The charge was all she could manage past the numbness in her tongue, the furor in her heart.
“You lied to me as well, Duchess.”
He was calm, the man watching her now. So eerily, oddly calm. Almost as if he felt nothing. All the bits of Robin she had loved most—his infectious grins, his silly humor, the way he had made her laugh without even trying, his tender kisses, and how he had looked upon her, as if she were a glorious goddess descended from the heavens…as if she were something rare and delicate, someone to be treasured…
There were no signs of that man.
In his place was a dead-eyed stranger.
“How did I lie to you?” she demanded.
And this time, in her fury, she was able to scramble to her feet, despite the voluminous skirts intent upon keeping her mired to the floor. He rose as well, towering over her, the walking stick once more in hand. Some part of her noted it must be his ankle which had been affected, which produced his limp, and not his knees, for he had used them quite well.
“How did you lie?” He released a bitter bark of laughter. “Need you ask, Duchess?”
She wanted to tell him to cease calling her by her title. It was icy and unfamiliar, and she did not prefer to think of herself as the Duchess of Longleigh for obvious reasons. However, she would not speak those words aloud; they were too personal. Those feelings were hers alone, and she did not trust this man.
“Yes, I need to ask,” she told him curtly, shaking out her skirts, doing her utmost to forget she had just humiliated herself before him by swooning.
Doing her utmost to forget, too, that she had lain with this man. That he had fathered her child.
“All those pretty words of love. Your promise to go away with me. You remember those lies, do you not? Or have you forgotten so soon?”
Of course she had not forgotten.
But he had disappeared before they had made plans for how she would extricate herself from Longleigh’s reach and wrath.
She was not going to answer his questions. He owed her answers first.
“Why did you lie about your name?” she demanded. “Why pretend to be someone you are not?”
“Longleigh thought you would object to bedding his own son, bastard or no.”
He would not have been wrong. Accepting his nephew as her lover had been difficult enough, until she had spent some time in Robin’s presence and his easy charm had managed to quell her concerns. She had fallen in love with him so suddenly and easily.
How stupid she’d been. How naïve. She should have known better. Should have known that anything and anyone connected to Longleigh was poisonous. Robin had not seemed so. But Robin had been a deliberately calculated lie. He had kissed her, touched her, held her, told her he loved her, and he had been lying about who he was.
Her stomach clenched, and she feared she was going to retch. “Why have you come here? What do you want?”
“Is that not apparent?” The smile he flashed her was lethal. Devoid of charm. “What is mine. That is what I want.”
She did not understand what he meant, but she was not about to surrender anything.
“And yet it is I who was wronged by you,” she countered, amazed at the strength in her voice, the lack of tremor.
“Because of a name? You truly are a vile one, are you not, Duchess?”
His words were biting. She flinched at the venom in them, but told herself she needed to proceed.
“Because you deceived me. Had you ever intended to tell me the truth?”
His smile faded. “It hardly matters now, does it?”
“It matters to me.” She did not know why. Nothing could have prepared her for this moment, for this meeting, for this unexpected, painful revelation.
For the man she had thought she had known and loved returning like this.
He moved closer to her, his walking stick thumping ominously on the floor as he approached. There was pain in his countenance, but she could not be certain whether it derived from their conversation or from his leg. When she had regained her senses earlier, she had sworn she had spied a moment of tenderness in his countenance. For a heartbeat, she had traveled back to that charmed time they’d shared at Coddington Hall.
