowed against a rush of bile. How lovely to know he considered bedding her a mistake because he was going to be taking another woman as his wife. He may as well have cut her beating heart from her breast and tossed it into the fire.
“I never should have touched you for that reason,” he added. “It was not just dishonorable of me, but it went against every tenet I hold dear as a gentleman.”
“Ah, your honor,” she repeated, feeling as brittle as her voice sounded. “And your gentlemanly tenets. Those should not be betrayed, should they?”
And neither, she longed to say, should I.
But she held her tongue and kept her head high, refusing to show him how devastated she was on the inside.
“Pen,” he tried, reaching for her again.
Half an hour ago, she would have taken that hand, threaded her fingers through his, and followed him anywhere. But half an hour ago, she had believed the best of him, and he had swiftly proven her wrong.
So very wrong.
She shook her head, refusing him. “Go now, Lord Lindsey. Go before you make this worse.”
Her heart had splintered into so many shards that she could not even summon the desire to mock him. First, he had been Lord Lordly to her, then Garrick, and now? Now, he was merely Lord Lindsey. Just as he always should have been.
He studied her, those bright-blue aristocrat’s eyes plumbing the depths of hers. She stood still for the examination, willing her countenance to remain lifeless. To refuse to show him even a hint of the hurt and pain he had dealt her. Nothing of the love she felt for him, burning like a hot coal still. He did not deserve it.
He did not deserve her.
But while he had not been the first man who was unworthy of her heart, he would most definitely be the last. And whatever it was he saw in her eyes apparently persuaded him that the time for conversation between them was done.
He gave a jerky nod. “If that is what you wish.”
She inclined her head, hoping she looked regal instead of downtrodden. Hoping he would think of her every moment he spent in the company of his future wife and that he forever regretted his decision.
“It is what I wish,” she told him. “Farewell, my lord.”
He bowed, and then, he left her room, taking her heart with him.