He remembered how all the senior girls had fallen silent as soon as she stepped out onto the pavement just before she left Bath with him.
“Discipline can be achieved without humor or feeling,” he said, “or with both. You achieve itwith. I am quite sure of that.”
She hugged her knees and did not answer.
“Do you ever wish for a different life?” he asked her.
“I could have had one,” she said. “Just this morning I had a marriage offer.”
McLeith! He had ridden over here this morning to call on her.
“McLeith?” he said. “Andcould have? You said no, then?”
“I did,” she said.
He was damnably glad.
“You cannot forgive him?” he asked.
“Forgiveness is not a straightforward thing,” she said. “Some things can be forgiven but never quite forgotten. Ihaveforgiven him, but nothing can ever be the same between us. I can be his friend perhaps, but I can never be more than that. I could never trust that he would not do something similar again.”
“But you do not still love him?” he asked.
“No.”
“Love does not last forever, then?”
“He asked me the same thing this morning,” she said. “No, it does not—not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But itdoesdie and cannot be revived.”
“I never thought I would stop loving Barbara,” he told her. “But I did. I look upon her fondly whenever I see her, but I doubt I could love her again even if we were both free.”
She was looking directly at him, and he turned his head to look back.
“It is a consolation,” she said, “to know that love dies eventually. Not a very strong consolation at first, it is true, butsomecomfort nevertheless.”
“Is it?” he asked softly.
He did not know if she was talking about them. But the air suddenly seemed charged between them.
“No,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Not at all really. What absurdities we sometimes speak. Future indifference is no consolation for present pain.”
And when he leaned toward her and set his lips to hers, she did not draw away. Her lips trembled against his and then pressed back against them and parted as his tongue pushed between them and into the warm cavity of her mouth.
“Claudia,” he said a few moments later, closing his eyes and touching his forehead to hers.
“No!” she said, withdrawing and getting to her feet. She stood looking out over the lake.
“I am so sorry,” he said. And he was too—sorry for what he had done to her and for the disrespect he had shown Portia, to whom he was betrothed. Sorry for his lack of control.
“I wonder if it is a pattern doomed to repeat itself every eighteen years or so of my life,” she said. “A duke and a duke-in-waiting choosing a bride for her suitability for the position and leaving me behind to grieve.”
Oh, dash it all! He drew a slow breath.
“Andwhathave I said?” she asked him. “What have I just admitted? It does not matter, though, does it? You must have guessed. How pathetic I must seem.”
“Good God!” he cried, getting to his feet too and standing a short distance behind her. “Do you think I kissed you because I pity you? I kissed you because I—”
“No!”She swung around, holding up one hand, palm out. “Don’t say it. Please don’t say it even if you mean it. Either way, I could notbearto hear it spoken aloud.”
