“She did it on purpose,” Gwen explained. “At least, she claims she did. The resulting avalanche of crystal provided me with a sufficient distraction to swoon politely and request to be taken to the withdrawing room. The maids settled me on a sofa and went away. The side staircase was mercifully empty.”
Victor stared at her for a moment, before a reluctant huff of laughter escaped him. “You faked a fainting spell?”
“I did feel faint,” she said. “With nerves. That must count for something.”
He shook his head, still picturing Arabella Barker hurling herself into a footman’s path with romantic abandon. “Your friends are troublesome.”
“They are loyal,” she corrected.
“So loyal they assist you in deception.”
“So loyal they assist me insurvival.”
The words tightened something in his chest.
Victor set down his glass, untouched. Silence stretched between them, broken only by the quiet pop of the fire. He felt her retreat even as she sat there, some steel shutters sliding back into place behind her eyes.
“You summoned me,” she said, looking into the flames rather than at him. “You wrote that I had avoided my obligations.”
“You had,” he affirmed.
“I am here to remedy that,” she said. “And to say that our arrangement must end.”
The words landed like a blow he had not seen coming, though he should have. He kept his face neutral.
“Must it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “I have changed my mind. I no longer need your assistance. The nights we agreed on need not be fulfilled. You may consider your obligation discharged.”
He watched her closely. Her posture was too straight. Her voice too level. He knew a lie when he heard one because he had spenttoo many years listening to men in meeting rooms trying to mask losses and debts beneath polite phrases.
“You have found another way to make money,” he murmured. “So quickly?”
“I have reconsidered my needs,” she offered. “I will manage with what I have.”
He thought of the little purse he had seen in her hand, of the desperate calculation in her eyes as she spoke to her friends.Managewas a generous word for what she was planning.
“You told your friends otherwise,” he said quietly.
Her head snapped toward him. “You were listening?”
“Yes. Unintentionally at first. Then less so.”
Color rose in her cheeks. “You had no right.”
“Perhaps not,” he conceded. “But I have it now. I know you mean to leave for Cheltenham.”
She hissed out a breath, as if struck. “Then you also know that I do not need your money any longer. I will work. I will earn my own living. I will not be beholden to you.”
“You would rather be beholden to a distant cousin who has never lifted a finger on your behalf,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered. “At least she does not wish to purchase my body in exchange for charity.”
His anger flared. “That is not what I am doing.”
“That is precisely what you are doing,” she shot back. “Or did you think I would be grateful to be kept like a mistress for seven nights and then dismissed?”
The wordmistresscut deeper than it ought. Victor heard his father’s contempt in it, the scorn of men at White’s when they spoke of women who lingered in their beds too long.
