Fleur sipped her sherry and did not answer. He was sprawled on his chair, relaxed, comfortable, informal. She sat straight and tense on her own.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said. “Oh, nothing that will uncover the mystery in which you like to shroud yourself. Who taught you to play?”
“My mother,” she said, “when I was very young. My guardian hired a music teacher for his own children and me after that. And at school.”
“At school,” he said. “Where did you go? No, you will not wish to answer that, I suppose. How long were you there?”
“For five years,” she said. “It was Broadridge School. I told Mr. Houghton.”
He nodded. “A long time,” he said. “Did you like it, apart from the music and dancing lessons?”
“I believe I had a good education there,” she said. “But discipline was strict and humorless. There was very little warmth of feeling there.”
“But your guardian continued to send you?” he said. “Was there much warmth of feeling at home?”
She looked down into the sherry in her glass. “We were a wonderfully happy family while my parents were alive,” she said. “Nothing could appear very warm with them gone. I was too young. I daresay I was difficult to manage.”
“You were the orphan spurned, I take it,” he said. “Did they not try to marry you off young?”
Fleur thought of the two gentlemen farmers, both over fifty, who had offered for her before she reached even her nineteenth birthday, and of Cousin Caroline’s fury when she refused both.
“Yes,” she said.
“But you resisted. I suspect you are made of stern stuff, Miss Hamilton,” he said. “Stubborn to a fault. Is that how you were described by your guardian and his family?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Frequently, I would imagine,” he said. “Have you never met anyone you wished to marry?”
“No,” she said hastily. And she thought about how Daniel had been in her nightmares lately, his image fading in and out with the duke’s.
“And did he wish to marry you too?” he asked.
She looked up at him sharply and down into her glass again.
“He was ineligible?” he asked.
“No,” she said dully.
“It was spite, then?” he said. “You were not allowed to marry him? Do you have a dowry?”
“Yes.”
“But you have no control over it until you marry or reach a certain age, I suppose,” he said. “And your guardian decided to cut up nasty. Why did you run away, Fleur? Would your beau not elope with you? Was the money more important to him than you were?”
“No!” she said, looking up at him fiercely. “My fortune was of no interest to Daniel at all.”
“Daniel,” he said quietly.
She swirled the dark liquid in her glass. She did not think she would be able to raise it to her lips.
“Did you love him?” he asked.“Doyou love him?”
“No,” she said. “That is all a long, long time in the past.” Like something from another lifetime altogether.
He downed the brandy that remained in his glass and got to his feet. “Drink up,” he said, his hand stretched out for her glass. “It’s time for bed.”
She took one more sip and handed him the half-empty glass. He set it with his own on a table beside her chair and offered her his hand. She looked at it, at the long, well-manicured, beautiful fingers, and set her own resolutely within it. She watched his fingers close about hers. And she got to her feet.
