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She blinked. “Of course I didn’t. It was my letter, after all. I had no expectation that anyone other than myself would read it.”

“When Lady Rawlings brought it up in the dining room, you could have confessed,” he said. “You could have saved me from this—this travesty of a marriage!”

“You’re absolutely right,” she said steadily. “I didn’t because I was greedy. I have never had anyone for myself, you see.”

“I know,” he said, feeling tired. “So you took me and my sisters.”

He saw that her little hands were clenched tight inside her gloves.

“I am not sorry that I wrote the letter, and I am not even sorry that it found its way to a public forum. I will love your sisters. I will love them as if they were my very own children. No one could love them more than I will.”

Her tone was fierce. Now her eyes were passionate. Now—when it was a matter of the children, and not him.

“I see no reason for further discussion,” he said slowly. “I suppose I would summarize our future life thus: you act as a nursemaid to my sisters. I carry on amorous relationships outside the house. We occasionally meet in the hallways or at dinner.”

“You are very cruel,” she said.

“Practicality is the bane of my family.”

“I see no reason why we cannot be friends.”

“Friends?”

“I should like to be your friend, Mr. Darby. I would like to be more than a nursemaid in your house.”

“I am never friends with those who have stolen from me,”

he said.

218 Eloisa

James

Somewhere Henrietta found a pulse of anger stealing up her spine. “It seems to me that you are taking a great deal of umbrage for this. After all, if I am a nursemaid, you will pay my salary with my inheritance. Unless I am mistaken, you desperately need my dowry in order to support your sisters. At least, that was my understanding.”

She waited, shaken. Would he explode with rage, or, or—

Instead the corner of his mouth twisted in a wry smile. She continued. “You knew there is a fair chance that Lady Rawlings’s child will be a male. It may be only gossip, but people say that your father’s estate was not . . .”

“Was not profitable,” he said. “The gossip is truthful as regards my father’s gambling debts.”

“You would have had to marry,” she said, looking at him.

“You would have had no choice.”

“Had I decided to hunt a fortune, I should have liked to chose my own heiress.”

“English gentlemen frequently marry to extract themselves from debt,” she said, with that wry strain of irony that characterized her observances. “You likely would have had to marry a woman whose father was a merchant.”

He shrugged. “You’re absolutely right, my lady. I might have had to marry someone from another class. But at least I could have bedded her.”

That silenced Henrietta.

“The primary point on which your gossip went astray concerns my financial situation,” he remarked. “I am worth approximately double your father’s estate.”

She stared at him, mouth open.

“I own lace in this country,” he said gently. “Had you ordered gold lace on your new curricle, the lace would have been supplied by me. The lace on your fichu was undoubtedly imported by me, and the lace on your stepmother’s reticule was made in a factory in Kent. My factory, as it happens.”