‘I had better tidy you up, so that you may return to your duenna without looking as though you’ve been half-ravished,’ he said. He hoped she wouldn’t notice that his hands were shaking as he did up her fastenings. Fortunately, she wasn’t looking at his hands, but at his face.
‘I am not at all sure,’ she said in a small voice, ‘that I am capable of returning to the ballroom...’
‘You will be in a moment or two,’ he said bracingly, trying not to be moved by what looked suspiciously like moisture forming in her eyes. ‘Here,’ he said, plucking a handkerchief from his pocket and thrusting it at her. ‘Use this if you mean to become emotional.’ He knew he sounded harsh, but at least it had a bracing effect on her. She took the handkerchief mechanically, crumpling it into a ball rather than using it. And hanging her head.
‘I don’t think,’ she said, her cheeks suffusing with colour, ‘that I shall ever be able to walk again. My legs feel like cotton.’
‘Wine,’ he said abruptly, getting to his feet and walking to the study desk. Apart from anything else, it gave him the chance to do up his breeches again before she could notice he’d undone the first button.
‘I brought some in, hoping to set a mood.’ He winced. How could he have been so blind? Treating her with the same casual cruelty with which he’d treated so many other women? And expecting her to smile at him gratefully afterwards, perhaps thank him for the skill with which he debauched her, then embark on a marriage based on trickery and power play? She deserved far better. When he’d decided he wanted to marry her, it was to get away from all that. Start a new life, a healthy life, where loyalty to one another played a pivotal role.
He poured wine into two glasses. Maybe he could never break free from his heritage. Maybe he was such an inveterate rogue that he’d never be able to live in the full clear light of Henrietta’s moral standards.
She ought to marry a man who was worthy of her. He rammed the stopper back into the decanter. Someone who would value her, someone she could respect in turn. Someone whose life hadn’t been so irrevocably tarnished by vice.
‘But now it can serve a better purpose,’ he said, tipping his drink down his throat before returning to the sofa.
Henrietta took the glass he extended to her with fingers that trembled and drank with gratitude.
‘I think I owe you an apology for this interlude,’ he said. What he’d actually done was bad enough, but his apology was for what he’d planned.
‘No. You do not,’ she said, lifting her chin to stare back at him with her open, trusting eyes.
‘Yes, I damn well do! Though at least it ought to act as a warning to you not to go apart with a man whose character is as stained as mine. With any man. You cannot trust any of us. We are none of us much better than brute beasts.’
Her eyes widened in shock.
‘However,’ he said, returning to the decanter, and pouring himself a second glass, ‘let me reassure you upon one point. On this occasion you escaped paying the full penalty for your dreadful naïveté. You are still a virgin. You need not fear your husband, whoever he may be, will know that you have had a sexual encounter.’
Because his back was to her, he did not see the stricken look in her eyes. And by the time he turned round, she’d managed to cover her hurt. It wasn’t just the implication that she’d deserved to be treated with contempt for breaking the rules that decreed no proper young lady should ever be entirely alone with a man. The wound which she thought might never stop bleeding had been inflicted by the casual way he’d spoken of a future husband. Whoever he may be. Which meant that he had no intention of it being him.
Stupid to feel devastated. She’d always known he had no thoughts of making her his wife. He was so far above her, socially, that she might as well dream of getting a proposal from the emperor of the Russias.
‘Can you stand yet?’
His impatience to get rid of her gave her a solid motive for attempting to get to her feet. And once she was on them, her own pride stopped her from tottering across the carpet, flinging herself on to his chest and begging him not to send her away like this.