“Have you told her that your interests have changed?”
“No,” Henry said, and gave up, slumping into the chair. “Another thing I must do before I leave.”
“When do you intend to go?”
“Tomorrow, first light.”
Comerford nodded slowly. “Very well. Is there anything else?”
“Where is Caroline?” Henry asked, raising his gaze. “I would like to speak with her.”
Caroline stretched across the bed with idle sensuality, not seeming to notice that her bosom spilled over the confines of her dress, or that she was displaying her curves to advantage. A display that was wasted on Louisa.
“I knew it would come to this,” Caroline drawled in not insignificant delight. “I knew you would bed him.”
“Don’t be crude.”
“Why, darling? Am I wrong?” Caroline watched her with dancing eyes. “You have not objected to me referring in that way to any of your past lovers.”
“You know Henry is different.” Louisa stared at her pen and the dashed copies she had made of Knight’s letters. Soon, she would have to return them and decide on her next course of action. Presumably it would involve leaving Worthington Hall for London, especially if she was to catch Thomas Hyatt before Knight had a chance to confront him.
And perhaps talk to Prinny.
“How is Henry different?” Caroline asked, and Louisa’s stomach dropped when she recalled the way he had asked her to marry him, then almost as urgently recanted it. The way he had all but admitted he would not have asked her if it were not for her fortune.
She gripped the desk and drew in a long breath. “He proposed.”
Caroline gave a delighted gasp. “Directly after the deed?”
“As I was leaving.”
“Poor boy. I suppose you rejected him?”
“Naturally,” Louisa said, her voice sharp. “The fact he had the gall to ask me after everything—I told him it was not transactional, our coming together. He knows I have not forgiven him.”
Have you not?whispered a voice in the back of her head.
She shook it away angrily. If he had just married her as she had asked, as she hadbegged, then none of this would be happening now. Not Bolton, not Knight, not the obliteration of her dreams.
The anger was harder to hold on to now, however, with Caroline’s probing questions and Henry’s shattered expression in the back of her mind.
He ought not to have asked her. Not like that.
“Your fortune may be an advantage,” Caroline said, “but I hardly think it is the source of your hold on him.”
“My hold on him is that he’s experienced no other lady,” she said, gathering the ink-smeared paper together. “That is all.”
“I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” Caroline shuffled to the edge of the bed and peered at her. “I tell you, no gentleman has ever looked at me like that, even when I’m in nothing but silk.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Did he tell you he loves you?”
The recollection of the anguished way he’d told her that he cared for her played across her mind, and she grimaced. “Not in so many words.”
“But he does?”
“Yes.”
