“And you’re set to inherit Wynbury Hall. I know.” They would be neighbours, forced into the same circles, the same church pews, when he bothered to attend. The thought was unbearable. “I asked a friend to make enquiries once I learned your aunt was bedridden.” And Daventry had come up trumps.
“Please. May we sit, so I might tell you my plans and answer any questions you may have?” She smiled, like a puppet trained to entertain. “Should we not attempt to clear the air?”
Clear the bloody air? He would rather choke on it.
Yet the need to know what his father had said to her plagued him still. Nothing in his cutting statement—Miss Bourne has shown her true colours—revealed how easily she had been bought.
“Very well.” He gestured to the antechamber and followed her inside. She sat in the red velvet chair beside the fire. He settled opposite, still on edge, as he had been since the day she disappeared. “If there’s to be any peace between us, you will tell me what he paid you.”
Her composure wavered, the faintest crack in her poise. “Gabriel, you must understand, my father was facing penury and had fallen out of favour with my aunt. You know she held the purse strings, and still does. Everything depends on her whims. She used every?—”
“How much, Miss Bourne? And this time, address me with the respect befitting my title.”
A blush rose to her cheeks, cheeks he had once stroked with the backs of his fingers as if they were the rarest thing in the world. But that had been a naive boy’s fantasy. Now the sight made him grip the arms of the chair, battling the fury within.
“The marquess gave me ten thousand pounds, my lord.” Her voice held a trace of shame. “And my father the same. In all, he paid twenty thousand so you would be rid of me.”
The news struck like a blow to the gut, stealing his breath. The act had destroyed his relationship with his father, yet it might have been the greatest gift the man ever gave him.
“And where did you go?”
“To France.”
“Alone?”
“My cousin lives in Lyon. I’m sure I mentioned her.”
“You told me she lived in Avignon.”
“You’re mistaken, my lord.”
No. She was lying.
And he was already tired of this conversation. He was no longer in awe of her beauty. It was merely a mask. Rubies and rouge could not hide a deceitful heart.
“Are you not going to ask if I’m married?” she said, catching him unawares. “If I wept for months when my father forced me to leave England? If I’m still in love with you?”
“No,” he said flatly. The past was dead, and he had no interest in resurrecting it. A man had to draw a line somewhere, and his was here, with her, with what she had done ten years ago.
She flinched. “Then you are as cold as they say. You always had such a generous heart. You were kind, forgiving, the most?—”
“I still am to those who deserve it.”
His thoughts turned to Miss Woolf. She had stood in her humble cottage and refused the chance to become a marchioness, refused his money. She wanted peace, not him, and she had been honest enough to say so. What she thought of him now, heaven only knew.
He rose abruptly. “I’ll have a footman see you home. I would hate for you to get lost en route.”
Miss Bourne was on her feet, her fingers clamping around his wrist like a viper’s coil. “Please, Gabriel. I made a mistake. If we’re to live in such close proximity I need your forgiveness … your friendship.”
He let her hold him, waiting for a flicker of the old emotion, some spark to prove he wasn’t dead inside. Nothing came. No warmth. No longing. Her treachery had robbed him of the ability to love, to feel joy, to know happiness.
“You have my forgiveness, purely because you taught me a great lesson and saved me from making a grave mistake.” The words tasted bitter, for lessons bought with betrayal were the hardest to stomach. “But you lack all the virtues I seek in a friend.”
Miss Bourne looked wounded. “Is she your friend, that woman in her shabby wrapper? Do you make a habit of rescuing strays? Or is it only the desperate who can abide your coldness now?”
He did feel something then, something other than anger. A desire to protect Miss Woolf, a woman he barely knew. But he’d be damned if he understood why.
“What I do is not your concern.”
